Between Worlds

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 sciences. -- Publisher: Parthian Books
Jeffrey Weeks was born in the Rhondda in 1945 to working-class parents. It was a society dominated by ties of class and a firm sense of family solidarity. It was also a macho world, and as a teenager beginning to be aware of his sexual difference, Weeks felt increasingly an outsider who had somehow ‘betrayed’ his family. Rescue came in the form of education when, in 1964, Weeks gained a place to study history at University College London. This gave him the chance to explore his sexuality, tentatively at first, in a city which seemed ‘like a great big laboratory of sexual life’. At the same time, he was growing in political awareness, identifying especially with Raymond Williams’s novel Border Country with its protagonist from a working-class Welsh background, who also escaped through higher education, to find himself, like Weeks, ‘between worlds’. In the latter’s case, however, this was complicated by being gay, and as for many others at the time his growing involvement in the struggle for gay rights was inextricably bound up with a commitment to socialism. Activism – and a not terribly successful stint as a schoolteacher – persuaded Weeks that his best contribution would be to put his training as an historian to good use, leading to a string of academic studies on the history of the movement and on sexuality. It also led to job insecurity for many years as the conservative tendency of history departments barred his way, until he moved sideways into the more receptive field of sociology, and eventually into university administration. Between Worlds is, you might say, two books intertwined: one a memoir which segues into an account of his academic career, the books he has published, and his involvement in a number of academic controversies; the other an account of the gay rights movement at grass-roots level seen through his own involvement in it. Much was achieved throughout the 1970s, but then came AIDS in the ’80s, which not only devastated the gay community, but paved the way for a conservative backlash under Thatcher and the infamous Section 28 of the Local Government Bill. Advances in LGBT rights were nonetheless made under Tony Blair, and Jeffrey Weeks and his partner Mark took the opportunity of entering into a civil partnership in 2006. For Weeks’s sixtieth birthday, Mark organised a party on a Thames riverboat, attended by Weeks’s family in the Rhondda and friends from the LGBT world. It was a real and symbolic gathering of his two worlds, because as he had come to realise, you never escape your past – far better to embrace it and incorporate it into the whole of what you have become. There is more to say about this memoir, which is packed with incident and historical analysis, than can be encompassed in a short review. It is a welcome addition to Parthian’s Modern Wales series. -- John Barnie @ www.gwales.com