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Generations of readers have loved Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels. His chronicle of queer life began in 1976 in the eclectic glamour of San Francisco’s Barbary Lane, where queer people learned who they were and how to live their lives. But even Maupin relocated in the end. The most recent instalment, Mona of the Manor, saw one of its key characters move to the Cotswolds to navigate a very different kind of village.
The social historian John Grindrod nods to Maupin in this fantastically entertaining alternative history of queer life in Britain, which departs from the usual tales of city-based freedom and discovery to tell the stories of people who grew up in the suburbs. “The suburbs” resist easy definition, and Grindrod handles this lightly. Sometimes they’re marked out by social class, sometimes by geography, each facet blurring into the other. His locations range from London’s commuter belt to hamlets, farms and towns, from the edges of Portsmouth and Hull to pockets of Glasgow and Wilmslow and a tiny village in Lincolnshire, where a gay builder is protected from homophobic abuse in the pub by the local darts team.
Grindrod grew up in Croydon and now lives with his partner in Milton Keynes; he opens the book with an anecdote about the thrill of finding out he has next-door “gaybours”. His fascination with and connection to the subject have allowed him to weave an intelligent and sensitive collection of stories, interspersing research from libraries, archives, books, newsletters and reports with original interviews. As much as it is a social history, it is a political, an architectural (he links the popularity of bay windows to the rebellious Arts and Crafts movement, for example) and a cultural one.
There are wonderful moments of humour. Among others, Grindrod cites Alan Bennett, Caroline Aherne and Jack Rooke, the creator of Big Boys, as the “sharpest observers” of suburban life, and his writing has a similarly observational flair. In 1985, a young lesbian gave up her dream of joining the RAF because her sexuality meant she was banned from the armed forces. She gets a job in a department store instead. “For all of its shortcomings, at least it’s not illegal to be a lesbian in Debenhams,” he notes. In its tragicomedy, the line is pure Victoria Wood.
Many of its brief chapters almost double as short stories. One tale, about picking up a dentist at the pub and going home with him, only to be introduced to the man’s mother, wife and young daughter, is wonderfully strange. Another, about a young woman in rural Somerset whose father comes out to her on his farm and introduces her to the patrons of a tiny underground gay club in Taunton, is practically a novel in its own right.
The more deeply researched chapters offer a means of time travel to scenes of brutal police raids, same-sex soldier sweethearts and furtive telephone chat lines. There are protests and prosecutions and acts of great courage. The Aids epidemic steals many lives. Still now, adults reckon with the lifelong impact of Section 28, which banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools and was only repealed in 2003. These currents flow in and out of human lives as catalysts and bit players, manifesting as abusive graffiti on garage doors, or the estrangement of some families, and the strengthening of others.
Community is vital. Across the decades, group meetings bring power to those discovering who they are, from goth nights to coffee evenings to an Bennett-esque-sounding “gay treasure hunt in Tunbridge Wells”.
This is largely an account of queer lives in the 20th century. Grindrod suggests that the 21st century has “completely rewritten” the rules of LGBTQ+ culture, something that allows him to end on a note of optimism. Some of his subjects fled the suburbs as soon as they were able. Some stayed. Some returned to care for sick parents, and some came back simply because it felt like that was where they belonged. In its fondness for the complexities of lives behind – and in front of – those twitching curtains, Tales of the Suburbs is ultimately about what it means to call somewhere home.
Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains is published by Faber (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
