Laura Doan

Then and Now: What the ‘Queer’ Portrait Can Teach Us about the ‘New’ Longue Durée.

Figure 1. Charles Buchel, Radclyffe Hall, 1918, oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery.

Figure 2.  Romaine Brooks, Una, Lady Troubridge, 1924, oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art

Museum.

Abstract:

Keywords:

Portraiture is a slippery and seductive art; it encourages us to feel that then is now and
now is then.
Marcia Pointon

In 2016 Tate Britain announced its plans to stage an exhibition—entitled ‘Queer British Art, 1867-1967’—

to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act (1967), parliamentary legislation now widely

regarded as a watershed moment in the history of modern British sexual freedom and equality. To

commemorate the ‘decriminalization of male homosexuality’ the organizers of the nation’s first major art

museum to ‘focus exclusively’ on queer visual and material culture sought to, first, demonstrate to the

‘wider public’ the ‘remarkable range’ of queer ‘identities and stories’ and, second, assist LGBT and queer

people in forging a ‘sense of community’.1 As much celebration as collective remembrance, the Tate

Britain show featured paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography, film, and the decorative arts by

numerous artists, arranged in thematic clusters rather than in a chronological order suggesting political

progression. Nonetheless, when we fix our gaze on a sexual object in the context of queer remembrance,

the pull toward a linear narrative of homosexual emancipation is hard to resist, particularly in portraiture

which ‘gives us more than itself’ in raising expectations pertaining to resemblance. 2

 2

If knowing a ‘person’s sexuality’ is to ‘know that person’, and if the face of that person is a ‘window

to the soul’, the portrait seems a good place to start for LGBT and queer people in search of individuals in

the past who appear to us now to be a ‘specific kind of human being’. 3 Identifying the sitter as an X binds

us to a past remembered which condenses all the messiness of sexual desire into the modern categories

prevalent today. However, structuring the past this way, some historians argue, presents us with a paradox

in that it increases not decreases the distance between then and now, a predicament requiring

methodological self-reflexivity to understand fully. What fascinates me about the Tate’s twin objectives—

to make the queer past relevant to the general public and useful to specific communities—is how they map

onto recent debates about time-scales in history writing. In this essay I suggest an investigation of the queer

portrait as continuous or discontinuous to the present offers fresh perspectives on the consequences of how

we navigate temporality in doing historical work.

The portrait, like no other art form, provokes us to look back—a prerequisite, logic dictates, to

looking forward. The trouble is, historians sharply disagree about the methods used in telling stories about

the past to shape ‘how the present understands its potential’ and intervene ‘in the future of the world’. 4 In

fact, no topic has been as controversial of late as the problem of temporal scale in the production of

historical knowledge, as practitioners confront the irreconcilabilities of going long or short in scanning

temporal horizons. Going long invites us to read the portrait as historical evidence of an individual whose

self-presentation, as observed by the artist, matches the taxonomic specificities of a modern sexual type. In

historiographical terms, interest in locating links or continuities across time is known as the longue durée or

Long Past, an approach to history writing that flourished in the mid-1950s before being nudged to the

margins in the mid-1970s with the rise of identity politics and post-structuralism. 5 Historians unconvinced

by the broad strokes of the Long Past—particularly its highlighting of ‘instances of compulsive repetition,

patterns that reveal themselves in the archives’—gravitated toward shorter increments of time, though not

for the same reasons.6 Some historians turned to ‘biological time-spans of between five and fifty years’ in

the service of social justice, their production of identity knowledge complicating earlier historical accounts

that excluded women, slaves or lesbian and gay people, for instance (7). Although short-termist in method,

this way of going short shared with the longue durée a common interest in continuity to produce a progress

narrative. In contrast, other historians turned to the Short Past in response to the post-structuralist critique
 3

of language, their ‘endorsement of an undetermined history’—a practice called critical history—deeply

suspicious of ‘correspondences across time’. 7 Calling both practices short-termist, then, must be seen as a

dodge—and more than that, a dodge no one seems to have noticed. This is where the queer portrait comes

in useful in illustrating: (a) affinities between political short-termism and the longue durée; (b) divergences

between political short-termism and theoretical short-termism (that is to say, critical history); and (c)

differences between critical history and the longue durée. Scrutinizing the tensions and overlaps in these

practices is essential if we are serious about looking back to look forward.

For the critical historian of sexuality committed to producing knowledge of ‘something that doesn’t

yet exist and of which we can have no idea of what it will be’, the longue durée and political short-termism

cannot open ‘doors to futures we might not otherwise have been able to imagine’. 8 To make creative

futures by looking back, the critical historian must navigate a sexual landscape now alien and unfamiliar.

