It is important to recognise that attitudes in the early 20th century have changed compared to the standards we hold today but it is not as binary as one period was unaccepting and the other accepting, particularly when looking at it through a working-class perspective. Helens Smiths comprehensive work 'Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957' speaks to that and in her chapter Working-Class Culture focuses on Yorkshire and Edward Carpenter as a case study;
 
[in the early 20th century in the north] having sex with a man did not define the identity of men Carpenter had relationships with; it was just something that they did alongside all the other sexual and romantic elements in their life.

[The] physical and emotional affection seem to have been commonplace in how working men interacted with each other, and it is possible that these men (and their communities) regarded sex between men as something ordinary - another form of human contact. Working men’s identities and sense of selfhood were not dependent on their sexuality;¹

It was people's politics (often socialist) and their workplace from which they drew identity. It seemed there was at the very least a passive tolerance for individuals on a ‘live and let live’ basis. This can be seen in the example of George Hukin who, when investigated by the police for suspected ‘deviant’ behaviour wasn’t charged as they were unable to gather sufficient testimony, those interviewed took more dislike of an intrusive state looking into people's private lives.   

Modern definitions of queer being cannot cover the nuances of love and desire in the period my research covers but does open it up to queer potential and it is this idea that I would like you to consider moving forward.

Chris Bull said that “for the last couple of centuries British seaside resorts have provided a place of escape, a liminal space where the normality and problems of people’s everyday lives could be suspended temporally and where people could experience, amongst other things, pleasure, fun and the carnivalesque”². In this moment the beach becomes more than one thing and these definitions of what beach is transforms the fixed traditions of societal norms to something beyond, something unbound and free. In this context the liminal nature of the beach, with its blurred boundaries allow us make connections to the many binary opposites; the respectable/disreputable, order/disorder, centre/margins, hard/soft landscapes. 

This tone and the use of opposites is common when looking at the British seaside in the early 20th century, especially when looking at, here in this newly (de)constructed space the middle class, somewhat Victorian ideals clashed with the working class mass entertainments. Allowing for new ways of being, dressing and acting that fell outside the prescriptive inland norms. The beach made the transition from patronage to market; from aristocratic seaside spa to mass seaside resort and it is in this space of transition we can see the queer potential of the beach.
 


 As Shields says “The grotesque carnival bodies on the beach are thus temporarily outside of social norms and embraced on a liminal project”³, he goes on to describe this as a ‘ritual of resistance’. When thinking about this ‘ritual of resistance’ that the carnivalesque nature offers it can be applied to a queer body on the beach, such an act is imbued with agency because here in this liminal space we as queer people have learned to operate successfully. Just as this draw to the beach attracted the working class now through this new queer lens can this language be used to describe the queer draw to the beach and the beach as queer. When considering this transference my mind by default started mapping different beach sites. Looking at different vector points, the ‘gay’ spaces everyone would know about, or be able to find within 5 minutes of searching the internet. These can be the subversive spaces used by the queer community such as Riis Beach in New York City and The Belmont Rocks in Chicago, or be the more explicit spaces such as Brighton and the beaches of Gran Canaria and Mykonos. 

It is worth noting that these spaces once founded aren’t always safe and uncontested. As Michael Water writes “queer beaches have always been contested. These spaces appear and disappear, blinker in and out, far more often than many of us realise.. [it] is fragile and ever-changing, an invisible landscape that shifts by the decade”⁴. But this isn’t going to be a list of specific geographies, the histories and fights for these spaces are ongoing and well documented, I want to consider the beach more generally as a queer site of being.

Just as Mark Booth's definition of Camp is aesthetics of the margin, queer spaces are often marginal spaces or spaces on the margin and the beach is a place for that. As the scholar Christopher Reed explained in the 1996 essay “Imminent Domain,” queer placemaking involves the transformation of “what the dominant culture has abandoned so that old and new are in explicit juxtaposition.” A queer space, to Reed, is a “space in the process of, literally, taking place, of claiming territory.” And from the 1960s when domestic seaside entertainment was in decline these spaces were ripe for the taking, waiting to be (re)claimed. 



Knopp writes “Indeed, many queers find a certain amount of solace, safety and pleasure being in motion or nowhere at all…on the move, passing through, inhabiting a space for a short amount of time”⁵ this is true of the seaside tripper* and so now it is the ‘Queer tripper’. Thirft(1999), conceptualises places not as fixed but as passings that are elusive, ephemeral and always in the process of becoming and disintegrating. Just as the tangible artefacts of the seaside are often ephemeral (e.g. postcards and Blackpool rock) queer places are ephemeral too, always in motion. Think of queer club nights, it is not the building that makes it queer but queer bodies coming together in movement, it is an ephemeral experience that will not be there tomorrow. These elements of movement are always present at the beach; between the sea and the land, the hard and the soft, it is a state constantly in flux and the pull of the sea is strong for queer people. We can see this in queer storytelling, often using the beach as a moment of reflection, acceptance and awakening. American filmmaker Barry Jenkins, when speaking about his film Moonlight, spoke of scenes in the ocean as “a moment of spiritual transference” and speaks to “a character who is always surrounded in open space and yet feels so locked into himself”. K-Ci Williams summarises this idea perfectly; 

The beach has long existed as a space for the enactment of queerness, in real life and in fiction, too. The beach lies waiting, for those running away from or towards something; a liminal space that begets transformation. These stories stay with us: the burnt yellow sunsets, the blue shine of Black skin in the moonlight, the orange flame licking at fabric. Queer storytellers across the world commune at the beach, disconnected yet tethered by this natural thread; speaking different languages, observing different customs, yet united where the sea kisses the land.⁶





 *trippers being the term used to describe those who visit the beach for the day rather than a longer stay, often used as a derogatory term as it was the working class who could only afford to visit for the day, in a sense passing through

Endnotes