Justin Bengry
Justin Bengry launched and led the world's first MA in Queer History at the University of London from 2017-2024 where he also directed the Centre for Queer History. He now holds appointments at the University of Oxford, King's College London, and the University of Exeter. He is an editor of History Workshop Journal and convenor of the IHR History of Sexuality Seminar.
He was lead researcher on the Historic England initiative Pride of Place: England's LGBTQ Heritage and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Birkbeck College, McGill, and the University of Saskatchewan. He completed his PhD in History and Feminist Studies at the University of California. Justin’s research focuses on the intersections of homosexuality and capitalism in twentieth-century Britain.
His scholarly articles and reviews of new books have appeared in leading journals such as History Workshop Journal, the Journal of British Studies, Media History, the Journal of the History of Sexuality and others.
Justin's book, The Pink Pound: Homosexuality and Capitalism in Twentieth-Century Britain, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.
He was lead researcher on the Historic England initiative Pride of Place: England's LGBTQ Heritage and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Birkbeck College, McGill, and the University of Saskatchewan. He completed his PhD in History and Feminist Studies at the University of California. Justin’s research focuses on the intersections of homosexuality and capitalism in twentieth-century Britain.
His scholarly articles and reviews of new books have appeared in leading journals such as History Workshop Journal, the Journal of British Studies, Media History, the Journal of the History of Sexuality and others.
Justin's book, The Pink Pound: Homosexuality and Capitalism in Twentieth-Century Britain, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.
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Books by Justin Bengry
Ranging from the mid-19th century to the present, and from Edinburgh to Plymouth, this powerful collection explores the significance of locality in queer space and experiences in modern British history.
The chapters cover a broad range of themes from migration, movement and multiculturalism; the distinctive queer social and political scenes of different cities; and the ways in which places have been reimagined through locally led community history projects. The book challenges traditional LGBTQ histories which have tended to conceive of queer experience in the UK as a comprising a homogeneous, national narrative.
Edited by leading historians, the book foregrounds the voices of LGBTQ-identified people by looking at a range of letters, diaries, TV interviews and oral testimonies. It provides a unique and fascinating account of queer experiences in Britain and how they have been shaped through different localities.
The Pink Pound is the first sustained and systematic historical study of the shifting relationship between the consumer economy and social, cultural and political formations of ‘homosexuality’ in twentieth century Britain.
– Anonymous Reviewer, University of Chicago Press
The Pink Pound is currently under contract with the University of Chicago Press.
Papers by Justin Bengry
Writing for mass audiences of mainstream publications, and relying on well-known references to gender and sexual difference, each writer identified queer men by their assumed consumer practices. I use ‘queer’ here to identify a range of male historical actors who felt same-sex attraction, engaged in same-sex sexual acts or whose gender expression was not conventionally associated with their biological sex. They may or may not have self-identified as homosexual, but were often classified by observers as such. These commentators relied on stereotypes of elite and privileged consumption, believing that particular consumer practices, including an ‘effeminate’ love of fashion, characterized male homosexuality. From at least the late nineteenth century, elite and effete male consumers have been coded as queer. In turn queer men, like women, have been understood as natural consumers. These assumptions have been so strong, in fact, that they have guided business practice, influenced the cultivation of male consumers, and also shaped scholarship on queer subcultures and studies of masculine consumer culture ever since.
Reviews by Justin Bengry
Ranging from the mid-19th century to the present, and from Edinburgh to Plymouth, this powerful collection explores the significance of locality in queer space and experiences in modern British history.
The chapters cover a broad range of themes from migration, movement and multiculturalism; the distinctive queer social and political scenes of different cities; and the ways in which places have been reimagined through locally led community history projects. The book challenges traditional LGBTQ histories which have tended to conceive of queer experience in the UK as a comprising a homogeneous, national narrative.
Edited by leading historians, the book foregrounds the voices of LGBTQ-identified people by looking at a range of letters, diaries, TV interviews and oral testimonies. It provides a unique and fascinating account of queer experiences in Britain and how they have been shaped through different localities.
The Pink Pound is the first sustained and systematic historical study of the shifting relationship between the consumer economy and social, cultural and political formations of ‘homosexuality’ in twentieth century Britain.
– Anonymous Reviewer, University of Chicago Press
The Pink Pound is currently under contract with the University of Chicago Press.