The epistemological divergences in these pathways to historical knowledge could not be more profound yet

they need not lead to paralysis if we grapple with the consequences of methodology, a task all the more

timely in light of recent calls for a ‘new’ longue durée. Congruent with the Long Past, the Tate Britain

show encourages affective connections across time and invites us to ‘feel that then is now and now is then’

but the portrait does not speak for itself. 9 Queer portraits might appear to capture sexual identity ‘better

than any other visual genre’, but it is the viewer who decides what that person once was. 10 My discussion of

the readings of the portraits of two women prominent in London’s bohemian circles in the interwar era—

namely, the novelist Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) and her partner Una, Lady Troubridge (1887-1963)—

highlights the possibilities but also the limits in imagining the object as like us. Getting critical traction on

the operations of portraiture in the context of the ‘Queer British Art’ show entails weighing the relative

merits of the longue durée in relation to its assumed opposite, a Short Past divided against itself. Before

considering the portraits themselves, however, let me first roughly sketch what is at stake in configuring

historical knowledge in relation to the past as Long or Short.

The Spectre Haunting Our Time.

In 2014 historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage published a provocative little book entitled The History

Manifesto, which recounted in general terms historiographical developments beginning at the mid-point of
 4

the last century to explain why enthusiasm for the Long Past cooled around the mid-1970s. Their version of

that story goes something like this. Stirred by the ‘politics of protest and identity’ a new generation of

historians turned away from the longue durée in favor of a more intensive engagement with the archive and

critical theory (43). Influenced by thinkers such as Foucault historians privileged the micro over the macro

to investigate ‘race, class, and power’—and, eventually, gender and sexuality (44). Coming to terms with

post-structuralism made it difficult to overlook the teleological consequences of ‘big-picture thinking’ (11).

Consequently, the Long Past became ‘increasingly unfashionable’—until, that is, Guldi and Armitage

issued a wake-up call (11). Casting their critique of the ‘micro-historical perspective of the Short Past’ in

the bracing style of a revolutionary movement (‘a spectre is haunting our time: the spectre of the short

term’), the pair sought less its demise than a reevaluation of its value and purpose (41, 1). Hence the pair’s

advocacy for a ‘new’ longue durée, its newness marked by ‘dynamism and flexibility’ in using the big data

of the digital age to allow history writing to reach its ‘greater critical potential’ and create new futures that

‘emerge from the present’.11 Suddenly, concerns about time-scales moved to the front burner, and collective

amnesia about the longue durée’s theoretical shortcomings descended on a history profession left

wondering why (or if) they had drifted away from transhistoricist perspectives.

Within weeks of its publication, The History Manifesto—marketed with verve as Cambridge

University Press’s first open-access book and endorsed by a string of distinguished historians—achieved the

principle objective of its genre in fuelling controversy. Commentaries for or against the revival of the

longue durée appeared in social media, the web, and the press. 12 Less predictably, the American Historical

Review (AHR) responded with unusual alacrity to an ‘exceptional’ moment in the history of history writing

by rushing into print a vigorous critique by Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler, followed by Guldi and

Armitage’s reply.13 Citing different data, Cohen and Mandler complained the authors of The History

Manifesto had not got their facts right. A more accurate picture of trends in the discipline, they asserted,

indicated the profession has never given up on the longue durée, extolled as an approach ‘no one could

fault’.14 ‘Superb history’, Cohen and Mandler concluded, could be ‘conducted on any time scale, from a

single day to thousands of years’.15 But can it? To answer this difficult but vital question we need to pause

and rewind the story. Guldi and Armitage’s own broad strokes provide useful umbrella terms at the

expense of a more nuanced account of the fissures and incompatibilities in splitting historical work into
 5

Long or Short. To be sure, zooming out to get the big picture is very unlike zooming in—but the rubric

‘short-termism’ vastly understates the heterogeneity of historicizing practices organized around the micro.

Whether we use the Long Past or political short-termism makes little difference if our purpose is to an

object already known. This is the lesson Michel Foucault taught us in his critique of the ‘teleological

thinking’ of the longue durée (121).

