ABSTRACT
The living room, provided a crucial imaginary site – accurately, a plurality of sites in which writers negotiated the possibilities and contradictions that characterized queer life in the mid-twentieth century. But as well as discussing the presence of the living room in queer novels, this chapter considers the frequently imagined presence of queer novels in living rooms. The living room, in nearly all of its guises, is usually the most public-facing room in the home. Its role as a ‘reception room’, where typically much work is put into presenting the identity and status of the household to visitors and thereby the outside world, helps to explain the proliferation of terms for this space. The representative artefact in the living room seems to be a common trope. In Audrey Erskine Lindop’s 1955 novel The Details of Jeremy Stretton, a modern ornament occupies centre stage in the living room of set designer Flick.