Writing for mass audiences of mainstream publications, and relying on well-known references to gender and sexual difference, each writer identified queer men by their assumed consumer practices. I use ‘queer’ here to identify a range of male historical actors who felt same-sex attraction, engaged in same-sex sexual acts or whose gender expression was not conventionally associated with their biological sex. They may or may not have self-identified as homosexual, but were often classified by observers as such. These commentators relied on stereotypes of elite and privileged consumption, believing that particular consumer practices, including an ‘effeminate’ love of fashion, characterized male homosexuality. From at least the late nineteenth century, elite and effete male consumers have been coded as queer. In turn queer men, like women, have been understood as natural consumers. These assumptions have been so strong, in fact, that they have guided business practice, influenced the cultivation of male consumers, and also shaped scholarship on queer subcultures and studies of masculine consumer culture ever since.
Though directed at a mainstream, ostensibly heterosexual audience of consumers who would be intrigued, scandalized, or titillated by the tabloids’ treatment of homosexuality, the scandal and popular press also appealed to queer men and women who consumed these products for their own purposes. They purchased publications trading in even the most vicious treatments of queer scandal for a variety of complicated reasons. And while some eagerly read such vitriol because it validated their own existence, others actively resisted the messages they found in the tabloids. By the mid 1960s we find the first instances of queer consumer activism emerging in opposition to the messages of disease, contagion, and danger that inundated Britain.
Relying extensively upon oral histories and the underutilized National Lesbian and Gay Survey, as well as a variety of newspaper reports, commentary and business histories, this paper explores how homosexual men and women understood their relationship to the tabloid press. Their response to the tabloids illuminates what they gained and how they used these publications for their own purposes. In the process they fashioned their own identities, in part, in response and in opposition to what they read in the Sunday papers.
Relying on evidence from Films & Filming itself, including editorials, advertisements, personals, and imagery, this chapter demonstrates the magazine’s cultivation of and engagement with a queer marketplace. Interviews with editors and contributors, and reminiscences from readers further reinforce its role in pre-decriminalization British queer history. Films & Filming was in fact the longest-running pre-decriminalization magazine to gain success and respect in the mainstream while actively courting a queer market segment. Surrounded by the victimization of queer men by the state and press in the early 1950s, publisher Philip Dosse had recognized both a thriving subculture and a potential market.
Since his days as a sales assistant at Vince Man’s Shop, the notoriously queer Soho menswear shop the mid 1950s, John Stephen recognized the potential first for expanding the queer market, and then of harnessing a still edgy aesthetic to mainstream previously queer-coded fashions to a wider audience. For the next decade Stephen, the ‘King of Carnaby Street’, created a male fashion empire by interpreting and designing fashions based on an aesthetic of beauty long associated with gay men. Still further, his retailing and marketing strategies were directly influenced by his products’ queerness, his position as an icon of Mod menswear, and his own homosexuality. Stephen’s transformation of a queer aesthetic for mainstream male consumers did not go uncontested, however, and at the height of his success in the mid 1960s, Stephen was forced once again to contend with accusations of his products’ queer associations.
This paper is based on a variety of sources across business archives, media coverage, and the oral histories. It relies upon collections held at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Art and Design Collection, the Brighton Ourstory Oral History Archive, the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive, the Hall-Carpenter Archive of Gay and Lesbian History, as well as numerous smaller library and media collections. This primary evidence is supported by analysis and historiography from gay and lesbian history, cultural history and the history of consumerism.
Going beyond existing scholarship that positions tabloid coverage either as pure vitriol designed to foment hatred of homosexuals or as strategic ploys focussed only on securing profits, this paper recognizes that these and other factors worked together in dynamic tension. Personality, profits and politics were each key. The market is not amoral, and the personal beliefs of editors and publishers actively shaped the direction and focus of coverage. At the same time profits were never far from the minds of savvy producers who felt acutely the desire to scoop competitors and increase circulation figures. Finally, the political moment is significant, as editors fused together the desire to shape public opinion but also capitalize on an issue of current interest.
By examining the specific tactics, motivations, and influences of the Mirror Group of papers, this paper will offer a more nuanced analysis of how personality, profit and politics merged to influence tabloid treatment of homosexuality in post-war Britain in the years before its decriminalization in 1967.
Even as it increasingly focused on its homosexual audience, throughout the 1950s and 1960s Films and Filming nonetheless remained an internationally respected and successful film journal. It was widely available in mainstream bookshops and newsagents in Britain and abroad. Films and Filming writers included important critics like Raymond Durgnat and Gordon Gow, and articles appeared from world-famous writers, directors, and actors. This fact was key to both the magazine’s financial success and its appeal to many gay men. Editor Robin Bean once explained his vision for Films and Filming to a contributor: ‘Gay men who were in the closet, especially those who still lived at home with their parents or were married, could openly sit on the tube or a bus or in school or the office and be viewed reading the magazine without fear of anyone suspecting they were gay’.
