And so, I began to understand how the half century in particular, before my birth, was full of relevance potentially to my own life, my concerns, my modus operandi as a gay man, both in terms of the people who had shaped it and the contemporary history that had shaped them. There was a great deal that had happened in that period, that it would have been very useful to have been taught (to some extent) at all ages but certainly as a teenager, as I grew up and progressed to the then legal age of maturity at twenty-one. Yet I knew practically nothing that I felt was positive about ‘my condition’, desires, life and loves up to that age. Nothing that I was taught about or read or discussed with others had really given me any references, stepping stones if you will, as to how to go about living my life in the contemporary world in the early to mid seventies, in central London. It was hardly surprising in retrospect then, that there were struggles to come, negativity, feelings of doubt and low self esteem in this period. I had no idea how to progress beyond the feeling that I try and live my life on a day to day basis and see what transpired. As Neil Tennant (yet again..) wrote in 1984 (though they cut a demo then, it wasn’t released until 1987):
When I look back upon my life
it’s always with a sense of shame
I’ve always been the one to blame
For everything I long to do
no matter when or where or who
has one thing in common too
It’s a sin
Everything I’ve ever done
Everything I ever do
Every place I’ve ever been
Everywhere I’m going to
It’s a sin
Whilst this theme has recently been used quite effectively by Russell T Davies in his story of gay life, love and tragedy in the early eighties (Channel 4 TV), and was a song from ‘Actually‘, (the name of the Pet Shop Boys album that it was released on) Neil Tennant has since said that ‘it was a throwaway lyric and not meant too seriously’ but -as ever, with much of their work, for some decades at the end of the 20th century – the song caught the zeitgeist of the times when it was released and went to number one in the UK charts. It certain affected me immediately, and with Derek Jarman directing the accompanying video, depicting the seven deadly sins, I’ve always regarded it as a inspirational, slightly camp masterpiece. And it’s one of those timeless pieces that always sounds ‘fresh’ with each new listen.
Some will say of course, that no one of that age, has any real idea how to live their lives: we are all a mass of contradictory thoughts, ideas and emotions at that early period in our lives. We experiment with things, pick up some ideas as being useful and cast others aside. But in the main we look at others who are slightly older & wiser than we are and try to understand what they are doing right, use them as mentors, if you like. An older brother, older friends: look at how these people are living their lives. Seldom do we listen to our parents or older guides at this time, for their thoughts, opinions, values all too often seem outdated, outmoded, and of no relevance whatsoever.
I think this feeling of ‘ones older and betters being outdated’ was something especially relevant in this period: the early second half of the twentieth century, here in western Europe, and Britain in particular, where fashion tastes, music, culture were all being shaped very rapidly indeed. So, in some ways, we were all in this melting pot together. Even the very shape of heterogenerative normality was changing quickly. And in retrospect, perhaps this was my saviour. People had stopped looking very far ahead at that time, as you simply did not know what the future was going to present to you. Each previous decade nowadays we tend to have wrapped up for us and re-presented in popular culture in different ways. The swinging sixties, the glam seventies, the kitsch eighties. Then, with CND at its peak the future was seen as potentially being quite dystopian. In the gay community in particular too, we had to contend with AIDS & HIV and again this stopped us looking very far beyond the immediate horizon; this time it wasn’t just a case of the unknown, we simply didn’t know if there would even be a future for us…which sounds rather dramatic but it was true.
It is also quite simple now, in hindsight, for us all to be able to see how we weaved our way through the paths available to us then; to gauge how much we were influenced by various styles, themes, political and social movements. In doing so, we often see how relatively rigidly in fact, we still tended to follow one of the prevailing paths open to us, in terms of our social class and structure. However, to some extent those structures were also being shaken up by the increasingly important body politic of the sixties and seventies; things were becoming less rigidly defined and our options as young people were becoming greater.
Without realising it at the time, as I left my schooldays behind me for good (or so I thought), I was going to be thrown into one of the largest and most diverse social & cultural melting pots (and spots) in Europe. And perhaps that was the saving grace for me, as I would have struggled I think, to feel happy elsewhere at that time.
But I am rushing ahead of myself (as I would often tend to do in the next few decades). It is still 1957, the conservative politician Harold Macmillan is Prime Minister, I have been born in St Mary’s hospital in Portsmouth and settled as a bawling baby (and my, did I bawl, my mother used to tell me) in Cowplain, the fast expanding overspill village nearby, which has recently become full of new prefabs, built to provide cheap new housing outside of the heavily bombed Portsmouth, the scars of which were still very visible just a decade later. Not for us though: after a few years in a tiny flat above a shop, my father is able to afford a mortgage and buy a brand new bungalow ‘Ingledon’ (shades of little England..but I discovered only after both had passed away a few years ago, it was the name of the holiday cottage in North Devon where he proposed to my mother Jean) in a leafy street in the expanding village, as he is teaching crafts, woodworking and sports at the secondary school in Portsmouth, in the poor suburb of Milton; the playground is still an old bomb crater; my mother is still working as a teacher, part time.
