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‘Young Bloomsbury’ explores queer family of choice in 1920s England

Meet the generation ‘That Redefined Love, Freedom, and Self-Expression’

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(Book cover courtesy of Simon & Schuster)

Safe spaces. Gender bending. Families of choice. Gender fluidity. Young queers being seen by their elders (hetero and queer). Throuples. Banned books. Conversion therapy.

At a party, a couple, two beautiful bisexual women, sing the latest show tunes and dance. One of them, wearing a purple dress, plays her saxophone.

We see you, Gen Z!

But you weren’t the first to embrace queerness in all its fab permutations.

A century ago in London at a time when being queer was illegal, a group of queer, gender-bending writers and artists — young members of the Bloomsbury group – broke through sexual and gender boundaries and formed families of choice.

In 1923, Henrietta Bingham and Mina Kirstein were the bisexual couple that danced and sang show tunes at the party. Bingham in her purple dress played the sax, author Nino Strachey writes in her illuminating, entertaining new book “Young Bloomsbury: The Generation That Redefined Love, Freedom, and Self-Expression in 1920s England.”

If you’ve had a queer friend rave about the gender-bending in “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf, or if you’ve seen the movie “Maurice” (of the novel with the same name), you’ve heard of the Bloomsbury group.

For Nino Strachey, the Bloomsbury group is up close and personal.

For starters, Nino Strachey is a descendent of Lytton Strachey, the queer, razor-sharp writer and founding member of the Bloomsbury group. She is the last member of the Strachey family to have grown up at Sutton Court in Somerset (U.K.), home of the Strachey family for more than 300 years.

Recently, Nino Strachey talked with the Blade about why she wrote “Young Bloomsbury,” the parallels between Young Bloomsbury in the 1920s and Gen Z today and the reaction to her book.

The formation of the Bloomsbury group began after Virginia and Vanessa Stephen’s father died in 1904. Virginia Stephens became Virginia Woolf after her marriage to Leonard Woolf. Vanessa Stephens became Vanessa Bell after her marriage to Clive Bell.

The Stephen sisters “escaped” to 46 Gordon Square in London, Strachey writes in “Young Bloomsbury.”

There, they could have a “life free from adult interference,” Strachey writes.

The Stephen sisters got to know their brothers’ — Thoby and Adrian — Cambridge University friends. These friends included John Maynard Keynes (who would become an acclaimed economist), Lytton Strachey, who would transform the art of biography, Duncan Grant who would revolutionize the art world and E.M. Forster, who would write “Maurice,” a novel with a queer love story that wouldn’t be published until after his death in 1970.

These queer artists and writers found “new ways to connect,” Strachey writes, “a commitment to honest communication between the sexes, to freedom in creativity, to openness in all sexual matters.”

The group was beginning to have critical support at the onset of World War I. Though the group’s (which Strachey calls “Old Bloomsbury”) activities broke down during the war, the cohort’s work took off after the war.

By the 1920s, the Old Bloomsbury artists and writers, then nearly in their 40s, had become successful. Virginia Woolf was photographed in Vogue. Lytton Strachey’s biography “Eminent Victorians,” a satirical takedown of Florence Nightingale and other renowned Victorians, was the talk of the town. Duncan Grant’s paintings were popular.

A group of queer young writers and artists, who Nino Strachey calls Young Bloomsbury, became lovers, friends, and creative collaborators with members of Old Bloomsbury.

Called the “Bright Young Things” at the time by the press and notables such as novelist Evelyn Waugh, members of Young Bloomsbury included: Julia Strachey, niece of Lytton Strachey and author of the novel “Cheerful Weather for the Wedding”; journalist and literary critic Raymond Mortimer; music critic and novelist Eddy Sackville-West; journalist and socialist politician John Strachey; sculptor Stephen “Tommy” Tomlin and artist and illustrator Stephen Tennant.

Members of Bloomsbury who were younger than Old Bloomsbury and older than the group’s younger members included the painter and decorative artist Dora Carrington; and the bookseller, publisher and writer David “Bunny” Garnett.

Nino Strachey didn’t write “Young Bloomsbury” as an academic project. Her reasons for writing the book were personal.

“I wrote [Young Bloomsbury],” Strachey said, “because my child identifies as gender fluid and queer.”

“It’s been a delight,” she added, “Something for us to do together.”

It’s been lovely for Nino Strachey to look at the queer history of the Strachey family and their friends and lovers, and to find queer role models going back to the 19th century.

Strachey became interested in writing “Young Bloomsbury” a few years ago. “I was working for the National Trust,” Strachey said, “I was researching the house called Knole – the home of Vita Sackville-West [poet, novelist, gardener and a lover of Virginia Woolf] and her cousin Eddy Sackville-West.”