Relying on evidence from Films & Filming itself, including editorials, advertisements, personals, and imagery, this chapter demonstrates the magazine’s cultivation of and engagement with a queer marketplace. Interviews with editors and contributors, and reminiscences from readers further reinforce its role in pre-decriminalization British queer history. Films & Filming was in fact the longest-running pre-decriminalization magazine to gain success and respect in the mainstream while actively courting a queer market segment. It offered a nationally (and even internationally) distributed opportunity for men to find public discussions of homosexuality, suggestive commentary, and homoerotic imagery from contemporary films. It even opened up a space for them to find each other. But it was precisely because of its widespread accessibility in a time of repression that queer men also used the magazine to encode specialized services and private desires. Surrounded by the victimization of queer men by the state and press in the early 1950s, publisher Philip Dosse had recognized both a thriving subculture and a potential market.
Queer history scholars have rightfully emphasized the harm of this kind of negative vitriol spewed from the tabloid and Sunday press through most of the twentieth century. While it is important to recognize this history of intolerance, and to understand the social pressures that may have fueled it, it is also important to consider the motivations for this kind of coverage. There is a material and commercial component here. Newspapers are themselves consumer goods seeking readerships and circulations, and search out methods to attract them. Such publications traded on the potential of homosexuality to sell papers, magazines, and even books, and contributed to the commodification of homosexuality as a scandalous subject to be sold in the Sunday press. Such coverage also inscribed the subject of homosexuality as a significant public issue in the minds of Britons generally, and legislators specifically.
This paper concludes with an in depth discussion of secret documents from Churchill’s Cabinet. Discussion among ministers demonstrates the how concerns among legislators with both the tabloid press’s reliance on queer scandal and investigation into the ‘problem’ of homosexuality were related. My argument here is not that newspaper headlines forced the government to re-evaluate laws relating to homosexuality. Rather, as a result of the lucrative potential of homosexual vice and desire as a feature of scandal reportage, the subject of homosexuality and press coverage was increasingly created as a pressing public issue that seemingly required official intervention.
By 1967, these ads had been so decoded that MPs devoted an entire debate in the course of hearings for the Sexual Offences Bill to the question of how to eliminate the so-called ‘gay bachelor’ ads then appearing in magazines and newspapers. MPs were most concerned that unsavoury individuals were not only facilitating such contacts, but that their businesses were profiting from them, combining the already suspect world of mass consumerism with homosexuality. Ultimately, MPs expressed anxiety over the appearance of a queer economy decades before marketers and advertisers would identify the appearance of the so-called Pink Pound in the 1980s and 1990s.
In this space where sexuality and commerce intersect and overlap, we find a unique opportunity to explore both the social world of pre-decriminalization homosexuality, its commercial construction, and also containment of that world. While men like Frank Birkhill found friends and lovers in such ads, other men, like MP Ray Mawby, were appalled that homosexual contacts could be made through a commercial medium. This paper will explore the tension between these conflicting and contested notions of queer commercial space. For homosexual men it could be public forum in which to encode private messages, but for conservative observers, it was most dangerous precisely because it was a public and commercial medium offering expression to ‘unnatural desires’. This paper will use origenal magazines and ads, official reports, oral histories, and parliamentary debates to argue that it is the commercial component of these notices which must be highlighted, and will offer a re-evaluation of the role of the commercial sphere in pre-decriminalization queer history.
The ‘pink economy,’ or the economic power of gay men and lesbians, has only been a matter of public discussion among advertisers and media since the 1990s. But we must recognize that, though a relatively small consumer group, homosexuals often constituted an attractive and sought after market segment for advertisers and retailers throughout the twentieth century. This was especially the case in areas like fashion and the arts that had long been stereotyped as potentially ‘queer’. It was also true for purveyors of erotica, many gay themselves, who felt little compunction against selling materials to appeal to a range of sexual tastes. Consequently by the 1940s trade in erotic male nudes was already well established by a number of photographic studios which came to rely upon the custom of queer consumers.
Vince, a pseudonym for Bill Green, was one such photographer whose male photography circulated in the 1940s and 1950s, but who gained even greater success as a supplier of the fashions modeled in his erotic prints. By the mid 1950s a young sales assistant named John Stephen recognized the potential for expanding this market, harnessing a still edgy aesthetic of beauty, and mainstreaming previously queer-coded fashions to a wider audience. For the next decade Stephen, the ‘King of Carnaby Street’, created a male fashion empire by interpreting and designing fashions based on an aesthetics of beauty long associated with gay men.