Equally important, we must not forget the ‘microscopic’ perspective of short-termism is never simply

a matter of privileging the micro over the macro (84). Going long or short determines and overdetermines

what can be said, asked, thought or written about the past—and how that past can shape ‘brighter futures’

(4). For Guldi and Armitage, micro-history struggles to reach readers outside the academy because of its

‘specialization of knowledge’ (11). If history matters, historians cannot afford to speak only to one another

but must disseminate their findings to a broad readership, from social scientists and policy-makers to the

public (9). When, between 1975 and 2005, the majority of historians ‘conducted most of their studies’

around the ‘length of a mature human life’, the ‘ancient goal for history to be the guide to public life had

collapsed’ (7, 8). Historians not only lost their readers but undermined their ability to write history in the

cause of social justice—and, arguably, Guldi and Armitage have a point. To meet the key objectives of the

Tate Britain show requires a more user-friendly historiographical approach like the longue durée or political

short-termism as some queer studies specialists too have discovered.

Thinking about how to frame the past to identify ‘alternative possibilities in the future’ has been an

ongoing concern in queer studies since the 1990s (10). Curiously, in a field where Foucault—the most

outspoken critic of long-termism—is foundational, many LGBT and even queer practitioners share Guldi

and Armitage’s faith in the power of the longue durée to consolidate and strengthen collectivities in the

present as a means to shape and transform the ‘destinies of queer communities’. 16 Beginning in the 1970s

and continuing to the present day, scholars in sexuality studies have sought to discover—or recover—a lost

or hidden past, their time-scales often fully compliant with the imperative to examine ‘big structures, large

processes, and huge comparisons’ (11). Doing the history of homosexuality often meant investigating

objects and events over a century or even a millennium in contradistinction to Foucault who insisted on a

discursive understanding of the past as radically discontinuous from the present. Forgetting Foucault

allowed queer scholars to search for ‘recurring patterns in the identification, social statuses, behaviors, and
 6

meanings’ of same-sex erotic desire ‘across large spans of time’, producing pathbreaking work on how, for

instance, ‘female bodies and bonds’ or ‘female-female desire’ may have been understood in the early

modern period.17 Alertness to ‘cycles of salience’ across time meets the political needs of organizations like

Tate Britain more effectively than critical history. 18

Reading the portraits in the Tate Britain show as depicting individuals like us serves an important

political function in binding together the ‘essential identity’ of a group to form a ‘mystical community’, in

this case collectivities once oppressed and now emancipated. 19 The visuality of portraiture neatly illustrates

what is at stake in pinning down the significance of historical objects—such as lesbian or trans—as if

present understandings were coextensive with the past. Nonetheless, to remember the past this way is to

affirm its ‘selfsameness in the present by means of a consolidated re-enactment’. 20 For the critical

historian, the longue durée cannot assure ‘a continuation of remembering into the future’ because the past is

not at all like the present.21 The Long Past as well as political short-termism confirm current understandings

but, vexingly, also obscure alternative ways of knowing, and thus represents little more than a ‘chimera’. 22

Haunting the arguments for or against a new longue durée is the inescapable problem of teleological

thinking, since the privileging of continuities over discontinuities inevitably constructs the past in terms of

forward movement during good times and bad. Examining the range of interpretations available in making

sense of the ‘slippery and seductive’ portraits of Hall and Troubridge might not resolve these

epistemological conundrums, but the current intensity of public interest in the past lends urgency to the task

of clarifying the importance of time-scales in producing historical knowledge of the modern sexual past. 23

Capturing Likeness.

Just as the grand portrait collections of European aristocracy rendered the individual portrayed a constituent

part of a ‘genealogical tree’, its several branches extending across centuries, so too have LGBT and queer

communities sometimes used portraiture to establish kinship ties with ‘gay icons through the ages’. 24 As a

genealogical tool—congruent with the modus operandi of the longue durée in seeking commensurability

over time—the portrait’s use-value relates less to the aesthetic in capturing the sitter’s physical likeness

than the political. In the absence of diaries or letters disclosing an individual’s innermost thoughts as a

desiring subject, the portrait supplies visual proof of sexual identity through facial expression, gesture, pose,
 7

clothing, accessories, and hairstyle, as seen in the case of Radclyffe Hall, whose name became a byword for

lesbianism as a result of the publicity arising from the 1928 trial in which the British government banned

her novel as obscene (fig. 1).

