still unsure what to think of this book, one one side it was interesting on another slightly confusing

(Sorry, I read this so long ago I don't remember much about it other than that I thought it was interesting, so gave it four stars on GoodReads)

The author writes very well and his description of family life in working class Wales
rings true. The isolation and stress felt by a gay boy in this masculine environment is very moving . I admit to not having finished the book because its bleak parts were getting me down but that is my problem not the author's.

Thanks to NetGalley

Between Worlds
A Queer Boy from the Valleys

Jeffrey Weeks


Jeffrey Weeks is a gay activist, historian and author.
This book is a record of the author's personal journey as a queer,along with the social and cultural transformation of the society/the world he lives through .
The book traces his personal and professional life, which began in 1945 in Rhonda to 1970's London.There he became a researcher and writer in sexuality.He puts forth how he joined with Gay Liberation Front(GLF)and other political, social turmoils which occurred in the time period and how he became a well known gay activist for the LGBT identities in Britain.The impact of these turmoils were visible and gave them strength to fight more.The struggles of those who came out, in the narrow minded society of the time and how they overcame this is also unveiled through passage of time.The book analyses how 'the prejudices, stereotypes, insults, discriminations, guilt and shame' shaped the lives of people of the community.
The historical incidents like decriminalisation of lgbt activities, first pride parade,the AIDS crisis,section 28 etc changed their living atmosphere.
He gives many references to other articles and books which can be used for further readings.

Though its a nonfiction, being a memoir,the personal and social narrative is very engaging. The writer provides many insights about the community, different perspectives from the community itself (for instance, regarding marriage and adoption ).
The evolution of lgbtq+ community in Britain is well presented with all its ups and downs along with the legal, social and political stands.
A must read to know the origins of queer movements in Britain.

I first encountered the work of this author when I was at university. His work was a cornerstone of the emerging study of sexuality and LGBT representation. In addition, Weeks' work played a vital role in my development.
Therefore, I was excited to hear that they had written an autobiography, intrigued to read it, and pleased to receive a copy from the publisher. I was not disappointed. This book is a fascinating self-portrait of an inspirational figure. This book explores the author's early life, his childhood in Wales, and his growing understanding of his sexuality.

He then outlines his role in LGBT activism and academia. He looks at his role in the emerging study of queer history. Moreover, Weeks explores the political climate of the 1980s and 1990s, looking at the key debates around sexuality. As someone growing up at that time, this exploration provoked feelings of nostalgia. If you weren't there, then this discussion will give you an understanding of the origins of today's queer/lgbt+ movement. It is a highly recommended read.

I enjoyed this book both for its references to the attitude of people of the Rhondda Valleys in the 70s and for Weeks' first hand experience of the LGBT+ struggle.It was funny, sad and extremely enlightening and I would recommend this memoir to everyone as we all need a deeper understanding of each other.
Thank you Netgalley and Parthian for giving me the opportunity to give my unbiased opinion and diolch yn fawr Jeffrey.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC.
This is the memoir of Jeffrey Weeks, a popular gay activist and historian. The book delves in to the lives of LGBTQ+ people of the 70's, how they strived in a very narrow minded society of that age. It brings to light the journey they had to make to reach where they are now and reduce the sharp gaze of the onlooking so-called normal people. The experiences of those people were really interesting to read about and lot of thoughts to ponder about. I liked how he stressed on coming together as a community and find a space for similar people in the society. Weeks has covered not just how they lived their personal lives, but also their experiences in their professional life as well.
This book is a must read for everyone within and out of the community to understand the lives of the fellow members of the society and to co-exist giving space for all categories of people. It was an enlightening experience reading the book.