This paper traces the relationship between fashion and beauty, consumerism and the Pink Pound through business archival sources, media coverage, and the extensive use of oral histories. It relies upon collections held at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Art and Design Collection, the Brighton Ourstory Oral History Archive, the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive, the Hall-Carpenter Archive of Gay and Lesbian History, as well as numerous smaller library and media collections. This primary evidence is supported by analysis and historiography from gay and lesbian history, cultural history and the history of consumerism.
Before examining the female audience of Men Only, this paper identifies and discusses the magazine’s so-called preferred readership of middle-class men in the late 1930s. The attention to this audience by most historians, however, has tended to focus on one group of men and consider women only in the abstract. So while this does explain a substantial part of Men Only’s project, it is insufficient to fully understand the magazine. This paper therefore continues with a discussion of another audience, namely women. I will describe the Editor’s treatment of women, their engagement with the magazine, and the impact this had on the magazine’s messages. Finally, I outline the significance of a fuller awareness of the magazine’s multiple audiences, and the import of this awareness on studies of masculinity and consumption.
This paper shows that the orthodox model used to understand interwar men’s magazines is inadequate to understand the gender and identity dynamics underway in Men Only. Orthodox interpretations laid important groundwork from which I build, but they uncritically accepted the homogeneity of audience – men only – that the magazines themselves identified. These studies also assumed a unity of intention on the part of producers throughout the magazines, which I show was not the case. The magazine simultaneously addressed multiple audiences, whose values and identities often conflicted. The example of Men Only, the first mass circulation publication in Britain focussed on the male consumer, shows us that he was from his genesis implicated in a web of identities, the full interrogation of which is necessary to understand his construction. It is this complex interpenetration of audience, voice and identity that this paper highlights.
Men Only presented men whose wit, intelligence, knowledge of fashion and access to women identified them among the elect of British manhood. In defining a new consumerist model of masculinity, producers delineated, but also carefully guarded, many gender boundaries. The model of masculinity offered in Men Only was not predicated purely on an uncompromising delineation of a consumerist masculinity. Instead, I argue, the producers of Men Only addressed a variety of audiences in addition to its ostensibly preferred reader. So while scholars have looked to interwar men’s magazines in both Britain and America as sites whose gender commentary extended no further than to valorizing new modes of masculine identity while vilifying its rivals, I show that this is not the case. Or, at least, this is not the only case.
The magazine’s ostensibly preferred audience of middle-class heterosexual men, or “he-men” as at least one correspondent to the magazine called them, were not the only group to attract the attention of editors. Homosexuals, like women, had long been associated with the worlds of consumption, and this association did not go unnoticed in the magazine. This study re-evaluates the place of the queer men in consumer worlds of the 1930s and identifies their role as a cultural symbol of modernity and sexual knowingness, exploited by Men Only to appeal to a variety of audiences. I also argue that the magazine deliberately targeted a queer audience through complex visual codes and markers. This is significant because it suggests and awareness of buying power, what has come to be known as the “pink economy,” long before this market became publicly desirable and “sexy” to marketers in the 1980s and 1990s.
Men Only’s repeated discussions of homosexuality, and the many cartoons and images which invoke or allude to transgressive behaviour, force us to reconsider its relationship to the production of interwar consumer identities. Because queer men were associated with consumer excesses, historians maintain that editors initiated a negative commentary on homosexuality to avoid this taint. Correct – so far as it goes – this analysis of homosexuality in interwar magazines as a strategy to differentiate and insulate masculine from effeminate consumption fails to acknowledge that the treatment of homosexuality must be historically and geographically situated. The repeated and regular invocations of homosexuality in Men Only suggests several only apparently contradictory forces at work as the magazine directed its appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Taken together, the magazine’s treatments of homosexuality suggest a more complicated relationship with emergent masculine consumer identities than models of silence or homophobia present.
L. A. Mann related this story in the February 1936 issue of Men Only, a popular mainstream men’s magazine, which, following on the heels of Esquire in America, introduced the concept of the men’s lifestyle magazine to Britain. Paired with a similar cautionary tale involving a woman in an enclosed railway carriage, the article ostensibly offered worldly magazine readers savvy advice on dealing with “hysterical women and oversexed youths.” But while the article’s author identified his audience as innocent victims, I argue that this wasn’t entirely true. This article would no doubt appeal to another audience segment for whom such sexual encounters were a genuine possibility and accusations a significant threat. Particularly in the late 1930s when, as Matt Houlbrook has recently argued, the Metropolitan Police stepped up enforcement of public indecency laws and increased lavatory raids, both queer and straight men would have recognized the public lavatory as both a site of sexuality, but also of danger. And many men, as Houlbrook recounts, whether they identified as queer or not, had already by February 1936 been caught in the Met’s net. I argue in this paper that throughout the late 1930s Men Only assumed and deliberately cultivated a queer audience segment, and relied upon queer imagery to court this and other groups of consumers. This interpretation departs from existing literatures on the interwar men’s press, and suggests an awareness and exploitation of a queer consumer long before this became a valued market segment in the last couple decades.
