I was recently rather puzzled by a Guardian article which focuses on the clothing worn by the Bloomsbury group when staying at Charleston. Everyone who has come across Virgina Woolf and friends knows that members of the Bloomsbury group had heterosexual, gay and lesbian relationships, but there seems to be a huge emphasis on re-examining this in the lens of queer theory.
The bit that jumped out at me was the analysis of a very mundane photograph, of JM Keynes and Duncan Grant standing opposite each other. It is literally a photograph of two men standing a couple of feet apart, chatting, wearing three-piece-suits - utterly innocuous - but it is re-interpreted as one man 'thrusting his crotch' at the other and the other man 'shielding' himself with his hands. The description came before the photograph and I was expecting something completely different from the bland picture that followed! The article seems bizarrely determined to sexualise things that are not sexual at all...
To the authors of the article and the book:
The Bloomsbury group had sex, as well as being mothers, fathers, artists and well-educated individuals.
They had same-sex relationships, as many people do over the course of a long life. This is not intrinsically extraordinary, although same sex-relationships either broke social norms or were illegal at the time.
This was known long before you came into being and does not need to be 'queered'!
‘You’re not getting any’ – the secret sexual signals in the Bloomsbury Group’s clothes | Culture | The Guardian