ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at two works from the first half of the twentieth century dealing with queer adoption and set them in relation to depictions from the second half. Positioned in this way Cecil Roberts’ novel The Chelsea Cherub and Mordaunt Shairp’s play The Green Bay Tree help us to identify substantial representational shifts. The Mail journalist uses the nursery to demonstrate Ivan Massow’s apparent conventionality. In contemplating having a nursery and child at all and in his pat rearticulation of gendered assumptions and roles, Massow is, to some, taking his ‘place at the table’ and acceding to a homonormativity supposedly encapsulated in the domestic and familial scene. The apartment is beyond the traditional worlds of nursery and schoolroom or indeed the working-class Camden home of Mr Owens – the setting of the second act of the play. Nursery games of ‘let’s pretend’ were imagined once more bracing the home lives of queer men.
