HAPPY GAYS ARE HERE AGAIN

This month, as Channel 4 did in July, BBC4 has been marking the 40th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act that decriminalised sex acts between two consenting males in certain circumstances. I was in London when most of the BBC4 programmes went out and we have resumed playing host to a steady stream of summer houseguests since then, so I only now get to blogging the matter. If it all seems rather old hat to you, dear reader, well … tough.

BBC4 took the opportunity to repeat several profiles of famous gay people (though not its film that thought itself very bold by – yawn! – outing Nöel Coward), along with a decent little series called It’s Not Unusual. Its one new programme made a pair with one of C4’s, for each channel presented a film dramatising events that directly led to the drafting of the Act. A Very British Sex Scandal, made by Blast! Films for C4, covered the trial of Peter Wildeblood and Lord Montagu, the most high-profile airing of the law relating to homosexual regulations since that of Oscar Wilde more than fifty years before. This was a mixed-genre piece, intercutting narrated history, interviews with (mostly anonymous) veterans of the pre-Wolfenden gay male world, newsreel (including an unremarked glimpse of the notoriously gay MP Tom Driberg up to no good in Moscow) and acted sequences. Montagu appeared both as an acted character and, very gamely, in his present condition, profoundly reduced by old age.

Wildeblood himself, a true hero in the story of gay liberation, was decently and credibly characterised and his life as a 1950s journalist was well caught, the Daily Mail newsroom looking straight out of Michael Frayn’s novel Towards the End of the Morning. The level of self-important ignorance that informed society’s attitudes to how other people lived their lives was also cannily invoked. There was some well-used research: the Queen’s first Christmas broadcast provided a painfully ironic counterpoint to the tightening of the screws by the authorities on illegal sexual adventuring.

If this story was new to you, I’m sure the mix of disciplines would have helped to show what a compelling sequence of events it was. But if, like me, you knew this history, it was hard to feel that here was the best way to tell it. A better scripter than writer-director Patrick Reams would have relied solely on dramatisation and would have avoided the linguistic anachronisms that occurred much too often. It always infuriates me when directors and producers lavish resources on exact detail of period locations, costumes, decor, hair, props, vehicles and lighting and then let modern phrases go by without a thought. It costs nothing to get the language right, chaps.

Lion Productions made the film Consenting Adults for the BBC. This traced the story of the enquiry conducted by John Wolfenden into the efficacy or otherwise of the laws then constraining homosexual acts and also, by the by, prostitution. Sir John, as he became, had been portrayed in the C4 film, played by Nicholas Le Prevost. He’s a fine actor but he never got close to giving a whiff of what Wolfenden was like. William Chubb, who played a chief constable in the C4 film, would have made a better match. In Consenting Adults, Wolfenden was acted by Charles Dance, a far less accomplished performer but better cast – indeed I’ve never thought him more sure-footed than in this role. Julian Mitchell, a proper writer, provided the script, though, while finding much enjoyable period flavour, he too couldn’t avoid the odd anachronism: “I have to tell you” and I’m sure we didn’t use “straight” in the current sense back in the ’50s.

The scenes between Wolfenden and his louche gay son were clearly intended to form the heart of the piece and they bore Mitchell’s most thoughtful writing and the most attentive direction (by Richard Curson Smith). But I couldn’t help wondering whether Wolfenden Jr can have cut quite such an Andy Warhol-ish figure avant l’événement – it seemed a bit drama-neat rather than actuality-rough.

There was a fictional subplot concerning a family baker and his male piece-on-the-side that was never going to pull its weight, as diluting of the main matter as were the interviews in the C4 film. Rather, playing real or representative people gave several of the performers scope to have some fun: Hayden Gwynne as a feisty committee member, Mel Smith as blustering Home Secretary David Maxwell-Fyfe, Mark Gatiss as a supercilious chief constable, David Bamber as an enquiry witness, an unrepentant but pain-wracked ‘invert’, as homosexuals of that generation were often termed.

In many ways this was an honourable summary of the way the world differed in the 1950s, without too much Shavian personification of attitudes. And it reminded us that it took another decade after Wolfenden’s report before the law was changed.

C4’s most substantial contribution to the anniversary was a new fictional drama, Clapham Junction, written by Kevin Elyot and directed by Adrian Shergold, both former actors. Elyot’s work has always foregrounded gay issues – his widest-known play is probably My Night with Reg, which began at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs and transferred to the West End and television (David Bamber was its heart-breaking lead actor). I won’t attempt a substantial review of it here because Kevin is a friend but I will write of it as it relates to the discussion programme that I now discuss.