Today Hall’s lesbianism is an established fact before even stepping into the archive; she expresses

her sexual proclivities through her ‘provocative’ and ‘risqué’ appearance. 25 Biographer Michael Baker

describes a ‘slim, extremely handsome woman’, whose ‘erect’ posture conveys an ‘air of authority’: ‘A pale

oval face with thin lips, high cheekbones and a prominent aquiline nose was framed by striking ash-blonde

hair tied severely back in a long plait round the crown of her head’. 26 The sitter wears a ‘high stiff collar’

and ‘gentleman’s stock’, and sports an elegantly tailored black jacket and dark brown skirt. Baker chooses

his words carefully—handsome rather than beautiful, severe rather than practical—to invoke the traits not

simply of the ‘mannish woman’ but, more accurately, the ‘mannish lesbian’, a well-known type identified

by nineteenth-century sexologists. 27 The Long Past configures Hall as a sexual outlaw who cross-dressed

not to ‘masquerade’ as a man but to rebel ‘against the male order’. 28 Like ‘young women’ at any moment

across the long twentieth century, Hall used fashion in her struggle to ‘express her true self’. We know the

significance of the codes because in the Long Past cultural meanings are constant, the knowledge passed

down from generation to generation. Reclaiming a lesbian past requires only insider knowledge to decode

Hall’s careful orchestration of sartorial detail. Reading the portrait of a woman we know to be lesbian

provides the lesbian community with a ‘role model’. 29

Reading Hall as lesbian is even more straightforward when we juxtapose her portrait with the 1924

portrait of Troubridge by the ‘lesbian’ artist Romaine Brooks, the ‘patron saint of lesbian artists’ (fig. 2). 30

Again we observe the telltale markers of a woman of the Sapphic persuasion: ‘short-cropped’ hair,

monocle, tailored black jacket, high stiff collar, jabot, white starched shirt, and fob dangling from the

waistline of her pin-striped trousers—that is, we assume her ‘male attire’ features trousers, although our

view is obscured by the two champion dachshunds she received as a gift from her lesbian lover. 31 No

symbol in this richly suggestive portrait resists incorporation into the master narrative, including the dogs.

Art historian Tirza True Latimer speculates the dachshunds—‘as long and sleek’ as Troubridge herself—are

as ‘equally matched as a same-sex couple’, conjoining visually ‘conjugal and canine bonding’. 32 Traces of

womanliness—her slender body, the side curls framing her face, the arched curve of plucked eyebrows, the
 8

glint of a single pearl earring, delicately rouged lips—vanish before our eyes, aspects superfluous and

irrelevant in securing the sitter’s lesbianism. As a woman who is ‘openly gay’ and eager in her ‘masculine

attire’ to flaunt the conventions of femininity, this iconic portrayal of ‘1920s lesbianism’ reinforces

preconceptions of what a ‘wealthy, confident, aristocratic, “mannish” lesbian’ looks like. 33 Brooks ‘used

portraiture to comment on how lesbians’ might play with gender, her unwitting sitter mocked to undermine

‘bourgeois’ values.34

Proclaiming the ‘world is finally ready to understand Romaine Brooks’, the Troubridge portrait by

an artist long ‘overlooked’ due to her ‘fluid sexual and gender identity’ becomes a constitutive part of the

Smithsonian American Art Museum’s narrative of a ‘leading figure’ of the ‘artistic counterculture of upper-

class Europeans and American expatriates, many of whom were creative, bohemian, and homosexual’. 35

Once mobilized the progress narrative—in Brooks’s case, first as a woman artist and later as a lesbian artist

—is unidirectional, leaving curatorial staff with few options other than to position her as ahead of her time.

As Brooks’s biographer puts it, in the early decades of the last century ‘homosexuality, lesbianism,

femininity, and effeminacy all defined a decadent perversity against which virile, mainstream, and

heterosexual modernism positioned itself’.36 In portraiture Brooks discovered how to show that ‘lesbians

could effectively use gender ambiguity’ and ‘play with style, personality, self-invention, and

impersonation’.37 In portraying Troubridge, Brooks channelled her artistic energies into translating

sexological theories of homosexuality to create a modernist aesthetic style. In this way, the biographer’s

question—‘what does it mean to put oneself into one’s art when one is a lesbian?’—is never really a

question at all but an opportunity to recite over and over again what is already known, the method of the

Long Past.38 In this way too, when the art historian Cassandra Langer recollects viewing a portrait ‘as a

lesbian’, she knows ‘immediately’ she is ‘looking at a lesbian subject’: ‘Here I was looking at this portrait

who was gazing out at me in a sort of cruisy, sardonic way, and I thought “I don’t know anything about this

painter’”.39 The portrait illustrates the specimen type by fixing the meaning of, for instance, bodily posture,

always a defiant stance against compulsory heterosexuality; through reverse discourse the lesbian artist

perverts the pathologies of sexology to illustrate resistance lesbian-style.

