ABSTRACT
The rented bedsit has long been a place to call home for queer people in London. It has been vital in the forging and orientation of queer identities and lives, and so has had a significant impact upon the queer topography of the city. The bedsit nevertheless still evokes both the circumscription and the freedoms associated with queer lives in the city and challenges normative patterns of relationships and domesticity. The bedsit has been especially associated with the immediate post-war period and with the subdivision of otherwise redundant large houses into low-rent accommodation. Surveys suggest that in the 1950s and 1960s London bedsits were disproportionately occupied by women. A significant body of gay fiction published in the 1980s and 1990s employed the bedsit within that same landscape of economic marginalization and restricted prospects, but with the added dimension of the AIDS crisis.
