Someday,
Somewhere,
We’ll find a new way of living
We’ll find a way of forgiving
Somewhere
There’s a place for us
Somewhere a place for us
Peace and quiet and open air
Wait for us somewhere
Pet Shop Boys: Somewhere (1997) after Bernstein (1957), lyrics for musical ‘West Side Story’
A 21 year old youth
He believes he’s found his life at last
After that long period of needless fear
And yet, as he sits, takes up his pen
Thinks so fondly of departed years
So much to learn that seems completely new
Of course- he has everything to live for, it’s clear.
But looking back, does it seem so bad?
On reflection, he is not quite so sure.
(Wiseman 1979)
At some stage everyone I met then -and many I still meet now- had taken that jump. It was a little like going to a cliff edge and peering over. It felt like that. You talked about it as a throwaway line in a conversation, pretty close to first contact: ‘So how did you come out? The answers you’d get would vary wildly but all accepted it as process from which there was no going back. Everything afterwards, like it or not, was predicated on the notion of moving on, moving forward, the next step. All those musical questions, cliches that we had hummed, danced to, allowed to roll around in our heads, suddenly seemed uniquely relevant: ‘How could something so wrong feel so right?’ It was hard to just dip your toe in, find the water was indeed warm and not want to get further drawn in. Meeting people like yourself for the first time, understanding and sharing their experiences, understanding that doubt, fear, panic. Really? You felt that way then too!? So I’m not crazy, or ill, or bad, or damned?
Where were you? Who were you with? How did it go, what did they say, what happened next? Were you nervous, were you scared, did it feel like a release, did you feel sick, could you speak, did you cry, did they cry, was it violent, were you both alone? Was it dark, was there light, were you happy, were you panicking, were you shouting, were you calm?
Were you with friends, were you at home, were you out, outside, was it wet, cold, sunny, hot, raining? Were you eating, were you drinking, in your right mind, out of your mind, out of your brain, on the rack, feeling blue, feeling empty, full, feeling beside yourself?
Was it the same for you, was it hell for you, was it at all easy for you, was it ever the same again? Were you ever the same again? Was there a feeling that a weight had been released, expunged from your heart, soul, lungs, body, mind?
When you first met, even after sex, you might spend ages talking about it; if it felt good nearly all the first night: talking about how it was for you, how it could be for you, how it might go, how dreams might happen, how life might get lived, how things could go, might go, where you wanted to go, maybe together.. hold my hand, we’re half way there, I’ll take you there, somehow, some day, somewhere: sweet dreams were ever made of this.
When we were a bit older, a bit less innocent, we used to joke about it to our best mates back then. ‘He had me married and moved in on the first night, yeh; a bit too intense for me really‘. But in those heady, first encounters, it was sometimes so easy to construct a better future, a more perfect future. To feel that we could somehow, someway, fit into the way we hoped it was meant to be. That perhaps we could please everyone that needed to be pleased, shape a future that ticked all, or at least most, of the boxes.
The pressure to conform then was undoubtedly huge; there were few obvious alternative role models that we could identify with, so few people that we could look at and see that they had found a way forward. Retrospectively, it is easier to see that there were couples in the UK who had lived together, formed partnerships, been accepted in closed communities but they were simply not publicised or promoted then. The books that sold and were read by people then were the salacious ones that said everyone in a same sex partnership was doomed to failure, to scandal, to gossip, to hell, in a handcart. In America, magazines in the 1950’s and 60’s like the National Enquirer, Lowdown, Confidential all had large sales primarily through peddling a lot of gossip and rumour about things that ended badly. Sometimes very badly. This is what all too often we had grown up seeing and thinking and usually what our parents and grandparents thought. Why on earth, they said, would you want to confine yourself to a lifetime of that?
The mainstream entertainment industry both in the UK -but equally throughout America and Europe & indeed more widely – was equally poor in relation to providing identifiable role models. Books such as Vito Russo’s 1981 classic, The Celluloid Closet which highlighted the historical contexts that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people had occupied in cinema history, and showed the evolution of the entertainment industry’s role in shaping perceptions of these figures, had yet to be released. In particular Russo addressed the secrecy, which initially defined, what was thought to be by many, deviant sexuality, but which at least examined the issue: that such relationships were happening but being covered up. But in the mid seventies all that was yet to come out to the general public, more widely than those ‘in the know’, in the industry.
In the UK, television programmes that stood out like The Naked Civil Servant, (clip from programme) based on Quentin Crisp’s 1968 book of the same name, were well written, produced and well acted with John Hurt in its lead role, and directed by Jack Gold. It was produced by Verity Lambert who had a fine pedigree, she was for instance the founding producer of the science-fiction series Doctor Who. It was first broadcast on 17 December 1975, as a 77-minute play, and produced by Thames Television for the ITV network. For his performance, Hurt won the BAFTA for ‘Best Actor’ in 1976, the production also won the prestigious Prix Italia prize in 1976, it was shown on US channel WOR-TV and later on PBS.