As a queer Welsh person (who's recently moved to Weeks' old neck of the woods!) I found lots to like here. It's one of those books where the authorial voice ultimately let it down for me; I loved the story, but didn't always love the way it was told. It took longer to read than I would usually spend on one book, and I'm glad I persevered, but I also wish I could have been more absorbed in it than I was. Still, a necessary and incredibly interesting read, and a welcome addition to the ever growing Welsh canon of LGBTQ literature.

a very good memoire with an interesting focus on his personal life mixed with his career in academic. i felt the lgbtqi history important in it that we should be aware of about how it was before. and a lot of reference i will check in the future for more reading

The most lively and interesting part of the book is the description of his childhood in the Welsh Valleys, part of a close community that also imposes a very strict and regimented, gender-based, hegemony on all the inhabitants. Men are super-masculine, women are the matriarchs who run it all from home, and there's no room for difference or gender non-conformity. He gets out as soon as he can, discovering himself and the gay liberation movement in London.

From then on, autobiography is mixed with history in a useful way, applying the changes in legislation and attitudes to his own life and experience. There is useful reflection on the ways in which the original gay liberation movement wasn't inclusive of GMP people and people along the initials from the L and G, especially transpeople. There's also acknowledgement of friends and comrades and a few shots at others and evening of scores. There is a lot of detail about Marxist magazine publishing collectives and the intricacies of academic life which did, I'm afraid, get a little tiring. It's a shame, as there's a great story and good work on linking the personal and the political which gets slightly lost.

This terrific memoir spans the life of Jeffrey Weeks with a focus on his academic career interspersed with his personal life. This is an informative read that both challenges and interests. The issues that arise during Jeffrey's life within the LGBTQI community include the HIV and Aids epidemic, the rights (or the lack) of a spouse, Section 28,

I was enthralled with Between Worlds as I find LGBTQI history important, something we should all be aware of. This shouldn't just be fore those with an interest in the community but an essential for everyone to read.

This autobiography is extensively referenced and I plan to look back at the bibliography to look towards further reading in this area.

I love the idea of this Jeffrey Weeks book. Between Worlds is definitely something I wanted to read. But the writing style is way too descriptive for my liking.

I never realised,as a gay man,how much politics some gay people were involved in the preceding decades
An eye opener of a book,some of it went way over my head I have to be honest and some it was fascinating
Loved the parts about growing up in the Welsh Valleys

I have admired Weeks for a while, being as he was one of the first queer historians I read, and was an absolute lifesaver while writing university essays (he’s great for a good quote about queer history or about queer identities).

In this book, he turns the lens on himself, and takes us through the fascinating times and locations that created him, from being a young sensitive and nerdy child in the Welsh valleys, to being heavily involved in the early days of queer activism in London.

These parts of the book are some of the most powerful- Weeks captures the energy, spirit and characters of both, and really creates a vision of a time that was hung in the balance, and was so pivotal to his life and those of many others.

He then moves on to his life as a historian, watching, documenting and writing about the UK (and wider world) as it goes through some significant turning points, especially for LGBTQ+ people (the first pride parades, the AIDS crisis, Thatcher, Section 28, equality legislation).

It occasionally veers a little into digressions about university life, but Weeks is at his best when he describes the unimaginable transformations in queer life and acceptance he has witnessed throughout his life, and his role as a historian and archivist means he observes them with brilliant insight and tenderness.

The moments where he connects the wider national picture with his personal life- in which he watches partners fall ill and pass away, and explores different relationship types- are really quite special. You realize just how much of the last few decades he has seen go by, and just how far we have all come.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Between Worlds is a lengthy tome, part social history essay and part personal memoir.
The author, Jeffrey Weeks has lead an interesting life, carving out a varied career as educator, administrator, author, speaker and scholar. He gained the experience to play these roles through grit and determination, often facing disappointment along the way.

Despite the possibly suggestive title, there is nothing salacious or scandalous about this book like so many along a similar theme. This is not a ‘Woe is me’ account, the author doesn’t seem to have suffered during his early years despite coming from a area steeped in tradition, so if you’re looking for a tale of triumph over adversity, personal tragedy and lament and loss, this is not the book for you. What it is, is an account of the authors career from his school days through to his retirement and the people he’s met along the way, people who like Weeks have helped to shape the UK into the country we enjoy today, be they fellow scholars, politicians or political activists. It’s a thorough record of homosexual life from the dark days of criminalisation, through the AIDS crisis and Section 28 up to the current day with same sex marriage being both legal and accepted. It’s easy to forget in this day and age, in this country, that while discrimination does exist, we live in a freer UK than we ever have thanks to the tireless campaigning and teaching of people like Jeffrey Weeks.

