Pride in face of adversity
SOME years ago I saw the film Victim on television. It portrayed another world: a Britain in which to be gay was to be sentenced to a life living in the shadows, open to blackmail and, far worse, a prison sentence, a world in which gay men were routinely referred to as perverts, associated with paedophilia, spoken of with contempt by everyone else.
That film, ground breaking in its day, has just been rereleased, and it came sharply to mind while viewing AGAINST THE LAW (BBC2), the centrepiece of the BBC’s Gay Britannia season.
Based on a true story about the journalist Peter Wildeblood, this drama took us back into 1950s Britain, when Peter met an airman called Eddie McNally and began a love affair. This love affair involved letters, which were subsequently used in court against him, when he found himself on trial with two other men, Lord Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers, for homosexual offences.
Peter ended up in prison but somewhat to the surprise of the prosecution, the public turned out to be very firmly on his side. A wave of disgust at the men’s treatment and a sense that they had been the victims of a witch hunt led directly to the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967 and gay rights as they exist now.
In these days of gay marriage, it is easy to forget quite how recently it was that gay men essentially lived a life of fear. The programme makers were very good at evoking a Britain of smoky pubs and dark secrets, a world in which the excellent Daniel Mays as Wildeblood asserted calmly “I’m a homosexual” in what we would now recognise as a gay joint. “I thought only doctors called us that!” squawked his companion; to the rest of them they were all queens.
The world has changed: all the men wore suits and ties, exuding an air of quiet respectability, which highlighted the injustice when they ended up in the dock. Looking back you also have to wonder about the motives of some of the men involved and by that I mean the straight ones: the then Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe wanted to expunge homosexuality from society. A case of the gentleman protesting too much?
Maxwell Fyfe was mentioned by name by one of a number of elderly gay men, who featured as a series of talking heads interspersed with the scenes of the drama, as they reflected on what life had been like back then.
Their stories were quite as touching as the drama being played out as they reflected on their loneliness and isolation. There was the odd fascinating nugget, too: one pointed out that in the gay world then, the class system didn’t exist in the way it did everywhere else and that as a gay working class man, he mixed with members of the aristocracy, which would not have been so for his straight friends.
This was a really thoughtprovoking drama with a justified undercurrent of anger at the way gay men were treated.
What came across most strongly was the contempt in which they were held, by everyone from their teachers upwards, until they were adults and it turned into full blown persecution. At least this is not the case now.
Peter Wildeblood, who deserves to be seen as a gay icon in much the way Oscar Wilde is, wrote a book about his experiences, on which this drama was based. And even this old stick-in-the-mud accepts not all change is for the bad.