Lesbians are not alone in making political demands on these portraits. An equally persuasive

reading configures Hall and Troubridge as trans or, to be historically specific, proto-trans. Hall’s portrait
 9

might stop the lesbian onlooker dead in her tracks but it can also stop ‘trans folks’ and future communities

as yet unknown because this is how the Long Past works: ‘resemblances…shimmer unsteadily and

unevenly, moving closer or receding, depending on the axes of definition that inform one’s perspective or

capture one’s attention’.40 Shifting the interpretive frame away from an identity based on same-sex desire to

gender variance and the sexed body destabilizes foundational assumptions about any secure link between

female masculinity and sexual desire between women, a maneuver easier than we might expect, since it is

unclear what Hall understood by ‘congenital sexual inversion’, whether same-sex desire or gender variance.

Praising the ‘noble and selfless work done by hundreds of sexually inverted women during the Great War’

in a forenote to a 1926 short story (‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’) in which any love interest is entirely

absent, the protagonist dreams of becoming a man—and, in a strange flashback fantasy, on transitioning to

a man rapes his female partner, hardly the imaginings of most lesbians then or now. 41 Interpreting the

‘masculine presentation’ of the paintings as markers of transgenderism raises awareness of the sexed body

as an ‘interpretive fiction that narrates a complex amalgamation’ of bodily features and reveals the fluidity

of gendered embodiment, insights that a longue durée of a trans past.42

While the longue durée’s interest in resemblances closes down the range of possible meanings of

Hall and Troubridge’s distinctive mode of self-presentation, a narrow time-scale zooms in with the

specificity of time and place to better grasp the fashion sensibilities of the sitters. The historical record

indicates that in 1918 Hall’s partner, Una, Lady Troubridge—herself a sculptor who trained at the Royal

College of Art—commissioned the work for £35 from the ‘well-known portrait painter’ Charles Buchel, an

artist who began his career working for the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. 43 Buchel, best

known for his paintings and sketches of actors on the London stage, was highly experienced in catching the

‘inner spirit or creative power’ of artistic people, often costumed and sometimes ambiguously gendered. 44

His portrait of Hall shows the seated figure of a thirty-eight year old, upper-middle class woman gazing

pensively into the distance. At the time of the sitting Hall had published several volumes of poetry but had

not yet produced any of the novels that would later establish her literary reputation. On display is a writer

on the verge of her fame, her engagement with the world of letters signaled by the gold-framed eyeglass

suspended on a black ribbon delicately entwined in her fingers. She does not seek to pass as a man but

instead exploits the severity of formal dress to present herself as a serious writer and aesthete. 45 We glimpse
 10

in the portrait the salient codes of an aspiring dandy: high white collar and dark velvety tailored jacket,

austere in its fastening with a button or two. Viewed this way the portrait is a site in which Hall stages her

literary aspirations by appropriating the distinctive style of the leading artistic figures of her day. Hall’s

getup more closely approximates a style of dandyism invented by Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm than

‘lesbian-chic’.46 As Beerbohm explained in his 1896 essay ‘Dandies and Dandies’, the clothing of the late-

Victorian dandy was remarkable in its austerity, ‘subtlety, and somber restraint’: while ‘Wilde was

flamboyant and outrageous, Beerbohm aimed for a smooth shell of elegance around a tiny kernel of

noncomformity’.47 Judged by one observer as a ‘masterpiece of ambiguity and sensitivity’, Buchel’s

portrait of Hall redefines masculinity and femininity in ways that would only later be associated with a

particular category of sexual identity.48 According to the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) 1984 entry, Hall

dressed to ‘proclaim her defiance of convention’. 49 The NPG description of the portrait refrains from

assigning Hall to a specific category of identity, except to indicate ‘at a time when male homosexuality was

illegal’, Hall ‘lived openly with a woman’. By the 2010s this phrasing carves out a space for any of several

identitarian possibilities, affirming only that Hall’s self-expression was political (‘courageously

controversial’) as opposed to, say, artistic, bohemian or a sign of genius, the multiple possibilities of a

critical historical approach.

Perceived resemblances between then and now shed little light on the past to look forward, a

transaction, critical historians assert, requires another mode of history writing. As long as we look at

images produced a century ago from the vantage point of the present, we will never know much about the

artist or the sitter. The critical historian endeavors to account for the structure and organization of

knowledge of the sexed body and its gendering, the social meanings of acts, identities, desires, and erotic

pleasures, and the moral or legal regulation of sexual practices at the start of the last century. This entails

stepping outside our knowledge system, defamiliarizing ourselves from what is already known, and

recognizing that most ordinary people at this time did not name themselves or others as a sexual something.

