Intrigue, desire … and awful landlords: why queer authors are suddenly writing about houses

More stories by LGBTQ+ authors are finding their way into the public sphere than ever before, but in recent years an unusual number of them focus on the physical space of the home. Matthew Lopez’s hit two-part play The Inheritance is a queer riff on Howards End that trades in EM Forster’s Edwardian England for present-day New York, but keeps an old house at the heart of the action. Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House is a fragmentary memoir set in a house that is both real and imaginary, dream and nightmare. In a raft of recent novels including Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Housemates, Nathan Newman’s How to Leave the House, Rivers Solomon’s hotly anticipated Model Home, and of course The Safekeep, houses are more than a setting for the action. They transcend the old figure/ground binary, which typically governs the relationship between the subject of an artwork and the spaces it’s set against, to become something akin to characters themselves, with difficult backstories that bear upon those who move around inside them.