Queer Cinema

Homo­sexual char­ac­ters have featured in films since cinema began and themes asso­ci­ated with sexual iden­tity – trans­vest­itism, trans­gender, bisexu­ality to name a few – have long been a staple of cine­matic storytelling. It has taken time however for these themes to emerge from the shadows; from allu­sion and subtext to a clear-eyed acknow­ledge­ment and accept­ance of sexual diversity. Society changed signi­fic­antly in the last part of the twen­tieth century and film and tv media not only reflected that change, it had more than a little to do with bringing it about.

Gay in The UK

Homo­sexual themes had of course featured in British novels, plays and films for a very long time but they were not dealt with that openly at first. Early British films, such as Victim, tended to deal in allu­sions and there was a great deal of covert language used both in drama and light entertainment

Victim 1961

Watching Victim in 1961, audi­ences would have been shocked to hear the word “homo­sexual” – the first time it had been uttered in a movie. Victim fash­ions a tight social thriller out of an issue that was under heated debate at the time, but it also conveys the gay man’s plight in a bygone era.

Bogarde’s char­acter has much to lose, as a lawyer with prospects: wealth and an adoring wife (Sylvia Syms). Having been photo­graphed in a comprom­ising embrace with a young man, he risks his repu­ta­tion to track down the blackmailers.

Bogarde had much to lose in real life as well. He never publicly acknow­ledged his sexu­ality but Victim opened a distin­guished second act to his career that included sexu­ally complex clas­sics such as The Servant, Death in Venice and The Night Porter. Victim was “the wisest decision I ever made in my cine­matic life,” Bogarde later said. “It is extraordinary … to believe that this modest film could ever have been considered cour­ageous, daring or dangerous to make. It was, in its time, all three.”

Steve Rose, Guardian 17.07.201

The Leather Boys 1963

Dot (Rita Tush­ingham) escapes her dull family life by impuls­ively marrying bike mech­anic Reggie (Colin Camp­bell). Their marriage comes under strain after Reggie meets hand­some young mod Pete (Dudley Sutton) and neglects her to spend time with him.

The gay subtext in this film only emerges right at the end which makes it an inter­esting reflec­tion of British society at that time. Male social groups and concepts of ‘masculinity’ were shaped by the military exper­i­ence of previous gener­a­tions; a world where women were essen­tially outsiders. Homo­sexu­ality was some­thing that was often uncon­sciously accepted in this world but the taboo against open accept­ance was a strong one.

Stair­case 1969

Homo­sexu­ality was still a subject with some frisson at this time, and the play by Charles Dyer from which this movie was made had been a success, but the casting of two (by repu­ta­tion anyway) hetero­sexual stars in the lead roles guar­an­teed that any nuances of the play were flattened out.

Instead, we got a grot­esque panto­mime where Burton and Harrison camped up their perform­ances defi­antly as if to prove they couldn’t be mistaken for gay. It stands in stark contrast to Peter Finch who played at least two gay roles (Oscar Wilde 1960 and Sunday Bloody Sunday 1071 – see below) with insight and sensitivity.

The Naked Civil Servant 1975

“Quentin Crisp (John Hurt) makes the bold choice of exhib­iting his homo­sexu­ality in the highly conser­vative envir­on­ment of England in the 1930s and 1940s.

What’s more, he adopts a self-consciously flam­boyant and theat­rical persona destined to attract negative atten­tion, although he navig­ates the streets of London with caution as he comes of age against a back­drop of homo­phobia.

But when he is confronted with crim­inal charges, he must decide how willing he is to defend his life­style.” IMDB

Prob­ably one of the most influ­en­tial tv film dramas ever broad­cast in Britain, this sympath­etic portrait of well-known self-professed homo­sexual Quentin Crisp succeeded in human­ising him and, in the process, raising the conscious­ness of the public like nothing on tv had done before.

Crisp’s defiant asser­tion of his iden­tity directly ques­tions the hypo­crit­ical and contra­dictory atti­tudes that he has to confront every day while John Hurt’s marvel­lous perform­ance makes us under­stand him as an unlikely but cour­ageous hero.

Sunday Bloody Sunday 1971

A good looking bisexual young man carries on simul­tan­eous rela­tion­ships with a man and a woman in the milieu of London’s chat­tering classes. This film, scripted by Penelope Gilliat and directed by John Schle­singer, is a low key love story that was quietly revolu­tionary in its day.

In the early 70s, the ques­tioning of gender roles and sexual iden­tity in British society began in earnest but the true impact of this film comes from the way this is pushed into the back­ground and the char­ac­ters are portrayed in a human and empath­etic fashion. Bisexu­ality was some­thing rarely dealt with in contem­porary cinema at that time, let alone in such a matter of fact manner,

The Hours and The Times 1991

Set in early 1963, and loosely based on fact, John Lennon (Ian Hart) and Beatles manager Brian Epstein (David Angus) take a holiday together in Barcelona.

Over a four day period these seeming oppos­ites: Lennon, often cruel and perverse, and Epstein, portrayed here as much more vulner­able and sens­itive, test their rela­tion­ship in an intimate and convin­cingly raw portrayal of these two mythic characters.

Butterfly Kiss 1995

Part road movie, part love story, this is a gay, UK, punk version of Thelma and Louise where a tattooed schizo­phrenic Amanda Plummer picks up timid shop assistant Saskia Reeves and takes her on a road trip littered with the corpses of men who got in her way.

Like Bonnie and Clyde or the young couple in Terrence Malick’s Badlands, they are fated to come to a bad end and they do but they do it memor­ably. An oddball film featuring a great perform­ance by Plummer.

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Gay in The USA

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The Sergeant 1968

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The Boys in The Band 1970

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Outrageous 1977

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Bound 1996

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