A worthwhile read..

Thank you Parthian and NetGalley for gifting this arc in exchange for an honest review.

Prior to reading Between Worlds by Jeffrey Weeks I was knowledgeable about his work as an activist, as well as his specialization on sexuality and how it pertained to sociology. I would highly recommend Between Worlds to anyone looking to explore a memoir depicting the realities of being LGBTQ+. Society has come a long way in terms of social acceptance, but still has a long way to go in working towards establishing and maintaining equal rights.

Between Worlds will release 1 April 2021.

“Words can be weapons, but they also help to give meaning to barely formed feelings, and I gradually learned through words my desires had a name, many names, which said something about me, what I was and could be.”

As a queer person, I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard of Jeffrey Weeks until this memoir. “Between Worlds” is not just an account of the activist’s remarkable life through some of the most socially radical and turbulent times for LGBTQ people—it’s a kind of time capsule as well, telegraphing moments in history for an audience that (like myself) might know little about the forerunning movements and battles and tragedies and victories that made today’s circumstances possible. Though I live in the U.S. and had a hard time grasping some of the political/geographical nuances and in-language of the earliest chapters (in which Weeks describes his childhood), I was drawn quickly to his renditions of his mother (and his excessive attachment to her) as well as some of the painful, coded gay experiences that were formative in his acceptance of his sexual identity.

There are beautiful and thought-provoking speculations on why we are queer—and the nature of the question itself—with insights from a chorus of contemporary gay activists. There are illuminating sections about pre-digital queer life in a city like London, and the coiled pathways leading into and revealing the omnipresence of queer spaces (at tube stations, theaters, music halls, squares, Turkish baths, etc.) roiling underneath the warp and weft of "everyday" reality. There is detailing of illness and death, scathing critique of Thatcher’s silence on HIV/AIDS (echoing, for American readers, Reagan’s own deplorable reticence), and how all these things intersected in very palpable, visceral, and personal ways for Weeks and other queer individuals in the '80s and '90s.

I’m excited to delve more into his other writings, and return to this memoir with more clarity/context of his greater body of work!

Jeffrey Weeks’ ‘Between Worlds’ serves the dual role of an autobiography and a firsthand telling of the UK’s social evolution from the 1960s to the present day. Beginning from his childhood home in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, he tells the story of the evolution of his people as he experienced it. He weaves a narrative showing how the changes in the global political landscape impacted UK policy, how that in turn had economical and social ramifications on the tight knit community of the valley, and how the impact was ultimately felt by an adolescent Jeffrey in the form of changing gender roles within his home and the altered economic habits of his family and community.
The seemingly solitary experience of a queer boy in a small mining town in Southern Wales turns into that of a young man making his way as a gay rights activist and scholar in London. From the Welsh countryside, the setting shifts to the heady rooms of the early years of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). An experience of isolation evolves into an intense and passionate journey of communal learning and the fight for equal rights in 1960s London. Weeks weaves a narrative of the evolution and growth of his perspective of his identity as a gay men in parallel with the growth of the movement itself. The story he tells is that of a group of young people doing whatever they could to increase visibility of the gay community in London, slowly recognizing their growing power as they realize that their activism was making a real impact. Importantly, Weeks describes the evolution of the movement from a unified front that fought for basic human rights to a diverse schismatic one with various sects and differing opinions and priorities. This change reflects the diversity and nuance contained within the complex identity and experience often reduced to the single word ‘gay’.
As the movement expands, so does Weeks’ career and the reader’s perspective. We move from a house in the Rhondda valley, to the still partially hidden gay community in London, to various hubs of thought across universities in the UK, to the globally connected and diverse discourse of the LGBTQ+ movement of the present day. Weeks’ burgeoning career is paralleled by his growing understanding of his own identity. He reflects on the naivety of his beliefs that the generations that came before him were too cautious, recognizing that he is able to live and view his predecessors’ acts as cautious because those same “cautious” acts were brave and audacious enough to pave the way to his current life. The book takes a macro-view to the movement, and as a result Weeks often notes occasions when his knowledge grew more nuanced without actually explaining what those nuances are.
Weeks talks of how his career as a historian and sociologist of the gay movement put him in a liminal space that often felt limited and constricting. As in many themes of his life, that specific space between worlds is what makes this telling powerful and unlike any other in skill and perspective.