There were a few bright notes at least, on the creative front during 1957. Openly (ish) gay (ish) composer Leonard (Lenny) Bernstein & lyricist Stephen Sondheim were to finally complete a new musical (which Bernstein had started in 1949), which opened on Broadway on September 26th, based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but set in the New York Bronx. They had called it ‘West Side Story’. Though it received a mixed critical reception, (the later film released in 1961 was to be what made it ultimately, so successful) they had written a new song for the show ‘Somewhere’,
Someday,
Somewhere,
We’ll find a new way of living
We’ll find a way of forgiving
Somewhere,
There’s a place for us..
It was a song that would go on to grip public hearts, the minds and soul of a new generation, who were ready to throw off the familiar institutions of the fifties as a decade and embrace something new for the sixties; something that was less about traditional family values and more about embracing and accepting the spirit of transformation and diversity. It was not to happen with any great rapidity however: this was a slow burn.
It was nevertheless a theme that was, by 1958, already resonating through the cultural memes of the period. In social history, 1958 saw the Homosexual Law Reform Society founded in the United Kingdom, following on from the Wolfenden report the previous year, initiating a public campaign to make homosexuality legal in the UK. In 1959 Alan Horsfall, a labour councillor for Nelson, Lancashire, tabled a motion to his local Labour party to back the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The motion, perhaps unsurprisingly, was rejected, but Horsfall and fellow activist Antony Grey went on to form the North West Homosexual Law Reform Committee, which again began to put pressure on authorities for law reform.
Culturally by then, there was also a movement by young playrights and writers to look at issues with a more critically & socially attuned political approach than previously, or perhaps it was more that the public was more attuned to accepting and responding to such material and being affected by it, by that time?
The‘Angry Young Men‘were various British novelists and playwrights who emerged in the late 1950s expressing both scorn and disaffection with the established socio-political order of their country. Their impatience and resentment were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the upper and middle classes.
The novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (published as early in the period as 1954) was crystallized in 1956 by the play Look Back in Anger, which became a key, representative work of the movement (and was made into a film in 1959, starring the young Welsh actor, Richard Burton). When the Royal Court Theatre’s press agent described the play’s twenty-six year old author John Osborne as an “angry young man,” the name was eventually also extended to all his contemporaries, who expressed rage at the persistence of class distinctions, pride in their working-class mannerisms, and dislike for anything seen as too highbrow or “phoney.” When Sir Laurence Olivier (who, somewhat amusingly, later came to epitomise a particular type of theatrical luvvy) played the leading role in Osborne’s second play, The Entertainer (1957), the Angry Young Men were acknowledged as the dominant literary force of the latter part of the decade.
South, 1959 (Granada) BFI The first gay drama on British TV
There were also the novelists John Braine (key work Room at the Top, 1957) and Alan Sillitoe (his key work generally acknowledged to be Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958), which were also made into critically acclaimed plays & films. In 1959 Independent Television (ITV), at the time the UK’s only national commercial broadcaster, broadcast the UK’s first gay themed TV drama, South, (made by Granada, ‘from the North’, as its jingle used to announce, so you wouldn’t be in any doubt) starring Peter Wyngarde. Wyngarde was in fact in a long-term relationship with the actor Alan Bates, later infamous for the nude wrestling scene, in Ken Russells ‘Women in Love’ released in 1972), and it was filmed & transmitted as a live performance, as most drama was then and luckily copies still exist. It all seems terribly ‘arch’ today but was strong stuff back in the late fifties.
In film, albeit mainly in American film, there were also some specific, notable movies that looked at the rise (and the ensuing ‘cult’) of the teenager and teenage angst. In particular Rebel Without A Cause (1955) starring James Dean stands out, co-starring Natalia Wood and Sal Mineo, directed by Nicholas Ray and scored by Leonard Rosenman, (who incidentally was James Dean’s roommate at that time). It had a huge influence on me, when I was considering coming out in the mid 70’s, in terms of relating to Dean’s teenage angst. The studio, Warner Bros released the film on October 27, 1955, less than a month after Dean’s death in a car accident on September 30, 1955.
For gay men, there were always rumours, (correctly, as it happens), about Dean’s sexuality and that he and Sal Mineo had had a relationship ‘of some sort’ whilst filming the picture. Sal Mineo, who was gay however, was only fifteen-sixteen at the time (whilst Dean was a relatively much older, twenty-three) and said later that ‘nothing happened between them, although he did have a crush on Dean’. He noted that, ‘if there had been a reciprocation of feelings, “Jimmy” was well-aware of the differences in age and experience.
There’s a story on ‘You Tube’ from Brian Rhodes, who met Sal Mineo in the Manatabee Bar in Toronto in the early Seventies, (entitled ‘The Night I Hung Out with Sal Mineo in a Gay Bar‘); they ‘clicked’ and he says after some conversation and a few beers he eventually asked him directly if there was some sexual tension between the two of them and Mineo confirmed that yes, the director Nicholas Ray had actually wanted them to play it like that anyway. Dean had said that he wanted Mineo to look at him in the ‘same way’ he looked (with desire) at the character that Natalie Wood was playing. Director Nicholas Rey had evidently wanted to go further, with an actual kiss, but the studio (Warner Bros) had completely ruled it out. It is true that if they had put a male/male kiss in, it would certainly have been cut by the censors, as there were some substantial cuts made to the film, before it was awarded even an ‘ X ‘ certificate from the BBFC censors, thus limiting its youth audience considerably to those over 16 years. It was then resubmitted by the studios to see if an ‘A’ certificate was possible but the censors then required ‘so many cuts as to make the continuity nonsensical’, and the studio did not pursue this option any further at the time. The necessity of coensorship when a film is to be publically displayed was to haunt me later, when I too was making films.