In the midst of this research, one of Nino Strachey’s colleagues told her that she’d found some boxes of Strachey family papers.

Until then, Nino Strachey hadn’t known that, in the 1920s, her cousin John Strachey had lived with Eddy Sackville-West in London. From their letters, “I learned that they were incredibly open about their gender identity and sexuality,” Strachey said. “I wouldn’t have expected that 100 years ago! I don’t think anybody had looked into the boxes since the 1920s.”

“I thought: this is something I must write about,” Strachey said.

In the past, people have concentrated so much on who had sex with whom in Bloomsbury, that they’ve forgotten how important friendships were to the group, Strachey said. “They would be lovers with each other. Have quarrels,” she said, “but they cared for each other. They formed life-long friendships.”

They didn’t have the words for it a century ago but Bloomsbury became a family of choice.

At a time when a man could be arrested for carrying a powder puff in public or a queer person subjected to conversion therapy, Bloomsbury became a safe space for young queer people.

“Older Bloomsbury members took on a parental role for queer young artists and writers,” Strachey said. “They nurtured not only their careers but their personal life choices at a time when many of their parents weren’t supportive.”

Young Bloomsbury members would be pressured to undergo conversion therapy, Strachey said. “It was legal then. It was horrible,” she said, “involving painful injections.”

Conversion therapy wasn’t the only way in which queerness was repressed. Then as now, books with queer stories were banned.

Bloomsbury rallied around when lesbian writer Radclyffe Hall’s novel “The Well of Loneliness” was prosecuted for obscenity. Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster wrote letters of support for Hall. The book’s publication was blocked because it was judged to be obscene. (It was published in the U.K. in 1959.)

“You might have thought that ‘Orlando’ [the gender-bending novel by Virginia Woolf] would have been prosecuted for being obscene,” Strachey said, “but luckily that didn’t happen because it’s couched in this wonderful, historical, fanciful language.”

Strachey loved learning about how both Vita Sackville-West (with her masculine presentation) and Eddy Sackville-West (with his makeup and eye shadow) inspired Woolf’s writing of “Orlando.” “Virginia put these people into a single character who survives for 400 years,” Strachey said.

“Orlando,” which remains a “contemporary” classic novel, is having a moment today, Strachey said. “It’s on stage in London. For the first time, with a nonbinary actor playing the lead,” she added, “It’s getting rave reviews!”

People have misperceptions about Virginia Woolf, Strachey said. “Some interpretations see her, perhaps, as being quite harsh and judgmental,” Strachey said.

Yet, Woolf could be “absolutely supportive” and quite funny, Strachey said. “She and Lytton were really naughty,” she said, “they loved to tease people!”

“There’s a series of photographs where they’re together and smiling, and you can see how they’re riffing off each other,” Strachey said.

Virginia Woolf and other members of Bloomsbury listened to the romantic troubles of younger Bloomsbury members when their families wouldn’t. “Eddy Sackville-West read his diaries to Virginia Woolf,” Strachey said, “He talked to her about his love life.”

Old and Young Bloomsbury members loved Noel Coward and musicals. Younger members of Bloomsbury clued older members in on new technologies from radio broadcasting to flying lessons to movies to gossip columns. Young Bloomsbury “was tuned into the world of the stage – to film actresses like Mary Pickford,” Strachey said.

Strachey has been heartened by the feedback “Young Bloomsbury” has received. Not just from journalists and reviewers, but from people at festivals. “The warmest moments have been when people come up to me,” Strachey said, “to talk about chosen families and queer role models.”

“Cis, hetero couples ask: How can we support trans young people,” she added.
This is important to Strachey. We think society is so inclusive, but it’s not, she said.

“The statistics for LGBTQ+ youth regarding self-harm, bullying, prejudice remain really high,” Strachey said.

Anything one can do to raise support and awareness is a good thing, she added.

Nino Strachey (Photo by Alex Schneideman)

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Books

Upcoming books offer something for every reader

From a history of the gay right to a look at queer women’s spaces

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(Book cover images courtesy of the publishers)

Daylight Savings Time has arrived, giving you more sunlight in the evening and more time to read. So why not look for these great books this spring?

If your taste runs to historical novels, you’re in luck. When Yorick spots his name on the list of the missing after the Titanic sinks, he believes this to be an omen: nobody’s looking for him, so maybe this is his opportunity to move to Paris and open that bookstore he’s been dreaming about. In The Titanic Survivors Book Clubby Timothy Schaffert (Doubleday, $29.00) his decision leads to more than a bucolic little business. Out April 2.