This was such a fascinating and thought-provoking read. As a younger queer person, I appreciated the insight into what the LGBTQ community was like in the late twentieth century and how much has changed since then.

Jeffrey Weeks needs no introduction. A well-known gay activist, Weeks is also a historian and author of numerous books, articles and papers. His books Coming Out, Sexuality and Its Discontents and others have adorned the shelves of many a student house (including one I used to live in) since they appeared in print. Between Worlds is his autobiography from young boy growing up in a close-knit mining community in Wales to gay activist in London in the 60s and later respected historian and sociologist of LGBT identities in Britain. The book however, is not just a record of a personal journey but also of a profound "social and cultural transformation" that led from the de-criminalisation of homosexuality and the erupting gay movement to a wider acceptance of LGBT identities in Britain today. We sometimes take all this for granted but barely a generation ago homosexuality was illegal, reputations and careers were easily destroyed, and young people were more likely to hate themselves for their feelings than find positive role models.

The book starts with Week's childhood in the Rhondda region in Wales in the 50s and early '60s. One of those places where life revolved around the pit, the radical politics of the trade union, and the pub, the Rhondda epitomised powerful contradictions:

"The Rhondda I grew up in was a byword for community, for neighbourliness, for warmth and mutual support. All this was true. The downside was that it was also a conservative, defensive, inward-looking culture. It bred intense local trust and strong social bonds, but also a prickly distrust of the wider world, and an acute sensitivity to criticism, especially from insiders."

It would be unfair to say that this warmth and support did not also extend to young people like Weeks. On one condition, though: that they kept their homosexual feelings a secret never to be made public. It was not that there were no other lesbians or gay men if you knew where to look; it's rather that the sense of shame and guilt was so strong that a young boy like Weeks could easily be led to believe he was the only one. This atmoshere of secrecy and shame was soon to change, though, as young Weeks finds out when he moves out of the Rhondda and into the whirlpool that was 60s London. The student movement, the repercussions of the Stonewall riots, the formation of the GLF (Gay Liberation Front), the emergence of a radical gay and lesbian movement that challenged the established mores, all this contributed to unprecedented changes both in attitudes and in lifestyle choices.

Weeks documents these changes with the precision of an eyewitness. His involvement with radical gay politics, his participation in groupings that sought to promote the acceptance of homosexuality, and his friendships and connections with other gay activists, historians and academics form the backbone of the book. Weeks does not shy away from documenting the tensions and divisions within the gay movement as well. Diverse and sometimes opposing views about how gay liberation could be achieved, the close links but also bitter disagreements with the labour and trade union movement, the rejection of the politics of an older, more cautious generation make this book a fascinating account of the gay movement and its development. But this is also a personal story; faithful to the 60s belief that "the personal is political", Weeks intertwines his historical account with his own personal journey as activist, researcher, historian and a sexual being.

This book will appeal to those interested in a history of the gay liberation movement in Britain from the '60s onwards. Its direct and simple style can be deceptive; beneath it, one will find a subtle and nuanced approach to the questions and issues that concerned the generation of gay people that came of age in the late sixties. Chapter 1, however, the account of Weeks' childhood years in the Rhonnda has a much wider appeal. A story of the forces that sustained communities that are no more, at least in that form, this chapter will apeal to anyone who was ever aware of being different in a world that both cherished and smothered him/her.

"I left the Rhondda just before my nineteenth birthday, and despite regular visits in the 50-odd years since never lived there again. I moved into different worlds, became a different person, not despite but in large part because of the love and support provided by my parents ... Yes, as a queer boy from the Rhondda I had to flee its intense embrace in order to become myself. What that self was or could be I have spent a lifetime exploring."

Thank you to netgally and Parthian Books for an advance copy.