HOW disappointing. The BBC has announced a series of programmes to mark the 50th anniversary of The Sexual Offences Act 1967, which was a landmark event in the history of gay rights. And yet the programmes look as if they are going to contribute very little indeed to moving society further forward. Gay Britannia, as the series is called, looks like it could set us all back by quite a few years.
There are a couple of problems. The first is that the 1967 act decriminalised homosexual acts between gay men in private in England and Wales only – it did not apply to the whole of the UK. In fact, Scotland did not follow suit until 1980. Yes, 1980. Under Margaret Thatcher. That’s an extraordinary fact isn’t it, and extraordinarily recent? Gay Britannia cannot pretend to address the history of British gay rights unless it includes the Scottish dimension.
However, the bigger problem with the programmes is how they, once again, perpetuate all the old gay themes without any making any attempt to approach the subject from a new angle. The stories told in Gay Britannia are mostly about violence, depression, prejudice, and victimhood, as if that is the whole story of the gay experience. It isn’t. Not even most of it.
You wouldn’t know that though if you looked at Gay Britannia. Radio 4 will explain all the ways the gay community has been ostracised; a BBC Three show will explain why gay people are more vulnerable to mental health problems; and there will be a documentary about physical attacks on gay people.
All of these issues need exploring, but to put them at the forefront almost every time gay issues are explored on TV is to take a deeply old-fashioned approach. I recently watched the 1961 film Victim, which stars Dirk Bogarde as a gay man being blackmailed, and the entire movie is about how terrible and dangerous being gay is. That was 56 years ago, but sometimes it feels like mainstream culture’s approach to gay issues hasn’t really moved on. It is still all about being a victim.
And there’s another problem with Gay Britannia, which is that it could perpetuate the homophobia it purports to fight. Most of the programmes will be preaching to the converted, but if regular audiences do switch on and see all the misery, they are likely to believe what people believed 50 years ago: that a gay life is a terrible life.
What we should be doing instead is tackling homophobia in a much more subtle way. A few weeks ago I spoke to the performer Rory O’Neill, who is better known as Panti Bliss, the drag queen whose speech about homophobia played a pivotal role in making Ireland vote for gay marriage in 2015. Rory’s argument is that homophobia is everywhere in society. “To grow up in a society that is overwhelmingly homophobic and to escape unscathed would be miraculous,” he says.
The point is that tackling that deep kind of homophobia is tricky and Gay Britannia will do very little to help. A much better option would be for many more gay people to be on TV, in drama and documentaries, on the news, just getting on with things, like everyone else does. That, rather than going on about how terrible things are, would be the greatest kind of equality.