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

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. The use of queer portraiture in the Tate Britain’s exhibition (‘Queer British Art, 1861–1967’), marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act (1967), provides a good opportunity for reflecting on the limits and possibilities of expecting resemblance across time. 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, though this approach to pastness entails risk in increasing rather than decreasing the distance between then and now. Looking specifically at the portraits of two women prominent in London’s bohemian circles in the interwar era (Radclyffe Hall and Una, Lady Troubridge) I wonder what is at stake in imagining the object as like us.