Maureen Duffy
Claudia Williams, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies
On the evening of 27 September 1966 a new play entitled The Silk Room, about a male pop group, premiered at Watford Palace Theatre. The playwright, Maureen Duffy, has been credited as being one of the first women in British public life to come out as gay.
Born on 21 October 1933 in Worthing, Sussex, Maureen was raised by her mother, who was keen for Maureen to get a good education and further herself. When her mother died in about 1948, Maureen moved to East London to live with family. Having already started writing at about the age of 17, she went on to study English at King’s College London, where writing poems and plays became her passion. One of her first plays Pearson, finished in 1956, led to her being invited to the prestigious Royal Court Writers Group. This encouraged her to continue writing, eventually leaving her post as an English teacher in London to become a full-time writer in the early 1960s.
Around this time Maureen came out publicly as gay. She bought a houseboat with the earnings from her first TV screenplay (Josie, 1961) for her to live on with her girlfriend.[1] That’s How It Was, the first of her many novels, was published in 1962, and her fame began to grow. Her most popular work The Microcosm, published in 1966, is inspired by the legendary lesbian nightclub ‘The Gateways’ in London and was her first openly gay piece of work and earned her a following of adoring fans, who often wrote to her asking for relationship advice.[2]
The Silk Room focuses on four young male musicians who are relaxing in a ‘silk room’ between performances. A critic from local newspaper The Watford Observer, whose review was published on 30 September, calls the characters ‘typical products of the beat boom’.[3] Maureen is known for writing diverse characters, regardless of class, ethnicity, sexuality and so on: this is reflected in the different members of the group. One band member has an upper-class and another a working-class background, one is black, and the last comes across as poorly educated. The play is about how they interact with one another within the context of how they came together as a group, and in Watford it ran until 8th October 1966.
Throughout her career Maureen has continued to write about LGBT people, particularly lesbians, believing that “it is very important that gay women, because we are often made invisible, are shown as part of the living everyday world.”[4] Alongside her writing, she has campaigned for LGBT rights since the 1960s, notably working with organisations such the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) and the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA),[5] of which she was the first President in 1980. Maureen is also known for advocating for writers rights, having founded the Writers Action Group with fellow writer Brigid Brophy in the 1970s and launched a campaign for the Public Lending Right (to provide authors whose books are lent in public libraries with compensation), which succeeded in 1979 and still supports authors today.
In 2004, Maureen was awarded the Benson medal, which recognises writers ‘in respect of meritorious works in poetry, fiction, history and belles lettres’.[6]
[1] Jill Gardiner, ‘Maureen Duffy’s Contribution to Gay Rights and Lesbian Visibility’, Strandlines Maureen Duffy Special Feature, edited by Fran Allfrey and Katie Webb, Nov 2020 < Gay rights and lesbian visibility – Strandlines> (accessed 11 Jan 2022)
[2] Maureen Duffy and Dulan Barber. ‘Maureen Duffy: TALKING TO DULAN BARBER’, The Transatlantic Review, no. 45 (Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation, 1973), pp. 5–16, <http://www.jstor.org/stable/41513286> (accessed 11 Jan 2022)
[3] T.P.S., ‘At the Palace Theatre’, The Watford Observer (30 Sep 1966), p.8
[4] Gardiner, 2020
[5] The group was first founded as the Gay Humanist Group in 1979, becoming GALHA in 1987, and has been known as LGBT Humanists UK since 2015.
[6] The Royal Society of Literature, ‘The Benson Medal’, The Royal Society of Literature, 2021 <https://rsliterature.org/award/the-benson-medal/> (accessed 12 Jan 2022)
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