Weeks Between Worlds: A Queer Boy From the Valleys

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-912681-92-1
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

A man's own story from the Rhondda. Jeffrey Weeks was born in the Rhondda in 1945, of mining stock. As he grew up he increasingly felt an outsider in the intensely community-minded valleys, a feeling intensified as he became aware of his gayness. Escape came through education. He left for London, to university, and to realise his sexuality. From the early 1970s he was actively involved in the new gay liberation movement and became its pioneering historian. This was the beginning of a long career as a researcher and writer on sexuality, with widespread national and international recognition. He has been described as the 'most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s'. His seminal book, Coming Out, a history of LGBT movements and identities since the 19th century, has been in print for forty years. He was awarded the OBE in the Queen's Jubilee Honours in 2012 for his contribution to the social science.

Jeffrey Weeks was born in the Rhondda in 1945. He moved to London in the 1970s and began a long career as a researcher and writer on sexuality, with widespread national and international recognition. He has been described as the 'most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s'. He held a number of senior university posts and is currently Emeritus Professor of Sociology at London South Bank University. He is the author, co-author or editor of some twenty-five books and numerous articles. He lives in London with his civil partner, Mark McNestry.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weeks, Jeffrey

Leseproben

Preface I was born on 1 November 1945 in the Rhondda, the most famous of the South Wales mining valleys. It was a birthplace that has marked and shaped me in ways that for a long time I did not really understand or fully accept. Because of my sexuality I felt I had to escape its all-embracing intensity as soon as I could, but what my life became has always remained entwined with how my life began – as a queer boy from the Valleys. The mythology of the Rhondda remains strong to this day, even in the marketing of Wales. A little while ago I happened to come across a copy of The Rough Guide to Wales, one of a series of well-known tourist handbooks. It opened with a list of ‘thirty-one things not to miss’ in the country. Among various tourist delights, from male voice choirs to railways, bridges to beaches, cathedrals to bog snorkelling, the number one choice is the Valleys: ‘Colourful terraces of housing, hunkered down under the hills, are the hallmark of Wales’ world-famous Valleys, the old mining areas in the south’.1 It is an image from the Rhondda that illustrates the piece. The almost bucolic photo is of three rows of terraced houses precariously set against a vibrantly green hillside. It is a picture of the last straggling streets in Llwyncelyn, a ribbon extension of Porth, the small town at the gateway of the twin valleys. The terraces overlook at the valley bottom the old colliery complex of Lewis Merthyr, once one of the largest coal mines in the world. Its existence gave these houses meaning and justification; it is now the site of a mining museum. The first of these three terraces is Nyth Bran, eighty or so small near-identical houses, though now nicely distinguished by different coloured doors and roofs. The uniform grey slate roof tiles of my childhood have long been replaced by red or green or duller imitation slate, markers of a new individuality that has grown hand in hand with the passing of the coal industry. Just out of sight in the picture is number 38. This was long my family home: the house where my mother’s father and mother lived and died, where my mother grew up with her sisters, got married and nurtured her husband and three children, where my father spent all his adult life and died, and finally where my mother herself passed away after living in the house for ninety-odd years. This is the house where I was born, just after the end of the Second World War. The Rhondda then was about halfway along a trajectory that took it from the feverish growth of the mining industry before the First World War to the romanticised tourist fantasy of the twenty-first century. In 1945 it was still world renowned for its coal, carrying the greatest burden of history of all the South Wales Valleys. The string of terraced houses, small villages and townships that clung precariously to the hillsides made up a homogeneous and, although only fifteen or so miles from Cardiff, geographically self-contained culture. Despite this, it had never been totally isolated from the outside world. From before the First World War it had been at the heart of a militant socialist culture, and it had exported thousands of its young to the rest of Britain and wider, to mine, work in factories and offices, and to teach, preach, nurse, act, sing, box, play rugby or write. The mobility forced by economic depression and the Second World War had given younger people a glimpse of other ways of life, but in many ways it had strengthened the ties of home. My father’s family had left the Rhondda en masse in the 1930s for Bristol in pursuit of employment and better prospects, but my grandmother had been acutely homesick, and Dad’s immediate family had returned to Tonypandy. My mother, like two of her sisters, had also left South Wales in search of work. Two became nurses, and settled in Oxford and Croydon, while my mother ended up in Slough, working for a while in the kitchens at Eton College. This was a period of high adventure for my still-teenage