You might have thought that in the decade of free love, peace and eternal cosmic happiness, there would have been a place for a greater understanding and tolerance of our sexuality. Everything else was getting the treatment: politically we swung to the liberal left, womens’ rights were discussed and in some cases even acted upon, the recognition of widespread institutionalised racism and the need to change these prevailing attitudes, the recognition of the need to understand and treat mental illness with sympathy and care, the need to make society an easier place for disabled people to live in. Ok, true: that was still very much to come. But for a young lad growing up gay in rural England? Were there any crumbs of comfort at all? Anything to make him think he wasn’t a freak, misfit or weirdo, as the kids all told him, at the slightest sign of effeminacy?
Well, you’ll be expecting me to say ‘no- there was nothing’. And that, it’s true, is the simple answer. In fact there was actually, but you had to look very carefully and know where and how to find it. I could probably have gone to my local library, at least by the end of the sixties and found a few books on sexuality, with a clinical analysis of homosexuality. I could have found biographies of my future heroes and role models, where there was a least a hint of their sexuality within the text or maybe more likely the subtext. Hell, even reading ‘Swallows and Amazons’ was pretty radical then. Funny (or maybe not) that all the most popular books then were about groups of kids getting on and having lots of adventures. I went through the Enid Blyton books in a flash one year: ‘Five do Smugglers Rock yet again’; they even had tomboy ‘George’ with her dog Timmy, an archetypically queer, transgender character if ever there was one (George not Timmy, though who knows?). Whilst Enid Blyton certainly used stereotypical tropes in abundance and was clearly racist too, she got some things right and hit the sweet spot for me at least for a few years. Whilst the adults are there in her stories, they never get in the way of a good adventure. Her books were rightly spoofed by the Comic Strip in the mid 1980s but in a relatively loving way. Recently her own sexuality has become a talking point as well.
But for library books covering anything more radically outre? Well, you had to borrow them first, get that library stamp and past your parents. By the end of the decade I was only 12, and just about recognising that Robert Hoffman as Robinson Crusoe on TV was pretty good to look at, and that Captain Scarlett from Thunderbirds was strangely quite a handsome puppet, and well, that Blue Boy from the High Chaparral was very cute too. And yes: let’s go there, wouldn’t it be really quite fun to dance with Rolfe, the sexy telegraph boy, in The Sound of Music singing ’16 going on 17′ (yes, not cool, he becomes a fully fledged and facist Nazi later, I know, I know..it was just a passing thought).
I still have no complete idea quite why ‘The Sound of Music’ in particular carries a huge cache of significance for me and so many other gay men and lesbians of a certain age (not all by any means: it’s a bit of a ‘marmite’ film). Starring Christopher Plummer, who recently passed away aged 90 (and always professed to hating the film) and Julie Andrews, for literally decades, as a gay man, it was impossible to admit to liking it without being mercilessly mocked and so I kept that secret hidden but I never forget it: always, secretly, loved it. It is just about the first film I can remember seeing; when I was just eight, in August 1965, my family went to see it at Bournemouth Odeon whilst on holiday and I can still remember the thrill (yes, really, thrill) of seeing it on that huge screen in glorious, glorious technicolor. Its commercial success at the time was huge: released in March 1965 it was on the same level as say ‘Star Wars’ a few decades later. By November 1966 it had become the highest grossing film of all-time.
It was also an exceptionally long film, coming in at just six minutes under three hours, pretty good for an eight year old to sit through but it was never boring. This length necessitated an interlude half way through, for ice cream, more popcorn and fizzy drinks, though a comfort break in the film was quite common in those days for the longer films. In retrospect, and after some thought, I think what made it special for me, was that it was the very first time I realised it was possible to ‘escape’ into a fantasy world: one far removed from reality. I still remember now, over half a century later, that I came out of the cinema in a daze, back into the real world. And that real world suddenly felt strange, somehow forced, unnatural. That was the first time, I recognised that it was possible to so completely be able to escape into cinematic fantasy for a few hours, to immerse yourself in a different world, where the sun shone, people danced and sang on the street and there was always a guaranteed happy ending. A realisation that we can live out our life or a part of it at least, in a fantasy world that we have created, if we so wish too. Except that in the ‘Sound of Music’, its takeaway, as they climb up over the mountains, to escape Austria for (eventually) the USA, says that an escape to a new happier life is really possible if you try. And best of all, at the end, it’s even a true story (yes, a slightly sanitised, sugar sweet, Hollywood version but nevertheless..) it’s not a lie. Fantasies can become realities. Part of me decided there and then, that I wanted to create these fantasies too. I still feel that it seems somewhat harsh that Maria Von Trapp (the original Maria) had no credit of any sort in the film at all though. Credit where credits due!
