ABSTRACT
In April 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, Keith Vaughan was serving as a conscientious objector in the Non-Combatant Corps in Wiltshire and out for a walk. This chapter argues that Vaughan’s art—consisting of photography, wartime sketches and post-war paintings—can be interpreted as engaging with the question of queer home during war and in its aftermath. It focuses on Vaughan’s painting, Assembly of Figures I, which brings together four individual male figures into a disjointed, strange group in an outdoor, indeterminate space. The chapter explores how Vaughan adopted the mythological figure of Theseus as a figure of queer potential. It considers how Vaughan’s Lazarus might speak of the difficulties and possibilities of post-war queer home that is built on memories, of war and lost relationships. In many ways, Vaughan found himself in a very similar position to Tennant at this point in the middle of the Second World War.
