Conclusion

Summary

H Staircase is not a metaphor, nor an allegory, nor a symbol. But place does matter, and does become charged with a heightened significance, layered with memory, a lure for stories. Topography, from atmosphere to institutional form, has proved crucial to the construction of the experience of men who desired men. The college has always been a privileged space. I do not mean simply that it has educated the rich and entitled, though it has certainly done that over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as, correspondingly, it has spent a lot of time and effort from the 1960s onwards trying to broaden access.