This book explores Neil Bartlett’s groundbreaking contributions to queer cultural production in the United Kingdom. It adopts a range of critical perspectives, presenting original scholarship on Bartlett’s fiction, theatre, performance, site-specific work, and adaptations, as well as more personal reflections on Bartlett’s influence and legacy.
Charting his emergence as a radical queer artist in the 1970s, his writing for performance and theatre in the 1980s to the present day, and his evocative novels about queer spaces and hidden histories, the book considers Bartlett’s works as ‘invitations to speculate’: to view and imagine otherwise, as part of a political aesthetics committed to making queer lives visible. Bartlett’s bold, sensuous, and challenging work crosses genres to find new ways of articulating queer desires, unearthing histories of the body, pleasure, and gay subjectivity while connecting queer experiences across time.
Dealing with topics including memory and loss, AIDS and its legacy, marginality, community, and identity, the collection shows how Bartlett embraces the past as a way of reimagining queer futures and demonstrates his status as one of the UK’s leading queer artists.
List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction William McEvoy and Joseph Ronan Part I. Time: Archives and history Chapter 1. ‘What if this was actually happening?’ An Interview with Neil Bartlett William McEvoy and Joseph Ronan Chapter 2. Tell Me Who I Am: History, Anachronism and Resemblance in the Time of AIDS Dominic Johnson Chapter 3. ‘All of me’ Nando Messias Part II. Space: Sites of performance Chapter 4. The Boys in the Back Room: Night After Night and The Disappearance Boy Deborah Philips Chapter 5. Mostly Glorious: Bartlett’s Adaptive Work with Gloria Michael Fry Chapter 6. Site-specific Bartlett William McEvoy Chapter 7. Bartlett's ‘Brechtian’ Adaptations: The Plague and Orlando Alex Watson Part III. Self: Intimate communities Chapter 8. Queer Ways of Coming Out in Neil Bartlett’s Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall Andrés Ibarra Cordero Chapter 9. The Price of Queer Admission Joseph Ronan Chapter 10. ‘Making things mean something’: Allegory and Myth Making in Neil Bartlett’s Skin Lane Irralie Doel Chapter 11. Neil Bartlett, out loud Vincent Quinn Index
William McEvoy is Associate Professor in Drama and English in the Faculty of Media, Arts, and Humanities, University of Sussex, UK. Joseph Ronan is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton, UK.
