What is written between the lines in obituaries is often as important as the words staring you in the face. I always wonder about people who travel halfway around the world to be with a friend then set up home with that friend for no ostensible reason.
Which is why it was so refreshing to read the obituary of collector James Agapitos who died in January with its recognition of his relationship with partner Ray Wilson; they were 'married', as The Sydney Morning Herald put it, "by a matey ampersand, James & Ray".
I know many gay and lesbian couples attached by punctuation but such a public display is unusual – one of the most prominent I can think of is Waz & Gav, Warren Sonin and Gavin Atkins, the gay couple on the first series of Channel Nine’s The Block whose popularity helped them launch their own design company. It also highlighted the boundaries of “acceptable mainstream images of gay men”, says geographer and archival researcher, Andrew Gorman-Murray (pictured below).
Gorman-Murray’s PhD topic, Queering home or domesticating deviance? looks behind stereotypes to the meaning of home for gay men and women, stripping away the gloss to show the home’s emotional and practical pulls.
"Queering the home was used against the normal idea of home to assert that we also need to look at home as not always being a heterosexual unit," he says. Domesticating deviance illustrates the tension between the nuclear family home and the design blood that is supposed to flow through all gay men.
Gorman-Murray interviewed 20 gay men and 17 lesbians, mainly but not all couples, aged from 19 to 68 though mostly of working age, living in Sydney primarily (and in all areas, not just the 'ghetto' of Darlinghurst) and in Melbourne, Newcastle, Wollongong and regional towns in New South Wales.
The sample was self-selected; the majority had no children and were tertiary educated managers or professionals. There was a mixture of owner-occupiers and renters and people living in houses and units, but the main findings of the research applied across the board.
"Design was important", says Gorman-Murray, "not for aesthetic reasons per se but for deeper reasons, for the self and relationships and well-being." It was the "materiality of home" that mattered, "the way it was designed to support and affirm sexual identities and relationships."
Going back to the 1930s or even the 1950s