Bed for One: A Queer Interpretation of the Rooming House

Understanding the historical and overlapping complexities related to the queer subject, the single bed, and the emergence of the rooming house, helps frame larger theoretical questions about the neglected, yet contradicting by nature, category of queer domesticity. During the twentieth century, when wage labor and the expansion of capitalism overturned the self-sufficient household production system, a way was paved for individuals who sought to pursue a life of their own. With the wider industrialisation and modernisation processes, the rise of labour and housing demands, the 1900s rooming house manifested as a key component in this transitioning narrative. Traditionally, this structure of single room dwellings, purposely built by the turn of the century for the working class, was an establishment comprised solely of bedrooms, deprived of any amenities and services. As claimed by the BBC documentary Loneliness, broadcasted in 1957, the number of men living alone in single room dwellings had doubled since the 1930s. Surprisingly, it was in this same broadcast that homosexuality was mentioned for the first time by a national radio station. Besides being stigmatized and slandered in tabloids for their ‘grim’ rooms and their lives of ‘squalor’, homosexuals were presented as deviant, accused of taking advantage of this radical invention, to be “disguised, of course, as single men”. Opposed and criticized by religious, conservative, middle-class reformers for challenging the nuclear family and traditional domestic settings, the rooming house, neither a hotel nor a house, but a category of the residential hotel, is often introduced by contemporary scholars as a fundamental type without any connection to its historical origin. What role did the bed play in the formation of the queer subject, within the context of single room dwellings? What contribution can this make to the discussion for a Fifth Typology, by focusing on a seemingly ahistorical, and figuratively abstract form of habitation, the rooming house?