Why Sian Phillips’ new role in LGBT film deserves to be seen by as many people as possible
IWATCHED a beautiful love story this week called Time & Again. Filmed in Cardiff and starring Dame Sian Phillips, it was just half an hour long. But those 30 minutes attempted to make up for years and years of this kind of love being invisible on Welsh screens.
Not only did it show what women know to be perfectly normal, but popular culture still recoils from – the fact that even when we’re old we feel passion – it portrayed emotional and physical love between two octogenarian women.
Its writer, producer and director, Rachel Dax, believes this is a first.
I certainly can’t think of any other positive representation of an elderly lesbian relationship in film or television drama.
Which, when you come to think of it, is a startling state of affairs in the 21st century.
And to get this story made Rachel had to do it without any backing from a studio or broadcaster.
Shot in two and a half days on a minuscule budget which she scraped together herself, it is an astonishing achievement given those restrictions.
The involvement of Dame Sian – who also helped bring veteran actress Brigit Forsyth to the project – was transformative.
Once the Welsh acting icon had seen Rachel’s script she immediately wanted to do the film.
The story was partly inspired by older gay people fearing prejudice in care homes.
We see Dame Sian’s character, Eleanor, being reunited with Isabelle (Brigit Forsyth) who arrives in the same care home 60 years after their relationship was torn apart by family opposition.
Isabelle had complied with her parents’ wishes and entered a loveless marriage, while Eleanor remained true to her sexuality, going
on to live the life she wanted, but sacrificed her bond with her mother and father, who never spoke to her again.
These brutal choices reflect the reality many lesbians of this generation would have faced, as Rachel told the BBC.
“I think the main thing is families would be ashamed,” she said.
“It was very much like forced marriage. They were told ‘if you don’t marry, we’re disowning you’. Lots of lesbians went to London.”
But Time & Again is anything but grim and, without too many spoiler alerts, an uplifting denouement awaits.
“It’s not all doom and gloom, and shows in your old age you can heal,” Rachel explains, adding: “I think older women in general tend to be treated like they don’t have any sexuality. I think it is important for lesbian visibility. Not all, but a lot of LGBT films with older characters are more male-focused.”
Time & Again is being shown at Barry Pride on September 19 and will also have screenings at the Cardiff International Film Festival in October, but it deserves a pan-Wales platform.
Let’s hope BBC Wales, who hosted the screening in the build-up to this weekend’s Pride Cymru event, can broadcast it.
If these kind of fictional stories deserve the biggest possible audience the same goes for Wales’ factual LGBT history, which has remained in the shadows until very recently.
The first book exploring the experiences of notable Welsh lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people through the centuries was only published last year. In the introduction to Forbidden Lives – LGBT Stories from Wales (Seren Books), author Norena Shopland outlines the challenges researching such a work presents. After all, the mainstream historical narrative we have all grown up with in Wales is resolutely male, heterosexual and British.
So Norena’s mission was to “read between the lines” to uncover hidden lives, as she explains: “Once outside the famous names such as Ivor Novello, the Ladies of Llangollen and more modern people such as Sarah Waters and Gareth Thomas things became harder. Trying to find the everyday lives of people became an
exercise in ‘bit-picking’ from other works. For much of what had existed had been shattered.
“For example, Frances Power Cobbe destroyed both her and her partner Mary Lloyd’s letters and diaries. Nothing they did was illegal, women were not affected by a ban in law the way that men were, but society did not approve and so the material was destroyed.
“Consequently, we are left to pick around in the letters and diaries of others to piece together stories about LGBT people in history.
“Over the years I have done much picking at bits and pieces and this book represents that.
“This is the first work highlighting real lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and events in and from Wales.”
A second pioneering work will arrive on the shelves this October. A Little Gay History of Wales (University of Wales Press) by Dr Daryl Leeworthy tells a big story.
The historian, who was brought up in Pontypridd, draws on a rich array of archival sources and oral testimony to examine the experience of ordinary Welsh LGBT men and women from the Middle Ages to the present day.
It’s the narrative of poets who wrote about same-sex love and translators who worked to create a language to describe it; activists who campaigned for equality and politicians who created the legislation providing it; teenagers ringing advice lines for guidance on coming out and revellers in the pioneering bars and clubs on a Friday and Saturday night.
It is also a study of prejudice and of intolerance, of emigration and isolation, of HIV/AIDS and Section 28.
And for its author, it’s also a deeply personal project: “My childhood and adolescence coincided almost exactly with the implementation and enforcement of Section 28,” Daryl explains. “Introduced in 1988 when I was a toddler, it was abolished in 2003 when I was in my final year of sixth form.
“Its legacy was still palpable when I went up to Oxford in the autumn of 2004. Talking to friends and former teachers in more recent times, it is clear just how fundamentally the legislation marked – and continues to mark – those of us who went to school during the period of its existence. To be blunt: this is a book that should have been written a long time ago.
“In other words, I wrote the Little History because I felt it should exist and that the longer such a book didn’t exist, the poorer we are here in Wales intellectually and culturally. Call it my revenge on Section 28!
“But it’s also a book that is very much about the ordinary men and women who we might now describe as LGBT, and I’ve tried to reflect the diversity of the community as far as possible, too.
“So the Muslim sailors who landed in Cardiff and had sex with local men; or the woman (Daphne Higuera) from Caerphilly who established Wales’ first-ever gay women’s support group in the early 1970s; or Tim Foskett, a student from London studying at Cardiff, who helped to create the first Pride march in the city in 1985; or the two ladies – Jamie and Eileen, active Christians – who ran Lan Farm in Pontypridd as an LGBT hostel in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“I wanted to move away from LGBT history as being about the great and the good – the Ladies of Llangollen, Viscount Tredegar, Ivor Novello, Rhys Davies, even (heaven forbid) Edward II, etc – and make it about the rest of us.
“When those pioneers marched through Cardiff in 1985 they shouted ‘we are everywhere’, but what does that mean if our histories only talk about the people whose lives are far more easily documented?
“I also wanted a book that could form the basis of a better understanding of heritage and the ways in which gay, or gay-friendly, spaces existed in far more places than we often realise.
“Even now I’m learning about new ones.
“If you look in the columns of the pink press of the 1970s, for instance, they tell you that Gay News was sold in the Salisbury Hotel in Ferndale, that Merthyr had Britain’s most boring gay scene (but by implication, it had one) and that there was even a branch of the Gay Liberation Front in Aberdare.
“I hesitate to call this hidden history: those who needed to know, did know.
“But for today’s generation of young people, or tomorrow’s, knowing that someone else from your community was LGBT is both powerful and comforting.
“Like all minorities it is important to know that you are not alone, that your experience is not unique.
“That’s the value of this type of history – of the history of us – it means we don’t always have to start over.”
Cardiff is hosting Pride Cymru this weekend – Wales’ biggest celebration of equality and diversity.
Around 50,000 people will enjoy a mile-long parade and entertainment, music and comedy in support of our LGBT+ community.
It is an event that shows modern, inclusive Wales at its best, but we also need to take Pride in the LGBT heritage and history of our nation – whether it’s expressed in the drama of Time & Again or through the pioneering research of Norena Shopland and Dr Daryl Leeworthy.