The Queerly Racialised Colours of Religion and Decadence at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge

The Sexual Offences Act (1967) was intended to legalise male homosexual sexual acts in England but only when they were carried out in private. It was not expected that ostentatious displays of same-sex affection would suddenly become commonplace. Before this date homosexuality was associated with the behaviour of what were widely seen as sexual deviants. It was supposed that such men were often androgynous and would, if given the chance, dress in colourfully ‘effeminate’ styles. This chapter explores the origins of such stereotypes by focussing on the use of colour in images of so-called ‘aesthetic’ male students at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Aesthetic tastes were particularly associated with Roman and Anglo-Catholics on the one hand and some of the universities’ non-white students on the other. Student periodicals display a popular suspicion of ‘queer’ and ‘peculiar’ hues that evoked recondite personal tastes. Bright colours were, by contrast, displayed by masculine ‘hearty’ students in the form of sports uniforms that proclaimed team identities. By the interwar period aesthetes were increasingly linked with socialist and communist ‘reds’ who were often opposed by the sporting elite known as ‘blues’. Race, class and sexuality, thereby, became entangled in debates on the meanings of colour in clothing and skin tone.