Climb every Mountain, sings Maria, the beautiful ex nun turned children’s governess,
Search high and low
Follow every highway
Every path you know
Climb every mountain
Ford every stream
Follow every rainbow
‘Till you find your dream
It seemed to promise that there was a way out of one reality to another, where nobody knew you and you could start a new fresh life. And there’s that glorious rainbow, with it’s promised pot of gold. This was a fantasy, my fantasy, that I suppose took over from Father Xmas, the Tooth Fairy and all those other tales that your parents spin to you, in your early years. And then you discover in your eight year old world, that they were all a lie: a horrible, horrible lie! How could they be so cruel? How can you ever trust them again?! So there is this double edged sword: what makes my parents fantasies presented to the young me unforgivable and yet my fantasies acceptable? Perhaps it’s something to do with consent or the lack of it. Perhaps others didn’t feel as upset at their deception as I did. Did you? Was the ‘Sound of Music’ special in fact to me because it was the very first time I ‘took control’ of my fantasies?
Like any fantasy you have, at such an early age, it’s hard to pinpoint now, half a century later, precisely why ‘The Sound of Music’ carried such strength and emotion for so many of us. I know I wasn’t the only one. In 2019 ‘Queer Lion’ website called Julie Andrews the ‘last remaining true gay icon’.
When you deconstruct it of course, you realise that all the key queer elements are there. It’s a sad lonely world, without a real mother until Julie comes along and a strict uncaring father, (classic homosexual trope), which is ultimately transformed by the power of song: fears of a thunderstorm are vanquished (My Favourite Things), everyone has a part to play in song (Do -Re-Mi), it’s completely natural to meet and sing together, (the Song Festival) and dance with your boyfriend (Sixteen going on Seventeen), then escape, with high drama but a song in your heart, for more adventures and a new life over the hills.. (Climb every Mountain..). Arguably, you could probably pin my later love of walking, weather, cinema and musicals, romantic love and big adventures on the ‘Sound of Music’. Something in my eight year old brain connected with my hope that I’d find ‘my place in the world’ like that too and the ‘big bad Nazis’ would be vanquished forever. I wonder if my parents would have taken me to see it, if they had known?! I do like to think so- but on reflection I am not quite so sure.
In fact I was so convinced of the merits of ‘The Sound Of Music’ that I put ‘My Favourite Things’ into my degree film, ‘From Linda to the Lizard’, when I went on later to study Film, Video & TV production at West Surrey College in Farnham, Surrey. This was undoubtedly a mistake! Do not necessarily assume your critics will try and understand you, just assume they will value your work on their own level. It almost cost me my degree. To be fair, it also really wasn’t a great film but that’s another story
As I grew up in the early sixties, we moved away from leafy but fast expanding Cowplain and to a new home in Torpoint, which nestles just inside Cornwall, on the western shore of the Tamar River, opposite Plymouth, on the banks of St John’s Lake and here my father took up a deputy headmasters post in a local school. I think I made friends relatively easily there, I still remember Tony, who lived opposite us and others, where we would climb up the large, eighty foot, fir trees on the foreshore and explore the heath land by the old Millpond. I had the somewhat strange experience of being taught by my father for the last year of my primary school. He was a good teacher actually and always managed to really involve his pupils, with an imaginative blend of storytelling, model making and ways of engaging their curiosity. It still pains me to write this but oh, if only he could have been quite such a good father!
I used to get confused sometimes and call him ‘Dad’ at school and ‘Sir’ at home. And then there were things that hurt much more than they should ever have and stayed with me for a lifetime. Like when the school was gathered in the hall for assembly every morning.. I was with my classmates half way back and my father had called for quiet. It seems that my father thought I had gone on talking (but I always and still do dispute this). ‘You’ my father said .. ‘yes you my son’. I still can hear him uttering those words from a full fifty five years ago. ‘Come out to the front, face the wall and stay like that for the rest of assembly’. Of course, I had wanted the ground to swallow me up. In retrospect, it’s quite possible my father was actually doing me a favour: so people couldn’t say he was favouring me as his son in the classroom. It is still worrying to me now though, that I held that against him for a very long time, whereas he might very well have forgotten about it the very next day. How often I wondered, do we unintentionally do things to others that scar them for life, without having any real idea of what we’ve done?
