Intrigue, desire … and awful landlords: why queer authors are suddenly writing about houses

‘I think it’s an investigation of belonging – one that we didn’t have a literal space for before.”

I’m on the phone with the novelist Yael van der Wouden, conferring with her about a recent trend in LGBTQ+ writing: a preoccupation with houses. I figured she would be a good person to talk to because her new novel The Safekeep centres on a lonely old house in the Dutch countryside that suddenly, one summer, is flooded with queer desire and intrigue. The problem is that the Booker-shortlisted author is talking to me in transit, touring Europe, at this moment on a train rattling across northern Italy. Reader, witness the irony of our discussing ideas of rootedness and belonging as Van der Wouden keeps getting ousted from her seat. She says she’ll have to call me back.

More stories by LGBTQ+ authors are finding their way into the public sphere than ever before, but in recent years an unusual number of them focus on the physical space of the home. Matthew Lopez’s hit two-part play The Inheritance is a queer riff on Howards End that trades in EM Forster’s Edwardian England for present-day New York, but keeps an old house at the heart of the action. Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House is a fragmentary memoir set in a house that is both real and imaginary, dream and nightmare. In a raft of recent novels including Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Housemates, Nathan Newman’s How to Leave the House, Rivers Solomon’s hotly anticipated Model Home, and of course The Safekeep, houses are more than a setting for the action. They transcend the old figure/ground binary, which typically governs the relationship between the subject of an artwork and the spaces it’s set against, to become something akin to characters themselves, with difficult backstories that bear upon those who move around inside them.

Why all these queer houses now? You could chalk it up to the housing crisis, where the prospect of a permanent home is a pipe dream for many of us, and opportunistic landlordism is rife. In books such as Van der Wouden’s, there’s a kind of wish-fulfilment going on: a house is a key part of the character’s story as opposed to a precarious somewhere they can’t get too attached to, because next month they could get thrown out of it. They’re indirect replies to something confronted head-on by the likes of Kieran Yates’ memoir All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In, Holly Pester’s novel The Lodgers, or essays in Ellena Savage’s collection Blueberries.

But there’s something unique about queer houses, and you can’t write about the private spaces of the gays and theys without conjuring up the history of state intrusions into them. Here we might name any number of cases, Section 11 of the UK Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, for example, under which Oscar Wilde was famously sent down, which dissolved the distinction between public and private space in its persecution of male homosexuality. Any man who committed an act of “gross indecency” with another “in public or private” was guilty of a crime, which effectively removed his right to privacy if he was under suspicion. Queer women weren’t policed in quite the same way, but they were routinely discriminated against by landlords or intimidated into leaving their homes without legal recourse.

Under these conditions, a house would have felt like less than a home, and a home wouldn’t necessarily have connoted privacy, security or belonging. As a result, in many early works in the canon of queer lit, you find lots of uncertainty about what home means and where to find it.

Van der Wouden gets back on the line, and I ask her about it. “Giovanni’s Room is about finding home and finding solace,” she says, referring to James Baldwin’s pioneering gay novel, published in 1956. “But love is never allowed to take root.” In the book, David falls for the dashing Giovanni and moves into the latter’s one-room flat; when he finds himself in the role of a housewife, he panics, dumps Giovanni, and returns to his fiancee, leaving Giovanni heartbroken. David wants to settle down, but he can’t imagine what a queer home looks like, or what role he could play in it.

Many gay men who came of age before the Stonewall riot in 1969 had a similar experience – not least Baldwin himself, who carried the trauma of growing up in a homophobic household with him wherever he went. Another of these men, the poet John Ashbery, writes in his poem, Never Seek to Tell Thy Love:

Viewed in this way, recent literary interest in queer houses isn’t so much the emergence of a new trend as it is the resurfacing of an old one, in different circumstances, with different aims.

Homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK starting in 1967 and, according to recent data, 75% of people now live in a country where homosexuality is not a crime. Machado points out that her memoir was written as gay marriage was being signed into law in the US. Lopez’s characters argue about the assimilation of gay culture into the mainstream. Van der Wouden says: “Because we don’t have to hide queerness fully and there’s more space for it in public, what I’m interested in now, and what I’m seeing other authors interested in, is a new kind of questioning.” In these works, same-sex desire isn’t the secret lurking behind the closet door, or sequestered in the attic; in these houses, there are other secrets to be uncovered, other truths to be confronted.

In Lopez’s play it’s the legacy of the Aids crisis, which lingers in the rooms of a farmhouse in New York state. Represented in Stephen Daldry’s production by a magnificent dollhouse upstage centre, the farmhouse was once a hospice where young men dying of Aids spent their final days. A thirtysomething gay man called Eric Glass inherits the house from his older gay friend; in the play’s most moving scene, he walks through the door of the house, and is greeted by the spirits of all the men who died there. “Welcome home Eric,” they say. With ideas of home and belonging at its core, The Inheritance stages a reckoning with what the activist Sarah Schulman called the “mass death experience” of Aids, and challenges the ongoing cultural amnesia surrounding it.

In Machado’s house, we have to contend with a different kind of history, one more personal than collective. Her memoir unfolds through a variety of genres and forms, from the coming-of-age to choose-your-own-adventure, to tell a story that’s seldom told: of abuse in relationships between women. The dream in question is a dream of domestic bliss; a dream of home, marriage, children, and protection under the law – all of which are finally within reach of queer women like Machado. But what happens when the dream becomes a nightmare? When the woman you love makes you ill with fear? When the home becomes a prison?

As for The Safekeep, it’s about an old house where opposites are brought into tense cohabitation – hate and love, trauma and desire, memories of a tragic past and the possibility of a bright future. In the rural Dutch province of Overijssel, a severe, solitary woman named Isabel is visited by her brother’s chaotic girlfriend Eva, who slowly turns her life – and her home – upside down. In its etymology the word “house” is related to the root “to hide”, but what’s hidden in Isabel’s house will turn out to be much more difficult to come to terms with than her desire for Eva. For Van der Wouden, “the book is about: how do we create a home for ourselves together in the shadow of complicity?”

From the shuttered secrecy and shame of the pre-Stonewall era to recent examples that throw open the French doors and ask big, difficult questions, the history of queer houses in literature is LGBTQ+ history in microcosm. Surveying the renovations made over the years, it’s clear that the foundations are important – but so too is a receptiveness to change and renewal. What the future holds for queer houses and queer identities is anyone’s guess; of the home he’s trying to get to, Ashbery writes: “It belongs where it is going / Not where it is.”

• Nothing Ever Just Disappears by Diarmuid Hester is published by Penguin