If you’re looking for something a little on the lighter side, discover Riley Weaver Needs a Date to the Gaybutante Ball by Jason June (HarperTeen, $19.99). Young adult books are perfect light reading for adults, and this one is full of high-school drama, romance, comedy, and more drama. What fun! Out May 23.

Can’t get enough of graphic novels? Then look for Escape from St. Hell: A Graphic Novel by Lewis Hancox (Graphix, $14.99). It’s the continuing story of Lew, who just wants to live his life as a guy, which he started doing in the last novel (“Welcome to St. Hell”) but you know what they say about one door closing, one door opening. In this new installment, Lew grapples with the changes he’s made and how his friends and family see things, too. This book is fresh and honest and great for someone who’s just transitioned. Out May 7.

For the mystery lover, you can’t go wrong with Clean Kill: A Nicky Sullivan Mystery by Anne Laughlin (Bold Strokes, $18.95). As the manager of a sober living home in Chicago, Nicky Sullivan has her hands full with 10 other residents of the home. But when one of them is murdered, Sullivan reaches back into her past as an investigator to find the killer by calling on her old partner. Fortunately, he’s still working. Also fortunately, he’s got a new partner and she catches Sullivan’s eye. Can love and murder mix? Out May 14.

Can’t get enough of politics? Then you’ll be happy to find Coming out Republican: A History of the Gay Right by Neil J. Young (University of Chicago Press, $30). In the fractious political atmosphere we have now, it’s essential to understand how gay conservatives have influenced politics through the decades. Find this book before November. It may be one of the most eye-opening books you’ll read. Out April 3.

The reader who loves her “space” will want to take A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture by June Thomas (Seal Press, $30) there to read. It’s a book about historically safe places for queer women to be themselves – and some are surprisingly very public. Interviews with iconic feminists and lesbians round out a great look at the locales that queer women have claimed for their own. Out May 28.

And now the housekeeping: Release dates can change and titles can be altered at the last minute, so check with your favorite bookseller or librarian. They’ll also have more recommendations if you need them because there’s a lot of time for reading now.

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Books

Gay author takes us on his journey to fatherhood in ‘Safe’

One man’s truth about the frustrations and rewards of fostering

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(Book cover image courtesy of Atria Books)

‘Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family’
By Mark Daley
c.2024, Atria Books
$28.99/304 pages

The closet is full of miniature hangers.

The mattress bumpers match the drapes and the rug beneath the tiny bed. There’s a rocker for late-night fusses, a tall giraffe in the corner, and wind-up elephants march in a circle over the crib. Now you just need someone to occupy that space and in the new book, “Safe” by Mark Daley, there’s more than one way to accomplish that dream.

Jason was a natural-born father.

Mark Daley knew that when they were dating, when he watched Jason with his nephew, with infants, and the look on Jason’s face when he had one in his arms. As a gay man, Daley never thought much having a family but he knew Jason did – and so, shortly after their wedding, they began exploring surrogacy and foster-to-adopt programs.

Daley knew how important it was to get the latter right: his mother had a less-than-optimal childhood, and she protected her own children fiercely for it. When Daley came out to her, and to his father, he was instantly supported and that’s what he wanted to give: support and loving comfort to a child in a hard situation.

Or children, as it happened. Just weeks after competing foster parenting classes and after telling the social worker they’d take siblings if there was a need, the prospective dads were offered two small brothers to foster.

It was love at first sight but euphoria was somewhat tempered by courts, laws, and rules. Their social worker warned several times that reunification of the boys with their parents was “Plan A,” but Daley couldn’t imagine it. The parents seemed unreliable; they rarely kept appointments, and they didn’t seem to want to learn better parenting skills. The mother all but ignored the baby, and the child noticed.

So did Daley, but the courts held all the power, and predicting an outcome was impossible.

“All we had was the present,” he said. “If I didn’t stay in it, I was going to lose everything I had.” So was there a Happily-Ever-After?

Ah, you won’t find an answer to that question here. You’ll need to read “Safe” and wear your heart outside your chest for an hour or so, to find out. Bring tissues.

Bring a sense of humor, too, because author and founder of One Iowa Mark Daley takes readers along on his journey to being someone’s daddy, and he does it with the sweetest open-minded open-heartedness. He’s also Mama Bear here, too, which is just what you want to see, although there can sometimes be a lot of tiresome drama and over-fretting in that.

And yet, this isn’t just a sweet, but angst-riddled, tale of family. If you’re looking to foster, here’s one man’s truth about the frustrations, the stratospheric-highs, and the deep lows. Will your foster experiences be similar? Maybe, but reading this book about it is its own reward.