mother-to-be, who looks fashionable and glamorous in the surviving photographs. However, she was called back when war broke out to be with her mother, and to work in the munitions factory in Bridgend, where she spent the rest of the war. Many of the young men, including my father, fought all over the world in the war; others stayed put to work in the pits, which had zoomed back into full production to power the war effort after nearly twenty years of disastrous under-use in the great strikes and lockout of the 1920s, and the Great Slump, which sucked the lifeblood out of the Valleys in the 1930s. War mobilisation provided new work opportunities for women in the factories and service industries, but as normal conditions resumed after the war a more traditional division of labour reasserted itself. After demobilisation my father moved into number 38 with my mother; her mother, who was the presiding mam of the family; my mother’s sister, Aunty Lily, and later her husband, Uncle Frank; my brother Dennis, born in 1947; and me. My other brother Robert came along much later, in 1963. This overcrowded little house at the edge of Porth was home, the focus of intense domestic life until I left for university in 1964, and the heart of family life until my mother died in 2014. That longevity in itself tells a story and marks a critical element in my own life history. I grew up deeply rooted in a particular social world and way of life. Although there were frequent rows and we often lived at the top of our voices, it was a loving and caring household. I grew up as a bright and imaginative child but was also sulky and grizzly, hypersensitive and acutely shy, blushing at everything, with a host of what my family called my habits, nervous tics and jibs, and was terrified by loud noises, especially fireworks: I managed to dodge going out every Bonfire Night, thanks to the reluctant connivance of my parents. I must have been a bit of a trial for everyone, but I can see now, and sort of took for granted then with the ruthlessness of the young, that I was deeply loved, even doted on, especially by the three forceful women at the heart of my life: my mother, Aunty Lily and their mother, Rosie – Nanny Evans (always just Nanny to me; my other grandmother was invariably ‘Nanny Weeks’) – who lived with us until she died in 1961. My relations with my father, to whom everyone said I was so similar, both physically and in personality, were more fraught and tense, with constant rows. Yet I never really doubted he was proud of me and wanted me to succeed; and I eventually recognised – too late – his own vulnerabilities, an acutely sensitive man trapped in an overwhelmingly macho identity and culture. But there was a problem that soon became obvious to everyone, especially my father, I suspect, although it was never fully vocalised, and one that was to shape my life. In a world where boys were boys and girl were girls, by the standards of the time and place I was not quite either. I was bookish, not sporty. I preferred playing with girls rather than boys, and dolls rather than guns. When I was no longer allowed to play with dolls, I adopted a glove puppet with a sweet face and cwtched it in secret. I used my Meccano set to construct simple little houses and palaces rather than trains or pieces of machinery. I fantasised about imaginary kingdoms rather than model motor cars or football or rugby teams. I was horribly bullied by other boys and cried easily. I was slight, ginger-haired, couldn’t roll my Rs, couldn’t whistle to save my life and had a lisp. I never wanted to be a girl, but I felt a peculiar sort of little man. I was a classic sissy boy. When my school class broke into separate teams for football or cricket the team captains used to toss a coin not to pick me. I was endlessly teased and made fun of, and on several occasions in school I was piled on between lessons by some of the class heavies and left in impotent tears and shame as the teacher came in. I didn’t come to any serious physical harm, and certainly till my mid-teens I had no sense that my increasing social and gender difference was related to being sexually different. Yet being simply a queer child, in the broadest sense, was difficult enough, and the source of constant guilt and misery. When I read much later the African-American (and gay) novelist James Baldwin’s dismissal of his childhood and schooling as ‘the usual grim nightmare’, the words stuck. I instantly identified: with his sense of exile and his minority status, his Otherness, and the deep unhappiness and isolation those produced. I know now, of course, that many thousands of little Jeffreys, as well as Jennifers, were going through similar experiences to me in hundreds of towns and villages at the same time and ever since, but the sense of being an outsider, of not fully belonging, shaped me fundamentally. The Rhondda I grew up in was a byword for community, for neighbourliness, for warmth and mutual support. All this was true. The downside was that it was also a conservative, defensive, inward-looking culture. It bred intense local trust and strong social bonds, but also a prickly distrust of the wider world, and an acute sensitivity to criticism, especially from insiders. I vividly remember the bitterness caused by the darkly sardonic witticisms of the novelist Gwyn Thomas, a Cymmer boy who had gone to my old school thirty-odd years before and loved the Rhondda deeply, but never uncritically, and who never seemed off the television in the 1960s. It was ironic that the Rhondda proudly presented itself to the world as a politically radical society, with a strong allegiance to trade unionism and socialism, and to social transformation, yet...