To be sure, by 1914 the project of making sexual knowledge ‘modern’ was well underway, forged by

sexologists and psychiatrists who understood their new discursive systems as ‘scientific’, their invention of

a language and style of reasoning representing not a discovery of the sexual as if timeless but a knowledge

structure that evolved at a particular time due to particular historical conditions. In the year preceding the
 11

outbreak of the First World War a small group of sex radicals gathered in London to found the British

Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, their meetings and lectures attracting a handful of progressives,

bohemians, intellectuals, artists, and writers. Gradually, this new way of thinking about sex would expand

beyond an educated elite through marital advice literature and sex education, a shift mobilized in part by the

disruptions of war. Equipped with a modern knowledge of sexuality we imagine it was possible read

between the lines—even those ‘subliminally aware of [Hall’s] relationship with Una Troubridge’

understood the ‘sartorial indicators’ of a ‘feminized version of a man’s suit, with a severe skirt…and

cravat’.50 In early twentieth century Britain, however, access to sexology was limited and ordinary people

were more likely to think about sex—if they thought about it at all—in terms of morality and respectability

rather than normality and deviance, each system requiring historical analysis that does not necessarily map

onto our own. Sexual desire or acts did not yet define an identity, a way of knowing that would emerge

decades later.

We see the risks in assuming otherwise in the biographer Sally Cline’s account of the butch-femme

performance style of Hall and Troubridge. Writing in 1997 Cline cites Richard Ormrod (writing in 1985),

who based his discussion on an interview he conducted with a gentleman in his 90s. The informant, Dr. E.J.

Dingwall, had attended meetings of the Society for Psychical Research with Hall and her partner in the

early 1920s, and recollected Hall as ‘extremely aggressive in manner’: she was a woman who ‘always had

an eye for the ladies! Lady Troubridge was passive and always wore feminine clothes’. 51 Except, of

course, the Brooks’s portrait indicates Troubridge also dressed in remarkably eccentric ways the artist found

amusing. In a letter to her partner Natalie Barney, Brooks wrote: ‘Una is funny to paint, her getup is

remarkable. She will live perhaps and cause future generations to smile’. 52 Why a lesbian artist would

describe the getup of a kindred spirit as ‘funny to paint’ is tough to explain in the context of the Long Past.

If, as Langer explains, the ‘portrait requires us to consider not only the image produced by the sitter but also

Brooks’s interpretation of Troubridge’s personality’, perhaps what caused Brooks to smile was witnessing a

second-rate artist posing in the dandy style.53 The exaggerated rigidity of Troubridge’s body, along with her

unflinching stare at the viewer, reveals gentle mockery not vicious satire. Similarly, in an interview

conducted in 1988 the artist Gluck referred to Brooks’s circle of friends as the ‘lesbian haute-monde’, a

formulation made possible through hindsight.54

 12

Time and Time Again.

What the queer portrait teaches us about the new longue durée is that no degree of newness mitigates the

fact it is hardwired to teleology, as we can observe by tracking the physical movements of the Buchel

portrait of Hall in the exhibition spaces of the National Portrait Gallery. Writing in 1968 the feminist Vera

Brittain regarded the NPG’s acceptance in 1964 of Troubridge’s gift as a ‘symbol’ of the greater social

acceptance of lesbianism: ‘Today this picture can be seen on request without difficulty of any kind. By

giving her a position among those worthy to be remembered by their country, the Establishment reversed

the moral judgment passed on its subject by a censorious public forty years earlier, and offered her, in

effect, a species of accolade’.55 Stored away from public view the museum’s acceptance of the portrait of a

lesbian registers in the late sixties as an important milestone in the progress narrative of gay liberation—and

there it remained, available for inspection on formal request until 1985, when it was hung ‘sadly’ in a ‘room

with other pictures rarely if ever on view to the public’. 56 In and out of storage until 2004, the portrait is

currently one of thirteen displayed in Room 30 (‘We are making a New World: Britain 1914-18’), alongside

the portraits of the militant suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel Pankhurst and the

statesmen and general officers who conducted the First World War. 57 Presenting the war as a ‘catalyst’ of

social change claims a space for those radical figures once ‘controversial’ but now admired for their

courage in standing up for their convictions.58 Here is a perfect example of the unhappy consequences of

nailing down an object’s meaning ‘beyond the biological life span of an individual’. 59 Portraying the object

as lesbian, trans or queer—the method of the Long Past—locates correspondences that shimmer steadily or

‘in and out of focus’.60 For the critical historian, however, recognition constitutes misrecognition because

the portrait is not a mirror image of the present.