By the time I was seven, in 1964, the country had a Labour party in power, with Harold Wilson its PM. We tend to look back now and remember the period as one of rapid change and a preoccupation with the sciences, arts, culture and all things progressive. Wilson had delivered a memorable speech at the party conference in Scarborough, where he boldly stated that if the country was to prosper, a ‘new Britain’ would need to be forged in the ‘white heat’ of ‘scientific revolution’.
Aspirationally, people were able to create a 2.2 person family unit (the average number of children that couples had then) that thrived, with a better healthcare system, cleaner, functional and more modern housing and jobs with reasonable security and paid holidays. However, in actual fact, in retrospect, the period was not quite as rosy as history remembers it. There was, to a greater or lesser extent, a preoccupation with national economic decline. Both the Conservative party in the years leading up to 1964 and the Labour party in the years afterwards, attempted to develop fiscal policies that would enable Britain to be more competitive on the world stage.
In fact though, a lot of time was actually spent dealing with problems caused by the balance of payments and volatility of the pound. The expectation that Wilson’s government had created, of continually rising living standards and welfare, came to be seen as a shackle, as the public became disillusioned that such changes were not more rapid and more widely felt. Scientific & Technological opportunities for progress were also missed, despite Wilson’s bold promises. There were large swings in the public’s feelings about different political parties and their various solutions: ‘panaceas’ succeeding one another in quick succession. So, actually, it didn’t feel like an especially aspirational period to have lived through, though in retrospect we can see that things were, in fact, slowly getting better.
Certainly, in terms of liberal or progressive social attitudes, things did slowly improve. In 1967, with the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, many people reshaped their attitudes, as a result of the government’s stance and of liberal media opinion more widely and through the next decade and a half, acceptance of homosexuality, in fact of sexuality in all its forms, slowly increased. It’s important to reiterate though, that there was still a lot of negative opinion about; indeed many were of the opinion that what people did behind closed doors was one thing but that it should never be flaunted outside, openly, in public. There was also a segregation of opinion in the country, where London, in general, was much more tolerant of homosexuality that other parts of the country. Most ‘ordinary’ working people then did not personally know another person who was openly homosexual. For most people, attitudes were to change because popular culture represented homosexuals in a more tolerant way, it was popular film, television and popular music that reshaped attitudes most obviously. Television ownership rose rapidly in the UK in the late fifties. In the year I was conceived, 1956, just 37% of households had a TV, by 1960, when we got ours, it was 68% and by 1970, 92%.
Sometimes popular culture in the sixties showed us youngsters some confusing norms though. In particular as a family we would watch ‘The Morecambe and Wise’ show, especially looking forward to the lavish Christmas production, reserved as a national treat on Christmas Day evening itself: 28 million people watched their 1977 ‘Christmas Special’. Ernie Wise’s real name was Ernest Wiseman in fact, so I always felt some kind of affinity to him in a way. Eric was the comedian, the joker, Ernie played his ‘straight’ man, often the butt of Eric’s jokes. The pair by this time were already well established, having honed their craft in the popular music halls of the forties and fifties but were able to re-invent themselves for a wider TV audience, something others found difficult to adapt to. It required ‘cleaning up’ the act to some extent for a family audience but one thing they always still did was share a bed together, when a sketch demanded it, Eric often smoking a pipe in such sketches.
In some respects they mirrored the role of countless other double acts that had gone before them, such as Laurel and Hardy. It was never mentioned though or suggested as strange in any way, (they in fact reminisced that they had often shared a bed when on tour around the UK in their early careers, simply to save money). They often played around with this particular trope though, recognising that the nervousness this would provoke in their audience would result in increased (nervous) laughter at more or less any gag. The way to get round it was to ensure that absolutely nothing was said about their behaviour and the audience after a while realised this, so felt comfortable with it, whilst still retaining an unease. Laurel and Hardy had exploited much the same ‘unease’ forty decades previously. It is also the way female impersonators got away with so much: think Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in the 1962 film ‘Some like it Hot’. where they both impersonate females to further the plot. People could accept these ‘gender bending’ roles up to a point as long as an invisible line was not crossed from humour to desire. In fact Curtis and Lemmon took this trope and pushed it almost to its breaking point in the film, with Monroe in the role as the ‘straight man’. But it was always in comedy that you could get away with the most risque material, as radio programmes in the 50’s like ITMA (It’s That Man Again), Round the Horne, and in the sixties the Carry On films, TWTWTW (That Was The Week That Was) and later the Monty Python team, all used with great success. These all allowed for more subversive aspects of sexuality, social culture and politics to be aired in a relatively safe and non threatening way in this period, those ‘in the know’ would understand them and for others the ideas would simply ‘go over their heads’. This understanding was an important entrypoint into acceptance of ‘otherness’, in our world as kids in the sixties and seventies and more widely in society in general, which we have more or less lost now in popular culture as it’s no longer felt needed or necessary.
