#like it wasn't an old law dating to the 1600s or 1800s. it wasn't something centuries old that they suddenly decided to act upon.

[redaynia]

ANOTHER COUNTRY: THE 1980s AND GAY CINEMA

by Alex Davidson

My Beautiful Laundrette, with its positive representation of a gay relationship, came at a radical time for LGBT rights in the UK and stands in the tradition of queer cinema flourishing in times of homophobic oppression. Victim (1961), Basil Dearden's drama about a lawyer (Dirk Bogarde) who realises his own homosexuality while investigating blackmail attempts against gay men, was made when homosexuality was still completely illegal in the UK. The sympathetic portrayal may have helped pave the way for a partial decriminalisation following the Sexual Offences act in 1967.

Gay Liberation flourished in the late 1970s and gay men on British cinema screens, who conventionally ended up miserable or dead by the end credits, started having fun. While Derek Jarman's Sebastiane (1967), an erotically charged take on the life and execution of St Sebastian, ended in tragedy, there was no doubting the film's gleeful celebration of gay sex. Nighthawks (1978) took British audiences into the gay clubs of Lindon and divided gay audiences, some of whom felt the main character -- sensitively played by Ken Robertson -- was an unappealing and downbeat figure. The film remains, however, an invaluable time capsule of 1970s gay nightlife. Television was more problematic, with TV schedules plagued by tired stereotypes typified by John Inman in Are You Being Served? (1973-1985) and Larry Grayson -- both, however, familiar, beloved faces on the small screen. The Naked Civil Servant (1975) was more provocative, with a Bafta-winning performance by John Hurt as the unashamedly flamboyant Quentin Crisp making a genuinely subversive statement.

With Margaret Thatcher's ascent to power in 1979 came a lurch to the right and a darkening of attitudes towards LGBT people in the 1980s. As the Aids epidemic spread, tabloids became bolder in their homophobia, with The Sun under the editorship of Kelvin MacKenzie calling Aids a 'gay plague'. Groups such as OutRage! and Act Up protested at the government's slow response to tackling the virus, noting how homophobia informed political decision-making. However, some progress was made. During the 1970s, Labour MP Maureen Colquhoun had been deselected after being as outed as gay by the press, and when Peter Tatchell stood as a Labour candidate for Bermondsey in 1983 he face a notoriously homophobic campaign from his Liberal opponents (the seat was won by the Liberals' Simon Hughes, who later came out as bisexual). Yet in 1984, Labour MP Chris Smith was the first minister to come out while in office. More LGBT people became politically active, such as Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), who inspired the award-winning film Pride (2014).

The most famous instance of the Thatcher administration's homophobic policy-making arrived in 1988, when Section 28 of the Local Government Act was passed. This legislation banned local authorities from publishing 'material with the intention of promoting homosexuality' as well as 'the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.' The law directly affected The Two of Us (1988), a mild BBC drama about two gay boys who must decide whether to leave their homophobic home town or stay and resort to conformity. The original had the boys continue their relationship but the broadcast version was changed: one headed back to heterosexuality, while the other is left alone. British filmmakers were quick to react to the wave of hostility that dominated the decade. Derek Jarman made unashamedly celebratory films about gay male lives in The Angelic Conversation (1985) -- a queer reading of Shakespeare sonnets addressed to a young man -- and Caravaggio (1986), a queered portrait of the renaissance painter. His 1989 experimental film The Last of England (1989) is a dark, poetic vision of a country in crisis and one of his most explicitly anti-Thatcherite films.

Production company Merchant Ivory has a (misleading) reputation for safe period dramas but its adaptation of EM Forster's Maurice (1987) was daring -- not because it was politically confrontational but because it had that rarest thing in 1980s gay cinema: a happy ending for its lovers. A further key British feature of the era is Another Country (1984), based on the early life of Cambridge spy Guy Burgess and starring Rupert Everett as a gay public schoolboy disgusted by his repressive environment. In both Maurice and Another Country, the protagnists are rich, white and male -- acceptable traits for audiences who had already embraced homoeroticism in the BBC's 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. All three works were comfortably set in the past, as was Stephen Frears' follow-up to My Beautiful Laundrette, his admirably bawdy Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears (1987). This fondness for telling gay stories through the distancing lens of period drama makes the contemporary love story of My Beautiful Laundrette all the more urgent.

Gay British films with interracial relationships were scant. A heavy hint of homosexual attraction followed the titular black and white characters in Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969), while the silly but lovable Girl Stroke Boy (1971) gave audiences a couple, played by Clive Francis and Peter Straker, where the gender of one half of the relation was supposedly ambiguous, but gay love stories featuring black and Asian characters appeared less frequently in the early 1980s. The political significance of an interracial gay relationship in a London blighted by the National Front adds fire to My Beautiful Laundrette and, despite the mildness of the scenes of passion, the film sparked controversy; when it was shown in New York, the Pakistan Action Committee demonstrated against it as 'the product of a vile and perverted mind'. Kureishi explored race and homosexuality again in his TV adaptation of his own novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1993) and interracial love informed some of the most interesting queer stories of the 1990s, in Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels (1991) and Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992).

While Queer as Folk (1999) may be the most famous LGBT British TV series of past years, a handful of gay non-fiction series from the 1980s paved the way for its success. Gay Life (1980-1981) explored queerness in various contexts, while the delightfully right-on Six of Hearts (1986) offered docudrama profiles of gay men and women, most notable Andy the Furniture Maker, an unlikely star of the art underworld. Channel 4's magazine show Out on Tuesday (1989) gave voices to marginalised queer people -- a highlight was Khush (1991), which celebrated South Asian lesbians and gay men living in Britain, North America and India, and was directed by Pratibha Parmar.

Plenty of documentaries about lesbian lives were made in the 1980s but British fiction films about gay women were few. A rare example is Mai Zetterling's Scrubbers (1982), set in a female borstal, while towards the end of the Thatcher era Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (1990), based on Jeanette Winterson's novel, was a huge hit. More elusive still in 1980s British cinema are depictions of trans lives. While the US has led in interesting depictions of trans people, gentle sitcom Boy Meets Girl (2015-2016) is a rare example of a British take on a transgender protagonist. Throughout British cinema and TV history, lesbian and trans viewers have had to be content with one-off episodes of TV anthology series or supporting roles in heterosexual-focused stories.

The activism of the 1980s, supported by British filmmakers, paved the way for the repeal of Section 28 in 2003 and the passing of the Civil Partnership Act a year later. Same-sex marriage followed in 2013 but writing today the situation for LGBT people is murkier. Following the referendum on Britain's EU membership in 2016, the most divisive recent political event, homophobic attacks rose by 147 per cent, while the 2017 general election resulted in the sitting government opting to rely on an openly homophobic party to achieve a Parliamentary majority and remain in power. At the time of this release, how an uncertain political climate will affect LGBT people remains to be seen but, with equipment and online platforms widely accessible, filmmakers have more opportunity than ever to confront homophobia through their art.

Alex Davidson is the film programmer at JW3 and a former curator at the BFI National Archive. He regularly writes for Sight & Sound and the BFI website. His specialty is LGBT cinema and television.

Article sourced from the booklet included in the BFI's dual format edition of My Beautiful Laundrette (2017).