The promise of a public future fuels imaginary ancestral connections across time. As a critical

historian, I accept the inclination to read the portrait as an object unlike us might leave queer people feeling

untethered to the past; nonetheless, zooming out—the method of the Long Past—tells us little about

sexuality at any given moment across the one hundred years covered by the ‘Queer British Art’ show.

Moreover I accept critical history is not supremely well equipped in addressing contemporary problems and

breaking down barriers between the academy and the public. The power of critically historicizing resides in
 13

its potential to explain the past as it was experienced in the past; its narratives do not spotlight objects in

accordance with modern formulations but seek to understand how it was possible to know differently. This

is what it takes to put the ‘past in the service of the future’—not discerning recurrences across time (123).

It is a testament to the portrait’s signifying power that its meanings can be both fluid and fixed. Part of the

pleasure for the queer museum goer is to discover in scanning the portraits on the gallery walls an object

already known, and that object will captivate and nourish longings for connections across time. This is

because the portrait ‘serves magically to freeze time and to extend artificially the life of the represented

individual’—it is a visual illustration of pastness seemingly outside the specificities of time and place. 61 At

the same time, recognizing the individual portrayed is unlike us acknowledges the chasm between then and

now so we can make new futures. What we might see in ‘fifty years time’ is utterly unpredictable: ‘some

future art historian is going to look back on it and be like, “Wow, that’s all you thought?”….All art

historical scholarship is a time capsule of where you are at that moment. And things change’. 62

Manifestoes and counter-manifestoes stir and provoke but a slanging match will never resolve

irreconcilable differences. What is required is recognizing what each approach makes possible or

impossible. Too often historians of sexuality discern in the imperatives of critical history cautionary advice

to avoid projecting current labels onto the past—the challenge is actually far trickier since critically

historicizing demands an understanding of sexuality as historically contingent. The Long Past attends to the

needs of the present moment and speaks to the wider public—‘policy-makers, activists, and entrepreneurs

as well as ordinary listeners, viewers, readers, students, and teachers’—as well as communities

‘traditionally excluded from power’ (i, 30). Nevertheless, for Foucault and others the Long Past’s promise

to reshape the future is ‘empty’.63 We need look no further to ascertain the risk of a new longue durée than

the UK press coverage of ‘Queer British Art’ in which Tate Britain’s more carefully worded phrase ‘queer

art’ was translated into a ‘colourful history of gay art’, demonstrating yet again the powerful undertow of

the emancipation narrative of a past already known. 64 After a half century in the wilderness, big history is

back—but a backward glance at ‘genetic traces’ will not always explain times past. 65 Fulfilling the promise

of the NPG room in which Hall’s portrait now hangs—‘We Are Making a New World’—entails picturing

the past as queer in the sense of strange, the past as nothing we have ever seen or heard of before.
1
Notes

See http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/queer-british-art
2
Catherine M. Soussloff, The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2006), 8.

3
Arnold I. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 21; Soussloff, The Subject in Art, 8.
4
Richard Drayton, ‘Imperial History and the Human Future’, History Workshop Journal 74, no. 2 (2012): 167.
5
For a cogent overview of these shifts in history writing see the first chapter (‘Historicizing Theory’) of Simon

Gunn’s History and Cultural Theory (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2006), 1-25.
6
Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 55.

Subsequent citations will be indicated parenthetically in the text.

7
Joan Scott, ‘History-Writing as Critique’, in Manifestos for History, ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun

Munslow (London: Routledge, 2007), 29; Valerie Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography’, in A

Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly

McGarrity (London: Blackwell, 2007), 126.

8
Michel Foucault, ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’, in his Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001),

896, cited by Scott, ‘History-Writing as Critique’, 29; Scott, “History-Writing as Critique,” 35.
9
Marcia Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 28.
10
Soussloff, The Subject in Art, 23.
11
Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, 9; David Armitage and Jo Guldi, ‘The History Manifesto: A

Reply to Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler’, American History Review 120, no. 2 (2015): 548.
12
For a sense of the immediacy of the backlash see the rapid response of historian Matt Houlbrook, et al:

https://mbsbham.wordpress.com/responding-to-the-history-manifesto/
13
‘AHR Exchange: On The History Manifesto: Introduction’, American History Review 120, no. 2 (2015): 527.
14
Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler, ‘The History Manifesto: A Critique’, American History Review 120, no. 2

(2015): 541.
15
Ibid., 542.
16
Carolyn Dinshaw et al., ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ: A Journal of

Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, no. 2-3 (2007): 187.

17
Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography’, 125, 126. See also, for example, Emmanuel Cooper,

The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 years in the West (London: Routledge, 1986).

