Good As You: From Prejudice To Pride – 30 Years Of Gay Britain
By Paul Flynn
Ebury, £20
Review by David Robinson
WHEN the social historians get to grips with the times of our lives, they’ll hover around a date that most of us have already forgotten about. On June 16, 2013, the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act was approved by the House of Commons. Equal rights for gays had finally, and fully, arrived.
If no-one remembers that day, it’s because Parliament was only catching up with the rest of the country. Lesbians and gays, we had already collectively decided, were no different from the rest of us in any way that mattered. Even a majority of Tory MPs – the very party, remember, which only a few years previously had been arguing that schools should never portray homosexuality in a positive light – now effectively admitted that they’d been wrong ever to think that. The majority of Tory peers – Tory peers! – in favour of the new bill was even bigger.
What had happened? Why was gay marriage suddenly no big deal when, less than 50 years earlier in England and Wales (and as recently as 1980 in Scotland), sex between two consenting adult males could result in a prison sentence?
In Good As You, Paul Flynn makes a convincing case that whereas LGBT equality in the US followed the law, here it followed the culture. Back in 1984, it was Jimmy Somerville with Smalltown Boy at No 3 in the charts, Holly Johnson singing about the male orgasm at No 2 and (though we didn’t realise it at the time) George Michael topping the pops with Wake Me Up Before You Go Go. Many others would remain in the closet for years, but the clues about our culture’s direction were there if you cared to look: Freddie Mercury hoovering up publicity with the MTV-banned I Want To Break Free; the homoerotic cover of The Smiths’ debut Hand In Glove; and well, take your pick – Boy George, Marilyn, Mark Almond, Pete Burns. “These weren’t,” as Flynn notes, “figures at the margin of British culture. They were its home-grown stars.”
This is too personal a book to be a definitive account of Britain’s pink revolution. Flynn is a journalist, not a social historian, so he stays clear of analysing who made the biggest difference in pushing public opinion towards tolerance, either individually (Elton John? Boy George?) or collectively (politicians? activists?). “There are as many different versions, time-frames and perspectives as there are LGBT people,” he says, which may be true but sounds like a cop-out all the same.
And yet Flynn’s own life could almost have been purposely designed for him to be a chronicler of Britain’s U-turn over gay rights. Born in Manchester, he came of age just as Britain’s first glass-fronted gay bar opened in that city's Canal Street. The country’s first gay urban village developed around it. Channel 4’s 1999 gay drama Queer As Folk couldn’t possibly have been set anywhere else.
By then, Flynn was working in London on the gay magazine Attitude, meeting some of the figures interviewed here (an eclectic line-up including Will Young, Lord Chris Smith, Russell T Davies and Kylie Minogue) and charting the emergence of metrosexuality and the celebration of male beauty in magazines. In that context, Attitude’s interview with David Beckham “probably had as much impact in tackling old-fashioned values about male sexuality as Peter Tatchell’s entire career”, the magazine’s founding editor tells him. Even the Sun, under the editorship of David Yelland (1998-2003) started sounding a bit more tolerant.
Again, though, what made the difference? Flynn puts the focus firmly on the mass media. Take soap operas. True, Manchester’s Coronation Street stayed well clear of Canal Street, but it was created by the openly gay Tony Warren, and “you don’t get gayer than Ena Sharples”. It was the same story in EastEnders, where the show’s gay co-creator Tony Holland admitted that leading character Angie Watts was based on him. Yet in terms of mass impact, nothing compared to the relationship between Barry and Colin acted out in front of an astonishing 20 million viewers in 1985 by Gary Hailes (a straight actor, now a cabbie) and Michael Cashman (a gay actor, now a Labour peer).
From Attitude, Flynn moved on to working on a book about Big Brother, and although he makes some pretty big claims for the influence of reality TV, in those early years before it slid off into unwatchable vulgarity, he might have a point. The millions who saw Anna Nolan’s easygoing charm or Brian Dowling’s vulnerability – winners of the first two series – were also seeing far beyond the old cliched image of lesbians and gays. This was the lesson of the previous 20 years of British culture and the reason the hostile reaction from Middle Britain that New Labour had feared when they started introducing gay rights never materialised. Because by then, we – even those of us who in our youth routinely called gay men “poofs” – knew better. And Flynn’s book – impressionistic perhaps but informed and well-written – shows why.
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