“Safe” soars and it dives. It plays with your emotions and it wallows in anxiety. If you’re a parent, though, you’ll hang on to every word.

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Books

A travel memoir with a queer, Black sensibility

Nonbinary author Shayla Lawson is the Joan Didion of our time

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‘How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir’
By Shayla Lawson
c.2024, Tiny Reparations Books
$29/320 pages

Joan Didion, one of the greatest writers and journalists of the 20th century and 2000s, wrote superbly crafted essays – telling engaging stories about the places she traveled to. Reading her, you sensed Didion reacting personally to her travels, and, as a writer, clocking it. To write in stories for her readers. 

Shayla Lawson, a nonbinary, Black, disabled poet and journalist, is the Joan Didion of our time.

Their new work, “How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir,” is a provocative, impeccably crafted, hard-to-put down, travel memoir in essays. (Lawson uses they/them pronouns.)

Lawson is author of “This is Major,” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle and the LAMBDA Literary Award, and the author of two poetry collections, “A Special Education in Human Being” and “I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean.”  They have written for New York Magazine, Salon, ESPN and Paper, and earned fellowships from the Yaddo and the MacDowell Artist Colony.

Yet, despite this impressive track record, Lawson, who grew up in Kentucky, and has lived and traveled everywhere from the Netherlands to Brazil to Los Angeles to Kyoto, Japan to Mexico to Shanghai, had to wait nine years before a publisher would wrap their head around releasing a travel memoir in essays.

Thankfully, Lawson had the  chutzpah to persist in seeking a home for her memoir. Kudos to Tiny Reparations Books for valuing Lawson’s writing and publishing ‘How to Live Free in a Dangerous World.”

From the get-go of their memoir, Lawson draws us in. We’re with them on the plane. Right away, we’re with Lawson – a writer who’s clocking it  – telling their story – while they’re on the plane. At the same time, we’re reading the story that Lawson’s writing. 

In a few nano-secs, we get that Lawson’s stories have a queer, Black sensibility.

“Our story starts in an airplane,” Lawson writes in the opening of the memoir, “with the sound of long acrylic nails tapping on laptop keys, the sound of black femme poetics…”

“Only connect,” writes queer writer E.M. Forster in his 1910 novel “Howards End.”

Lawson’s daring memoir is a dazzling mosaic of connections between race, class, gender, sexuality, death, queerness, love, disability, grief and beauty.

Lawson met Kees, their ex-husband, a white man from the Netherlands, when he was in Harlem during a layover on a flight to Brazil for a six-month back-packing trip through South America, Lawson recalls. They meet cute over pizza, fall in love, and marry.

In the Netherlands, Lawson has to learn a new language and is stuck living in a beautiful, but boring village. They volunteer at a refugee village, that Lawson discovered had been an “insane asylum.” That village, Lawson thought, wasn’t  beautiful.

Lawson discovers beauty and sexuality when she meets up with a hunky gondolier in Venice.

In post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, they experience what it’s like to hang out with other Black people, where everyone is Black. 

In one of the memoir’s most compelling chapters, Lawson visits artist Frida Kahlo’s house in Mexico City. Kahlo was disabled. She had spina bifida.

At age 39, Lawson was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. They have chronic pain from the disability.

A doctor (with the bedside manner of Attila the Hun) told Lawson that they would die. “It’s a strong presentation,” Lawson remembers the doc said to her.

Often, disability is left out of storytelling. If included, it’s put in a box – separated, disconnected, from other intersections of the narrative (gender, sexuality, race, class, sexual orientation, etc.).

One out of five Americans is disabled, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and Lawson writes, post-COVID that 60 percent of Americans have been diagnosed as chronically ill.

Lawson brings ableism out of the shadows.

I’m white, cisgender, queer and legally blind. I’m one of the many for whom Lawson’s experience of ableism will ring true.

They’ve “called me a bitch,” for moving slower, Lawson writes.

The last time Lawson traveled when “I didn’t return in a wheelchair,” was 2019, they write.

But that won’t stop them from traveling, Lawson writes.

“How do I want to live,” Lawson asks, “in such a way that someone will be honored by how I die.”

“How to Live Free in a Dangerous World” is exhilarating, but sometimes discomforting reading. Lawson makes you think. If you’re white and, using all the right pronouns, for instance, you can still be clueless about racism or being entitled.

But Lawson’s memoir isn’t a hectoring sermon. It’s a frisson of freedom, liberation and hope.

“No matter where you are, may you always be certain who you are,” Lawson writes, “And when you are, get everything you deserve.”

Check it out. You won’t be able to get it out of your head.

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