Leila Rupp surveys a huge expanse of time 40,000 BCE to the present; see her Sapphistries: A Global History of

Love between Women (New York: NYU Press, 2011). Other examples include Susan S. Lanser, The Sexuality of

History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
18
Valerie Traub, ‘The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies’, PMLA 128, no. 1 (2013): 21; Traub, ‘The Present

Future of Lesbian Historiography’, 126.

19
Edward Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987),

256.

Ibid.
20

21
Ibid.
22
Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity, 45.
23
Ibid., 28.
24
Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 45; Tom Ambrose, Heroes and Exiles:

Gay Icons through the Ages (London: New Holland, 2010).

25
Sally Cline, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (London: John Murray, 1997), 144, 138.
26
Michael Baker, Our Three Selves: The Life of Radclyffe Hall (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 1.
27
For a discussion of lesbian signifiers see the entry by Jan Laude under ‘Folklore, Lesbian’, in Encyclopedia of

Homosexuality, Volume 1, ed. Wayne R. Dynes (New York: Garland, 1990), 416.
28
Esther Newton, ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman’, in Hidden from History:

Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New

York: New American Library, 1989), 290.

29
Cassandra Langer in interview with Doug Rule, ‘Defying Convention’, Metroweekly, September 1, 2016.
30
See https://whatistalent.wordpress.com/tag/lesbian-artists/
31
Cooper, The Sexual Perspective, 91.
32
Tirza True Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press, 2005), 24.

33
Press release by Rod Macneil for the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film

Archive, October 11, 2000, see http://bampfa.org/press/amazons-drawing-room-art-romaine-brooks; Patrick

Bade, Lempicka (New York: Parkstone Press, 2006), 65; Cooper, The Sexual Perspective, 91.
34
Cassandra Langer, Romaine Brooks: A Life (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 125.
35
See http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/its-time-acknowledge-romaine-brooks-early-

20th-century-artist-180959725/; http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2016/brooks/
36
Langer, Romaine Brooks, 124-25.
37
Ibid., 125.
38
Ibid., 131.
39
Cassandra Langer refers here to a self-portrait painted by Romaine Brooks in 1923; Langer in interview with

Rule, ‘Defying Convention’.

40
Joe Lucchesi in interview with Rule, ‘Defying Convention’; Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian

Historiography’, 131-32.
41
Radclyffe Hall, Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1934), no page number.
42
Susan Stryker, ‘Transgender Feminism: Queering the Woman Question’ in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical

Exploration, ed. Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 62.
43
Richard Ormrod, Una Troubridge: The Friend of Radclyffe Hall (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1985), 29;

Cline, Radclyffe Hall, 137.

44
West, Portraiture, 87.
45
For a sustained discussion of these spectatorial effects, see Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of

a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), especially 95-125.
46
Aileen Ribeiro, The Gallery of Fashion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 208. For a

thoughtful discussion of lesbianism and ‘dandy chic’, see Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart, 62.
47
Max Beerbohm, ‘Dandies and Dandies’ in The Incomparable Max (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company,

1962). 12; Talia Schaffer, ‘Fashioning Aestheticism by Aestheticizing Fashion: Wilde, Beerbohm, and the Male
Aesthetes’ Sartorial Codes’, Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 1 (2000): 47.
48
Ormrod, Una Troubridge, 91.
49
See http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw02836/Radclyffe-Hall?

LinkID=mp01984&role=sit&rNo=0
50
Cline, Radclyffe Hall, 144.
51
Ormrod, Una Troubridge, 103.
52
Letter dated May 20, 1924, Romaine Brooks/Natalie Barney Correspondence, box 1, folder 1, McFarland

Library, University of Tulsa. Cited by Whitney Chadwick, ‘Amazons and Heroes: Romaine Brooks and Her

World’, in Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks, ed. Whitney Chadwick (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2000), 35.

53
Langer, Romaine Brooks, 129.
54
Diana Souhami, Gluck: Her Biography (London: Pandora, 1988), 63.
55
Vera Brittain, Radclyffe Hall: A Case of Obscenity? (London: Femina Books, 1968), 157.
56
Ormrod, Una Troubridge, 313.
57
See http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/location.php?locid=50; personal correspondence with Paul Cox,

Associate Curator, NPG (2016).

58
See http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp01984/radclyffe-hall-marguerite-antonia-radclyffe-

hall
59
‘AHR Exchange: On The History Manifesto: Introduction’: 527.
60
Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography’, 126.
61
West, Portraiture, 44.
62
Lucchesi in interview with Rule, ‘Defying Convention’.
63
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin

Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 117.

64
See https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/apr/19/queer-british-art-show-leads-tate-2017-

programme
65
David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 107.