However, in 1976 it was resubmitted without the cuts made for the X certificate in 1955 and passed as an ‘AA’, thus allowing those aged 14 and over to see it in the cinema. In June 1985 it was again resubmitted to the BBFC (British Board of Film Censors) for a modern video classification and was awarded a PG (Parental guidance advised) certificate, with the Examiners describing the film as seeming “both old fashioned and harmless” compared to modern programmes aimed at children, such as Grange Hill’.There is now a scene in it where Dean’ pout kisses’ Mineo -almost- on the cheek. I think there is no doubt that if it was remade today it would look quite different to what was shot in 1955, though it is unlikely it would be the ‘classic’ film that the original ‘Rebel’ remains, to this day.
The film has achieved an almost mythical cult status with the LBGTQ community since, perhaps especially for gay and bisexual men as a result of these stories. Certainly it was what particularly attracted me to it, in the mid seventies, when I first viewed it. I have a photo taken then of me that is almost a look-a-like resemblance of Dean, (this more by luck than reality) and I also had a ‘Dean’ T shirt I wore in the period (as did many others) but he was an important character for me, not so much as a role model but more for his angst and interpretation in ‘Rebel’ (but also in his two other key films, East of Eden & Giant) of being misunderstood.
There is something here for me personally when I was a teenager, of being misunderstood by my parents in particular, because of the way I was behaving but not being able to explain why I was behaving in such ways. This isn’t something just confined to gay teens of course but it did strike a particular chord with me. I interpreted the film as seeing his main relationship as being with the Sal Mineo character and of Natalia Wood as being the figure he turned to, in frustration, to express the related emotions. It is an interesting example of how we all view things in very different ways, depending on our lifestyles & emotional engagements.
There is a clip on You Tube (above) that shows, whether there was anything really there or not, that there seems to exists a definite ‘vibe’ between the two young men and I defy anyone to watch it and say there wasn’t! The song incidentally ‘Young as we are’ is sung by Sal Mineo himself but is not on the film, it was released by Mineo’s label in 1959. He did have a great voice and -arguably -was actually, or at least as, talented, as Dean himself. On You Tube debate rages as ever about whether it’s pertinent or appropriate to discuss and speculate on whether the two were gay or bisexual and had any romantic attachments. However, I add one of the responses to these criticisms, as it is put so well, in my opinion:
There is a clip on You Tube that shows, whether there was anything really there or not, that there seems to exists a definite ‘vibe’ between the two young men and I defy anyone to watch it and say there wasn’t! The song incidentally ‘Young as we are’ is sung by Sal Mineo himself but is not on the film, it was released by Mineo’s label in 1959. He did have a great voice and -arguably -was actually, or at least as, talented, as Dean himself.
It’s important to document the contributions people of color and members of the LGBTQ community have made to the history of politics, the arts and sciences. For way too long the history books were filled with straight white men and their achievements. ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ contains a very bold, while at the same time coded, gay infatuation. Something that could not be said outright in the film and the actors themselves could not express and hold onto their careers in the repressed climate of 50’s & 60’s Hollywood. So discussing their sexuality is something that can be done now that couldn’t be done then and is important to understanding the history of film and the society it was created in.
I would agree. It was as important then as now (if not more so) to be able to have some kind of role models, aspirational or otherwise and both these two men fit the bill, though both were dead before they were middle aged. In some ways though that completes the fantasy.
To accompany the magnificent performances from the cast and especially Dean, was a film score that many believe revolutionised film music. Dean took Elia Kazan to a concert of Rosenman’s music, the director was impressed enough to commission him to score East of Eden, though both Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein had to encourage him to accept it.Receiving an Academy Award and Oscar nomination for the work, he merged serialism, jazz and classical rhythms to construct what is still considered to be one of the best modernist film soundtracks. Equally, in music in the late fifties there was an element of liberation in the sounds that were being made, especially in much of western Europe & the USA and broadcast through radio, television & distributed on disc.
So we can see, that the during final years of the fifties, from when I was born in that Portsmouth hospital until aged nearly three and just starting to go to a Nursery school in Cowplain, there were events ongoing, way beyond my personal comprehension, that were just starting to release the handbrake, on a decade of repression. This is not to say that public opinion was suddenly very positive about homosexuality though. Surveys at the time showed that opinion was still overwhelmingly negative in relation to the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and the government knew this. It would take many further changes in society in the UK, as we entered the early sixties, to make any impression at all on this engrained prejudice, the result of years of negativity by both the key institutions and public faces of the day.
ON to Sex, love and life 1.8 Into the Swinging Sixties: surrounded by pervasive conformity(part 1)
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