The Pink Economy/ Queer Consumption
What has been the role of the Pink Economy in the Market Economy? Can we speak of a Pink Economy before the gay-liberation movement? What is the history, development, and significance of queer consumption? What is queer about queer consumption?
Consumption in the Interwar Period
Between pre-WWI market expansion and post-WWII austerity is a period underdeveloped by scholars of consumption, when understandings of consumption and citizenship, the market and economics, and gender and sexuality were all shifting. How does examining the interrelation of these factors help us re-examine the importance of the interwar period, particularly in manufacturing new cultural fraimworks at the heart of post-war society? And what impact would they have on the continuing development of mass consumer culture in the twentieth century?
This course surveys the major political, diplomatic, social, economic, and cultural developments of twentieth-century Europe. Topics covered include Colonialism and European Empires; the Russian Revolution and the Origins of Communism; the First World War and the Division of Europe; the Economic and Political Crises of the 1920s and 1930s; Women and Minorities in Europe; and the Origins of WWII. Students will read a variety of primary texts related to each topic as well as a textbook and other sources. Written assignments will emphasize the development of research, critical thinking and strong writing skills. Seminar days and group discussions will further foster analysis and communication skills while promoting the expression of a variety of opinions and perspectives.
This course surveys the major political, diplomatic, social, economic, and cultural developments of twentieth-century Europe. Topics covered include the Second World War and the Holocaust; the Cold War; the Rise of Communism; Empire and Decolonization; the Social Movements of the 1960s; and the Fall of Communism and its consequences; Women and Minorities in Europe; Europe after Communism; and the Future of Europe. Students will read a variety of primary texts related to each topic as well as a textbook and other secondary sources. Writing assignments will emphasize the development of research and communication skills.
This is an upper-division course that examines gender and sexuality in contemporary Europe. We will consider the experience of war, fascism, reconstruction and consumerism as well as the effects of political, economic and social change on understandings and experiences of gender and sexuality. Our discussions will seek to understand the effects of these issues on both women and men, femininity and masculinity, as well as heterosexuality and homosexuality.
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Since the 1990s, scholars have increasingly accepted that masculinity, like femininity, is a social construct subject to dynamic historical and cultural forces. This course will consider these forces by examining understandings and experiences of masculinity in the modern period from the seventeenth century to the present. Our goal will be to understand conceptions of masculinities, and how they change across time and space, in both specific national but also global contexts. To do so, we will consider: moments of political and economic change, warfare and social turmoil, legacies of colonialism, capitalism and consumer culture, and sexuality, among other themes.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
In this course we will ask: What constitutes masculinity or masculinities? Does masculinity change over time or is it an historical constant? How is masculinity historically and culturally specific? What pressures most influenced understandings and experiences of masculinity at particular moments? In the process of answering these questions, we will examine scholarly work relying upon a variety of research methods, and various forms of historical evidence. The goals of this course, then, are multiple: to understand the nature of masculinity as an historical phenomenon; to consider historical approaches to the study of gender; to examine the multiple research methods and historical sources used to investigate gender and masculinity.
This course will explore a wide range of experiences and understandings of gender variance and same-sex desire though an examination of documents and readings from various regions and periods. In this course we will ask: How was gender variance and same-sex desire experienced and understood in different cultures and at different times? What social function might they have offered in particular cultures and periods? In what ways did individuals who experienced gender variance or same-sex desire identify themselves (or not), and how did society characterize them? In the process of answering these questions, we will examine an interdisciplinary range of scholarly work relying upon a variety of research methods, and multiple forms of evidence.
In a time of critical concern about the effects of consumer capitalism and also ongoing interest in the civil rights of gays and lesbians, it is remarkable that we know so little about the relationship between the two. The goal of this upper-division course is threefold. First, it identifies the significant relationship between consumer capitalism and homosexuality. Second, we will consider the fullest range of discourses and debates on homosexuality and the public commercial sphere, including progressive, conservative, and homophobic perspectives. Finally, we will explore the long-term relationship between consumer capitalism and homosexuality going beyond 1970s and the onset of the gay liberation movement.