The University of Oxford played an important role in the education of Britain’s social and political elite. The university and its network of colleges, each of which maintains an archive, has preserved a detailed set of institutional records. There were stringent prohibitions against sexual liaisons of any kind on the part of students, but residential accommodation in single-sex colleges could facilitate homosexual connections. Reading between regulatory records and semi-autobiographical interwar novels enables us to understand the ways in which apparently repressive university structures facilitated closeted forms of queer life and tacit knowledge concerning them. Life in the colleges was also policed by students who deployed forms of sexualized bullying on their peers. These processes shaped the emergence of the homosexual closet on campus.
Dominic Janes (Tue,) studied this question.