40 Years On presented an evolving debate with an evolving cast, chaired by David Aaronovitch. It began with Clapham Junction, which Aaronovitch described as “a drama that showed gay men in 2007 enjoying vigorous cottaging, depicted them at constant risk of sudden and terrible violence and believing that precariousness and danger are part of the pleasures of modern gayness. But is this what it’s really like to be homosexual in 2007?” This wholly reductive summary asked all the wrong questions. Elyot’s script never claimed to demonstrate what it is “really like” to be gay. It was much more about the philosophy and practice of living dangerously, something that some gay men (and some straight men) get off on doing. But to parlay that into a comprehensive statement of gay life is as absurd as proposing that, say, Coronation Street is a definitive depiction of life in the north of England. Late on in the programme, Simon Fanshawe took the opportunity to refute this reductiveness: “‘gay men’ is not a very coherent concept”.

Clapham Junction’s producer Elinor Day was put up to field on its behalf, not an ideal advocate in that she appeared to concede that some exaggeration had crept into the film. (No it hadn’t). Matthew Parris reckoned that, insofar as the film depicted male gay life, it was twenty years out of date, just about the length of time that Parris himself has been well enough known not to be able to cruise Clapham Common anonymously. The rapper known as Q Boy, much younger, was much more supportive of the film’s credibility. Mark Simpson, a widely recognised commentator on gay politics, offered a highly confused response, from which I extract the preposterous suggestion that the film represented “a desperate attempt to make gayness seem perhaps more interesting or more dramatic anyway than it perhaps is now”. Fancy a dramatist writing drama!

Later, Simpson spoke up for the right of people to express distaste for homosexuals, a curious concession that would hardly pass the test of substituting non-whites or the disabled in the argument. This occurred in a diffuse discussion about how far gayness is “still an issue”. The fact that Aaronovitch felt it necessary to indicate twice that he was among, in his patronising phrase, “the tedious old heterosexuals” provides the answer.

Male promiscuity was briefly but usefully discussed and Paul Sinha, a comedian-cum-GP, made the challenging point that “there is no reason for us to believe that the whole world is our sexual playground”. Julie Bindel, pressed into representing the otherwise missing lesbian view (“we didn’t need to be decriminalised because we were under the social control of men”) was listened to in eerily respectful silence by the fellers. On civil partnerships, the sceptical Mark Simpson missed the whole point: taking these vows is not done to ape heterosexuals but to avail ourselves of the tax breaks that go with them.

Simon Callow repeated the Simpson line on civil partnerships in a new documentary on C4 called How Gay Sex Changed the World. This was a superficial gallop through gay history since before the Act, touching all the bases but doing no more than touch, with a lot of sweeping generalisations and easy phrase-making in the script (“the uptight, sexually-conflicted straight world”). Simpson turned up again in this. If he’s an expert on gay matters, he really ought to know that horizontal stripes put fat on you.

Mark Turnbull’s film for October Films demonstrated all the shortcomings of contemporary documentary-making: snatches of interview taken out of context; unchallenged inaccuracies; wild assertions; the notion that a viewpoint is more important and indeed more true if spoken by a celebrity. The fact is that all these witnesses are immensely privileged, even if they weren’t necessarily so when they were growing up, and that disqualifies them from representing ordinary gay experience.

We got to see actual ordinary men in another C4 docko called Queer As Old Folk, except that these mature chaps were … I don’t want to say extreme cases but they were certainly quite extraordinary. There was the camp old couple doing the civil partnership thing on Tenerife after 43 years together – but the kiss at the ceremony was their first and, says the one who never allowed kissing, “I’ve never had sex with a man with my penis, ever in my life … there are other things that you can do sexually”. There was the 57 year-old who’s gone gay only recently and who runs around like a teenager with a permanent hard-on (“in the last two weeks I’ve had sex about a hundred times with at least seventy different people”), who weeps over the liberality of his wife and whose 17 year-old son has the shrewdest take on this new life. And there was the former deputy head teacher who’s 'married' to a former student almost forty years his junior and who manages his strapping young partner’s career as a male stripper. There’s no soap opera anywhere on the box that could do justice to these inordinate stories.

Had Kevin Elyot put such characters in a fictional film, David Aaronovitch would have asked if what they were all doing was “really” what it is like to be homosexual in 2007. I think Andy Wells’ film (for Transparent Television), like Elyot’s own, simply showed that the gay world is just as rich and varied as any other. There was one odd little thread through all the programmes except Queer As Old Folk, however. This could have been called the Richard Lintern Season because that actor, not exactly a household name, turned up in all three of the acted films and was even glimpsed in a Bronski Beat promo that was excerpted in C4’s gay history programme. I hope it helped his career and hasn’t fatally type-cast him.