: Jeffrey Weeks
: Between Worlds: A Queer Boy From the Valleys
: Parthian Books
: 9781912681921
: 1
: CHF 10.80
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 272
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
A man's own story from the Rhondda. Jeffrey Weeks was born in the Rhondda in 1945, of mining stock. As he grew up he increasingly felt an outsider in the intensely community-minded valleys, a feeling intensified as he became aware of his gayness. Escape came through education. He left for London, to university, and to realise his sexuality. From the early 1970s he was actively involved in the new gay liberation movement and became its pioneering historian. This was the beginning of a long career as a researcher and writer on sexuality, with widespread national and international recognition. He has been described as the 'most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s'. His seminal book, Coming Out, a history of LGBT movements and identities since the 19th century, has been in print for forty years. He was awarded the OBE in the Queen's Jubilee Honours in 2012 for his contribution to the social science.

Jeffrey Weeks was born in the Rhondda in 1945. He moved to London in the 1970s and began a long career as a researcher and writer on sexuality, with widespread national and international recognition. He has been described as the 'most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s'. He held a number of senior university posts and is currently Emeritus Professor of Sociology at London South Bank University. He is the author, co-author or editor of some twenty-five books and numerous articles. He lives in London with his civil partner, Mark McNestry.

Preface

I was born on 1 November 1945 in the Rhondda, the most famous of the South Wales mining valleys. It was a birthplace that has marked and shaped me in ways that for a long time I did not really understand or fully accept. Because of my sexuality I felt I had to escape its all-embracing intensity as soon as I could, but what my life became has always remained entwined with how my life began – as a queer boy from the Valleys.

The mythology of the Rhondda remains strong to this day, even in the marketing of Wales. A little while ago I happened to come across a copy ofThe Rough Guide to Wales, one of a series of well-known tourist handbooks. It opened with a list of ‘thirty-one things not to miss’ in the country. Among various tourist delights, from male voice choirs to railways, bridges to beaches, cathedrals to bog snorkelling, the number one choice is the Valleys: ‘Colourful terraces of housing, hunkered down under the hills, are the hallmark of Wales’ world-famous Valleys, the old mining areas in the south’.1 It is an image from the Rhondda that illustrates the piece.

The almost bucolic photo is of three rows of terraced houses precariously set against a vibrantly green hillside. It is a picture of the last straggling streets in Llwyncelyn, a ribbon extension of Porth, the small town at the gateway of the twin valleys. The terraces overlook at the valley bottom the old colliery complex of Lewis Merthyr, once one of the largest coal mines in the world. Its existence gave these houses meaning and justification; it is now the site of a mining museum.

The first of these three terraces is Nyth Bran, eighty or so small near-identical houses, though now nicely distinguished by different coloured doors and roofs. The uniform grey slate roof tiles of my childhood have long been replaced by red or green or duller imitation slate, markers of a new individuality that has grown hand in hand with the passing of the coal industry. Just out of sight in the picture is number 38. This was long my family home: the house where my mother’s father and mother lived and died, where my mother grew up with her sisters, got married and nurtured her husband and three children, where my father spent all his adult life and died, and finally where my mother herself passed away after living in the house for ninety-odd years. This is the house where I was born, just after the end of the Second World War.

The Rhondda then was about halfway along a trajectory that took it from the feverish growth of the mining industry before the First World War to the romanticised tourist fantasy of the twenty-first century. In 1945 it was still world renowned for its coal, carrying the greatest burden of history of all the South Wales Valleys. The string of terraced houses, small villages and townships that clung precariously to the hillsides made up a homogeneous and, although only fifteen or so miles from Cardiff, geographically self-contained culture. Despite this, it had never been totally isolated from the outside world. From before the First World War it had been at the heart of a militant socialist culture, and it had exported thousands of its young to the rest of Britain and wider, to mine, work in factories and offices, and to teach, preach, nurse, act, sing, box, play rugby or write. The mobility forced by economic depression and the Second World War had given younger people a glimpse of other ways of life, but in many ways it had strengthened the ties of home. My father’s family had left the Rhonddaen masse in the 1930s for Bristol in pursuit of employment and better prospects, but my grandmother had been acutely homesick, and Dad’s immediate family had returned to Tonypandy. My mother, like two of her sisters, had also left South Wales in search of work. Two became nurses, and settled in Oxford and Croydon, while my mother ended up in Slough, working for a while in the kit