LGBT+
Tom Birchenough
Finnish director Dome Karukoski has made a sympathetic and quietly stylish biopic of Touko Laaksonen, the artist who did as much as anyone to define 20th century male gay visual culture. There’s a degree of irony in the fact that we know him by his national pseudonym – he started signing his work “Tom” for anonymity, while “of Finland” was thought up by an American publisher – given that post-war Helsinki is depicted here as about as repressive an environment for a young man exploring his sexuality as could be imagined. Asked at one point whether he has published his work in his homeland Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
As chat-up lines go, “I can’t do my fly up single-handed” is pretty full on – even if it is true. Thomas March (James McArdle) is speaking to James Berryman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who not only went to the same public school but has also just saved his life on the Italian front during World War Two. Furthermore, the come-on works. The wounded soldiers are soon sucking face.Man in an Orange Shirt is Patrick Gale’s first TV screenplay. He’s a master of middle-class misery whose novels read like Alan Hollinghurst for beginners. Think pink potboilers, albeit very well written ones, that explore Read more ...
David Nice
Like his smash-hit My Night With Reg, Kevin Elyot's first and last plays have a role to play in the history of gay theatre, but do they work? Emphatically not in the case of Twilight Song (★★), completed – one is tempted to say, sketched – shortly before his death in 2014, though four out of five actors at the admirable Park Theatre give it their best shot. Coming Clean (★★★) is a different matter: a frank and well-structured essay in a crumbling relationship from the early 1980s, before AIDS truly came to the fore in the London scene.Unfortunately Coming Clean – the innuendo isn't pertinent Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Part of the BBC's Gay Britannia season, here was a programme fulfilling what it said on the tin: prominent LGBTQ (when will all these expanding acronyms cease to confuse us all) figures narrating, examining, discussing, analysing, letting it all hang out about LGBTQ folk and the arts during the past half-century. The usual suspects were interviewed, from Maggi Hambling – her smoking more shocking than anything else on the programme – to Stephen Fry, Sandy Toksvig and David Hockney, although there was no Alan Bennett or Grayson Perry.In the 1960s before the act that partially Read more ...
David Benedict
The thing almost no one remembers about the great Nora Ephron/Rob Reiner 1989 romcom When Harry Met Sally is that the love story is intercut with real couples talking to camera about the mechanics and longevity of their true-life loves. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Remarkably, Fergus O’Brien’s deeply moving BBC film Against the Law, armed with far darker material, pulls off the self-same trick. Surprising though that may sound – this is a drama about fear and loathing in 1950s Britain – it is also highly appropriate since it is, in so many ways, a story about love.Unless you’re up to speed Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Victim was released in 1961. Six years would pass before the passing of the Sexual Offences Act cautiously exempted from prosecution men over 20 who had consensual sex in private. Yet the Basil Dearden suspenser probably played an equally important part in de-stigmatising homosexuality by highlighting the ugliness of homophobia.Dirk Bogarde is needle-sharp as Melville Farr, a sophisticated London barrister with a successful practice who is about to become a QC - and whose tamping down of his homosexuality has filled him with angst. He lives peaceably, however, with his wife Laura (Sylvia Syms Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
It’s half a century since homosexuality was partially decriminalised in England and Wales, so who better to cast his gaze over the lie of the land than stately homo Rupert Everett? The accomplished actor (and even finer diarist) started as he meant to go on in 50 Shades of Gay by disappearing down a manhole in Manchester. His mission? To relive the heady days of “cottaging” – sex in public conveniences – with a former copper whose job it was to catch men at it. And not a single mention of dear, departed George Michael.Cruising was a dangerous pursuit that could lead to exposure and ruin Read more ...
Saskia Baron
For those of us still mourning John Hurt, this lovely HD restoration of the actor’s favourite film is a real joy. Made in 1975 for Thames Television, it’s stood the test of time remarkably well. Funny, moving and often cited as a turning point in British acceptance of homosexuality, The Naked Civil Servant is based on the aphoristic autobiography of Quentin Crisp, who famously described himself as “one of the stately homos of England”. Born Denis Pratt in 1908 into a respectable suburban family, he reinvented himself as the flamboyantly camp Quentin Crisp, rent-boy, artists’ model, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
2017 is proving the year of celebrating queer. To mark 50 years of the decriminalisation of homosexuality, we are enjoying a host of cultural and historical reminders, from Tate Britain to the British Library, and many locations in between, all affording a degree of prominence that over most of the last century would have been inconceivable. And now we have Peter Ackroyd’s Queer City to put it all in context – 'Twas ever thus, if you like – charting the history of gay life in the capital from the Romans to the present day.The historian par exellence of London, and chronicler of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With some re-releases, the fascination is not only discovering the work of a director, but also the environment and context in which he or she worked. This immaculate BFI restoration of two films by the Filipino master Lino Brocka (1939-1991) is a case in point: Isiang and Manila in the Claws of Light are from the mid-Seventies, when his native land was under Ferdinand Marcos-imposed martial law. The key player in both is the city of Manila itself, in particular its slums where life is hard, and human life cheap.With Isiang, Brocka may have been the first director from the Philippines to Read more ...
David Nice
"Good for the history of music, but not for music," one of Prokofiev's professors at the St Petersburg Conservatoire used to say of artistically dubious works which created a splash, according to the composer's diaries. I'm not even sure that this show is good for the history of art, though it's certainly enriching for the burgeoning discipline of queer theory, and food for thought whether or not you agree with the choices and the stance of the curator, Clare Barlow. And it's especially admirable that it's happening while the Tate is also showing major exhibitions of gay artists David Hockney Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Park Chan-wook is a Korean decadent and moralist who’d have plenty to say to Aubrey Beardsley. The lesbian pulp Victoriana of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith proves equally amenable in this opulently lurid mash-up with a novelist he adores so much (the director once took a holiday to Tipping the Velvet’s Whitstable setting).Park himself calls The Handmaiden a “fan fiction” rewrite of Waters’ novel, but in transposing it to 1930s Korea, the Oldboy director sinks it deep into his own sensibilities. The country is a Japanese colonial outpost, where top-hatted Japanese toffs are sweatily entertained at Read more ...