Queer Thanatography: Joe Orton’s Death and Afterlife

This essay explores the cultural afterlife of 1960s British playwright Joe Orton (1933-1967) by identifying, for the first time, a corpus of biodramas about his death. It proposes that these biodramas constitute a distinct and previously unrecognised genre, and theorises a new critical concept: queer thanatography. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s account of necropolitics and key interventions in queer theory, the essay advances queer thanatography as a framework for analysing how cultural texts contest the perceived deadliness of queerness. The essay (1) contends that John Lahr’s biography Prick Up Your Ears (1978) functions as a thanatography through its association of queer life with death; (2) illustrates that a significant number of plays rework this paradigm, producing a counternarrative, or queer thanatography, that reconfigures the relationship between sexuality and fatality; (3) considers the biodramas as acts of mourning, melancholia and memorialisation, moving beyond existing discourse that treats Orton’s death as queer tragedy to show the generative potential of queer thanatography as a means of political resistance. While the essay introduces queer thanatography through Orton, it also establishes it as a genre and critical concept relevant to literary and queer studies more widely.