Gay interest was surely aroused by the preview of Shame (the single and video), combining the talents of Gary Barlow and Robbie Williams for the first time since the latter went defiantly solo 15 years ago. Since then to his recent marriage, Robbie has pursued an unevenly successful career, teasing us with ambiguous messages as to his queer credentials.
Now we have a song of reconciliation and a video with clear visual references to Brokeback Mountain and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Barlow and Williams dance holding token females in a bar whilst gazing longingly into each others’ eyes. They both strip to the waist (showing some evident gym work), race joyfully to the top of a mountain ridge with a lake far below it, and then turn their faces back to the sun just as you think they will join hands and jump.
The end of this romantic sequence is perhaps symbolic of what Barlow has admitted may be only an eighteen month joint venture with the band, with Robbie likely to resume his lone career after that. What deserves deeper examination is the gay factor in all this, and how it helps us to decode the hidden meaning of the song’s chorus, “What a shame we never listened…” Read the rest of this entry »
Biggles took to the skies long before James Bond came to life in the imagination of Ian Fleming. A great British hero, invented by prolific writer Captain W. E. Johns, was fighting our country’s enemies. Through over a hundred books ( many now sought-after by collectors), Biggles along with his cousin Algernon (Algy) Lacey and the young Ginger Hebblethwaite were adventurers in a white European male-dominated world - far removed from gay cultural developments to come.
While Johns, a First World War pilot (who reached the rank of Lieutenant), went on to pursue a settled heterosexual lifestyle, closer reading of his stories may surprise us in their suggestion of a hero very much in tune with the modern gay movement, even down to some dubious titles: Biggles Gets His Men (1950 ), Biggles Takes It Rough (1961 ), Biggles Takes A Hand (1962 ), and Biggles Sees Too Much (1968 ).
No one could doubt James Bond’s liking for women (reflecting Fleming’s own sexual fantasies), laid on with a trowel in character names like Pussy Galore. By complete contrast, in one book Biggles comments that he much prefers smoking to contact with the opposite sex!
Fast forwarding to the 2005 tv episode of Dr Who which introduced Captain Jack, an RAF volunteer, and we find a character who is a conscious tribute to Biggles, even to the point of having a friend called Algy. Gay actor John Barrowman has since made the role of Captain Jack ( in Dr Who and the Torchwood series) very much his own. Read the rest of this entry »
Lee Alexander McQueen, aged only 40 and found dead by his own hand on the eve of his idolized mother’s funeral, was a gay fashion designer of undisputed genius. He combined Savile Row craftsmanship with rare imaginative style, from rippling visions of Kate Moss to the intersexual video posturings of Lady Gaga. His last act inevitably stirs memories of the shooting of Gianni Versace in 1997. Self-described as the “pink sheep” of his Lewisham-born family, McQueen was always confidently out and gay, as reflected in his bizarre and spectacular shows. It is significant though that he once compared his creations to armour, giving protection to the wearer, hinting at an inner vulnerability which had its own unerring cut and motif. Read the rest of this entry »
Best known as a gay activist, writer, artist and filmmaker, Derek Jarman’s physical end in 1994 followed an heroic and well-documented struggle with AIDS. A last act was to make a film whose completely blue screen and soundtrack commentary was a brave testament to having gone blind. He lies over Romney Marsh in one of England’s most beautiful sheep-frequented chuchyards, in the towering presence of a two thousand year-old yew tree.
Derek Jarman
Jarman was a gay renaissance man, cheekily canonised by the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence in a shoreline ceremony before his clapboard cottage and lovingly created sculpture garden, where he managed to grow a profusion of bright flowers and herbs in the nuclear terrain of Dungeness. His journals similarly captured the vibrancy of gay life and gay politics against the backdrop of a Thatcherite Britain.
The rebel in Jarman was closely shadowed by a late 1940s, early 1950s upbringing, travelling to rather grand places as the career of his RAF father Lance dictated. This ambivalence showed itself in Jarman’s appetite for lying across Charing Cross Road protesting with Jimmy Somerville with members of Outrage!, his attraction to cruising and all the liberating elements of the thriving London scene, and a private reticence at betraying the values of his parents’ privileged world. In paint, celluloid and intimate writings Jarman wrestled with his vision of a new gay Jerusalem.
It was Jarman who took the homoerotic story of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a young man pierced with arrows, featured in such gay literature as Yukio Mishima’s Confessions Of A Mask, to make the film Sebastiane in 1976. Not only was the dialogue in Latin, giving it a certain stylistic campness, but as a way of looking positively at gay sex, it was a pioneering British production. Read the rest of this entry »
October is Black History Month, and human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has criticised the Black History Month organisers for not celebrating the sexuality of black heroes such as Malcolm X.
Malcolm X
Speaking in the Guardian Tatchell expresses concern that the Black History Month website fails to identify the majority of past black figures who are LGBT, including Malcolm X who Tatchell has identified as bisexual. Tatchell states
“Perhaps it is unintentional but Black History Month sometimes feels like Straight Black History Month. Famous black LGBT people are not acknowledged and celebrated. Either their contribution to black history and culture is ignored or their sexuality is air-brushed out of their biographies.”