In fact, remarkably, in 2000, the film was placed fourth in a poll by industry professionals to find the BFI TV100, which was chosen by a poll of industry professionals, to determine what were the greatest British television programmes of any genre ever to have been screened (Doctor Who was third) but it was the highest ITV production on the list and the second highest drama on the list (‘Cathy Come Home’ was above it). Whilst its credentials are sound, unfortunately the drama had a very negative effect on a lot of young gay men who had watched it, as many later conversations I had with men that I personally met and spoke to, confirmed. It seemed to confirm to me that the particular trope of gay men as outcasts in society was perfectly valid. There must (surely?) have been certain men for whom the story was quite life affirming but I suspect they were in the vast minority.
For me, it was a reminder that seemed to suggest I would be unlikely to relate to such men I met and that to go forwards in society was going to be an extremely difficult and painful process. Other such stereotypical presentations of gay men abounded in the media then and have been well documented since. It is now possible in retrospect and with the benefit of -decades of- hindsight to view these characters as representations of a particular type of a powerfully alternate, strongly delineated sexuality, that certainly existed in the latter half of the 20th century. For me personally however, such representations made the notion of being accepted and moving forwards with my life in society positively a lot more difficult. It was a long time before I could personally forgive Quentin Crisp for his brand of homosex. Having said that it is a very good drama.
An important shoutout then, to the very few populist positive portrayals around at the time I was coming out and the people making them happen. One of the first positive role models I ever saw for out gay men was in 1979 on an ITV drama series by London Weekend Television (LWT) called Agony, with Maureen Lipman in the lead role.
Lipman portrayed a fictional successful agony aunt Jane Lucas, whose own personal life was a mess. It was created by Len Richmond, an American writer from Santa Monica, California and the real-life agony aunt, Anna Raeburn, who co wrote all of the first series. (The second and third series were written by Stan Hey and Andrew Nickolds). Anna Raeburn had already developed a very positive reputation with many, in the 1970’s, on the popular late night problem phone-in show on London’s commercial radio station Capital Radio (where Kenny Everett also became hugely popular as a DJ around the same period) called Anna And The Doc. The journalist Vincent Graff said of the show: “If you were a baffled teenager trying to find your way in the world, Anna and the Doc gave you the roadmap.” She had already offered invaluable advice to many young gay men beset with fears on this late night forum (and I was one of them) and so was an ideal writer to co-create and write a populist commercial script.
Although there had already been an American sitcom drama with a recurring gay character, Billy Crystal in ‘Soap’ (see above for clip) from 1977) as the wikipedia entry notes Agony ‘was the first British sitcom to portray a gay couple as non-camp, witty, intelligent and happy people’. By today’s standards though, it’s quite interesting watching it now, how ‘camp’ those two men do still seem – or maybe it is just how the actors decided they needed to play the roles. Jeremy Bulloch & Micheal Denyer were cast as the -middle class- gay couple bringing their issues and problems to Jane to help solve.
Jeremy Bulloch is now retired but became best known for the role of the bounty hunter Boba Fett in the original Star Wars trilogy but also appeared in many British television and film productions, including Doctor Who and Robin of Sherwood. Peter Denyer (who sadly died in 2009, aged 62) is probably now best remembered for playing Dennis Dunstable from 1971-1973 in LWT’s Please Sir and its spin-off series The Fenn Street Gang, taking on the role of a teenager, when already into his 20’s (which is still quite common in youth drama: ELITE (montage from series 4) at al, I’m looking your way ).
There is, nevertheless huge kudos due to both actors for agreeing to play these ground breaking roles, which certainly helped me, as a young 22 year old, just coming out gay man at the time, realise that it was very possible -at least in the media’s eyes- to live as a gay couple and have friends who recognised and valued such a relationship, who helped you celebrate the good times and helped see you through the bad times.
Agony’s creation, script and values were recognised professionally when it went on to win the Banff International Television Festival’s “Best Situation Comedy” award, beating two of the largest American drama shows of the time, “Mash” and “Taxi”.
It was far ahead of its time and it would be another seven years before there was a similarly positive portrayal of gay character(s) in a popular TV drama series, in fact arguably not until Michael Cashman played the character Colin Russell, in the BBC soap opera EastEnders, his character appearing between the 5 August 1986 and 23 February 1989.
He was also to go on to become ‘iconic’ in his own right of course, campaigning for lesbian & gay rights and particularly for his tireless campaigning against ‘Section 28’ in the following decades. There was also the character of Gordon Collins on Brookside who came out onscreen as gay in 1986. It would be another long five years on, before in 1991 BBC TV again portrayed a gay couple in the long running comedy drama The Brittas Empire (1991-1997) where Tim and Gavin (Gavin Featherly & Tim Whistler, played by Tim Marriott and Russell Porter) are a couple working at a ‘Brittas’ leisure centre, that the series was based around, who, throughout the seven series choose not to tell some people of their relationship due to the fear of being fired. The ‘joke’ centred around the fact that their homophobic boss was innocently oblivious to their relationship for the seven series, although this ‘joke’ clearly mirrored fact for many gay men in this period.
Di me! Tell me! Such a simple question, so many answers, so much talking to do. When did you come out? Somewhere, somehow…
But I am rushing ahead; even in the early nineties things had changed. Back in the late seventies, it was not so easy and the first thing you had to think about, as a gay man coming out, was where you might even meet like minded souls?
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