Queer Gothic

In the third piece commissioned by the Society’s LGBTQIA+ network in celebration of Pride Month, Ayla Lepine reflects on queer readings of the Gothic Revival.

In the 1920s, Kenneth Clark – long before rising to fame at the National Gallery and on television as the legendary presenter of Civilisation – wrote an influential yet somewhat eccentric book about the Gothic Revival. When he revised it for a second edition in 1950, architectural and critical approaches to the subject had gone through numerous transformations. Architects including Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel, Stephen Dykes Bower, and Ninian Comper had been experimenting with this medievalist toolkit to reinvigorate a style that had always oscillated − depending on who was asking − between the very definition of establishment (the Palace of Westminster) and the extravagance of queer historicist pleasure (Lord Berners’ Faringdon Folly).

Blowing the cobwebs out of the dusty corners of this style – seen in the early 20th century as not only outdated but outright vulgar – made it at least a little bit cool again, and even somewhat edgy. The medieval cultural history's crockets, vaults and gargoyles made a virtue out of historicism not as stale nostalgia but as a bold iteration of modernism without a capital ‘M’. Associated with camp, queer and radical voices within British culture, the Gothic Revival provided – and still provides – a space for the expression of diverse identities. 

Ayla Lepine has written about the queer circles surrounding Gothic Revivalism in Architectural History (subscription required). Subscribers can read more from her on queering the Gothic Revival in the Architectural Review. Lepine's research focuses on medievalism and revivalism in 19th- and 20th-century British and American architecture. Her publications include a collaborative interdisciplinary project on the Hereford Screen in British Art Studies (open access) and Modern Architecture and Religious Communities 1850-1970: Building the Kingdom (Routledge, 2018), co-edited with Kate Jordan.

Ninian Comper, St Sebastian Altarpiece (detail), 1922.

Report on the “Tower Warming Party” for Lord Berner’s Faringdon Folly, The Tatler, November 1935: ‘What exactly Lord Berners intends to use it for is not reported ...'