Len & Cub: A Queer History

by Meredith Batt and Dusty Green

Len and Cub were two rural New Brunswick men who, it seems, had a loving relationship for several years in the early decades of the twentieth century. The photos collected in this book give insight into their lives. But the book is equally valuable for the careful way it lays out the contemporary social and legal circumstances of their society, and how the authors pieced together their stories through inferences and interpretations of the few facts available.

Based entirely on photos with the barest of notations (subjects, dates, locations at best) and a few remembered rumours, supplemented with a few surviving official records and news clippings, the story is drawn out by two archivists who came across the photo collection with the description that it referred to a man and his “boyfriend.” I’d be curious, too, especially since many of the photos, taken by Len, illustrate a close and intimate friendship. The authors use their professional training and what must have been a significant amount of personal time to piece together the story, without romanticizing or going beyond reasonable inference. As a result, they create a detailed portrait of what a same-sex relationship must have been like in their specific time and place. This is a much richer and more human picture than one gets in broader histories, which often rely only on collections of small snippets and anecdotes to represent a social setting in general terms. It’s a remarkable addition to the “microhistory” approach that focuses in depth on a specific story to add understanding that is hard to get out of a broader historical approach.

Their story seems similar in many ways to what might occur in a rural town 100 years later. A young man, Len, finds that his interest in a younger neighbour, Cub, is reciprocated. They hang out together, becoming increasingly close. Having a car allows Len, the more affluent of the pair, to arrange private getaways, and having a camera allows him to make a record of their friendship. In their gossipy town, they keep their relationship private, in a way that many do now. They risk social sanctions and perhaps condemnation from their families and friends, although the danger of criminal prosecution that they faced no longer exists. Over time, their relationship weakens, possibly because the structures that could strengthen it did not exist. Len is driven from the town over a scandal that is apparently covered up by his family’s social standing. Cub enters a childless marriage to a 39-year-old woman, and after a time moves to a larger city. While the legal repercussions are no longer as strong, and a couple today would have many more options, young men today who want to remain within a conservative small town could find themselves on similar tracks.

While the personal details are thin, the photos themselves give the richness that makes the book unique. Len was an early photo buff and apparently took thousands of photos of his friends and family, his surroundings and, with the aid of a timer, himself. Many are deliberately posed to show the relationship that Len wanted to capture. Some are candid snapshots. Some are not great shots and the reproduction in some is unfortunately grey, but many show the facial expressions, gestures and physicality of their relationship. A reader can see the lives of Len and Cub in the photos and from the pictures infer a story that is much more concrete and memorable than a simple text description would be.

A string of lucky circumstances led to the photos being saved by Len’s sister, purchased and donated to the New Brunswick archive, and then discovered and researched by the authors. They offer a unique view into the lives of two men who could perhaps stand in for many of those living in small towns across Canada and the USA in the 1910s and ’20s.