Increasingly too, in the late fifties , there was the development of a specific ‘youth culture’ with its own music,l fashion and tastes. Whilst I was not particularly aware of ‘The Beatles’ whilst very small, in the early sixties they quickly became one of the most widely popular bands of all time, with much of that popularity engendered by newspapers, newsreels (in the cinemas), music magazines and television. The time they spent in Hamburg, Germany, is widely credited with turning them from ‘just another teenage band ‘in Liverpool into a tight rock ‘n’ roll combo. They played their first night at the Indra Club there on August 17th 1960. By early 1963, they were huge, with their first number one hit ‘From Me to You’ in the UK in May 1963 and in the USA with ‘I want to hold your hand’ in February 1964.
What was less well known at the time however, was that the catalyst for such success had been managed from early in 1961 by a gay man from Liverpool, Brian Epstein (1934-1967). Seeing them play at the Cavern Club in Liverpool’s Mathew Street one lunchtime, prompted him to take them ‘under his wing’ and propel them to success, despite his own lack of any other artists management at the time. Retrospectively, as ever, it is quite simple now to examine exactly how his management propelled them to success, rather less so to understand how they were aware of his sexuality: not especially phased by it but accepting that it needed to be kept a secret. This was one question that never came up in the myriad of interviews they did, that were published across the world, in the early to mid sixties. His homosexuality was not publicly known until some years after his death, of a drug overdose on the 27th August 1967, although it had been an ‘open secret’ among his friends and business associates.
Early on, Brian Epstein had made two bold, visionary statements about the future. The first went on to become legendary, when he asserted that: “The Beatles are going to be bigger than Elvis!”. He was right. His second statement has been forgotten but it was in fact bolder, when after dashing lovestruck fans’ hopes by revealing that the Beatles had girlfriends and would one day be married, he added: “And someday, I might be married too!”. Of course, no one took any notice then, it’s only now the significance of what he was suggesting is clear.
Sadly, he was not to live to see homosexuality decriminalised. There have been many rumours, counter rumours, salacious stories and much gossip in the intervening years about whether any of the Beatles were ever involved with him, the ‘pass’ he made at Pete Best, in his car (Best was the sacked Beatle) and the story of John Lennon’s time away with him in Barcelona, Spain is the stuff of legend now, and depicted in a 1991 film ‘The Hours and Times’ which generally received critical acclaim. Also legendary, is the suggestion that Lennon’s song ‘Baby You’ve got to Hide your Love away’ (on the ‘Help’ soundtrack) was written about, or for Epstein. Whatever the truth, which is of lesser importance now (though maybe not interest), the reality is that none of this was ‘open’, it was all clandestine and although such sexuality was accepted in certain arty circles (as it always had been to an extent) it didn’t filter through, down into the popular culture of the time; I wasn’t aware that the Beatles had had a gay manager until about 1990.
As it was of course, it all ended in tragedy (as, we were then led to believe, homosexuals lives always tend to) when Epstein died of a drug overdose, just a month before homosexuality was decriminalised in England & Wales. His abuse of stimulants and barbiturates led to addiction and death, at just thirty two. All four Beatles were devastated by the news, especially John, who was probably the closest to him. It’s often thought that Epstein’s death marked the beginning of the end of their career, Lennon certainly ‘thought they were fucked’ after he died. And in 2006, his ex wife Cynthia Lennon said: “I think Brian’s one of the forgotten people. It’s almost as if he’s been written out of the [Beatles] story. I don’t think they’d have got anywhere without Brian.”
Of course, the case of the Beatles and Epstein is just one story, in what essentially is a vast network of musical culture and more widely artistic and literary culture in this period, where gay men & lesbians had a huge influence in shaping its portrayal and its related creative output. Mostly, it was as undercover as Brian Epstein’s life had been with the Beatles and his other artistes. The other thing about the period, which certainly didn’t help, was that the newspapers, more especially the ‘red tops’, often made a huge negative issue out of rumours -or indeed truths- about peoples’ sexuality and it was felt then (sadly, quite rightly) that such publicity could end people’s careers.
ON to Sex, love and Life 1.8 Into the Swinging Sixties: surrounded by pervasive conformity, part 2
