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History Now! The Sexual Politics of a Cold War Spy Scandal
An online talk by David Minto in LGBT+ History Month 2022
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The 1951 disappearance of Foreign Office men Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess steered Britain towards a diplomatic disaster that exposed its limitations as a Cold War non-superpower. It also, however, opened up a heady imaginative space of high drama in British sexual politics and, more specifically, homosexual politics. This talk explores this latter element of the case in its many dimensions during the half decade between the sensational vanishing of the men and their reappearance at a 1956 Soviet press conference. This particular 1950s spy scandal provides a striking illustration of entanglements between the geopolitical world and supposedly more domestic concerns.
Speakers
Dr David Minto
Assistant Professor (Modern British History)
Dr David Minto arrived at Durham as an Assistant Professor of History in 2017 after three years as the Cotsen-Fund for Reunion Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows at Princeton University. An interdisciplinary scholar, he holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Contemporary History and Politics from Birkbeck, University of London. He completed his PhD in History at Yale University in 2014.