I was looking through some old files, when I came across the piece below. I often contribute to York St John’s LGBT History Month events, and had been asked if I would video a contribution for an event on LGBT icons and idols. When I started thinking about the piece, I was hugely enjoying Sally Wainwright’s Last Tango in Halifax. Who could believe that a prime time, Sunday night, BBC family saga drama featured a lesbian single mum as one of the leads, settled down in domestic bliss by series three with her female partner? Then, just before LGBT History Month, the series reached its denouement, and I had to write my talk again. Here is a piece I delivered in 2015.
My LGBT icons and idols (February 2015, York St John University)
My icons and idols are fictional: Johnny and Omar from the 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette. As I lived slap bang in the middle of Salisbury Plain, where half my school friends came from MOD families or worked up the NAFFI, and everyone apart from Steve and his mum were white, they might not seem like obvious role models. That and the fact that they were men. But Johnny and Omar made such a big impression on me because they offered an alternative to the world I lived in. They lived in London, to my eyes excitingly edgy with urban decay. I lived in the midst of green fields, military manoeuvres and cruise missile deployments. Of course, Johnny and Omar had to battle horrendous racism and the National Front, something that the film foregrounded. On the plus side, however, at least they lived somewhere where there were people from outside the Avon Valley. (The Avon Valley is very nice, I hasten to add, but little appreciated by the teen me.) If I worked hard and passed my A-levels, I could get into university, move to London, too, and the world would be my oyster.
This was the era of Thatcher and her Victorian Values. Section 28 was looming on the horizon. Pretty much everything you heard about being gay in my environment was negative. I found a copy of The Well of Loneliness but I never got past the front cover and the first few pages. It seemed to be about a girl who wanted to be called Stephen. I knew a lot of Stephens and they weren’t anything like me. Johnny and Omar weren’t anything like me either, but they were fun, and had a laugh, and stuck two fingers up at the world. Yes, they were in the closet, but while the film discussed a million other issues – arranged marriages, the rise of far right extremism, new capitalism – Johnny and Omar just got on with being gay. Or possibly bi, because they both seemed to think that Tanya was very, very pretty, too.
It’s still one of my favourite films.
Back at the end of the 1980s, I could never have imagined the life I later lived: having children, having a wedding, even getting a “divorce”… I’m the legal parent not only of my birth daughter, but of my two sons, born into a civil partnership by my then partner. I’ve been in the PTA, served as a primary school parent governor, I’m out at my place of work. I lead just about as normal a life as I never dreamed of having back in 1985. In fact, very recently, I thought I’d found a new pair of icons – Caroline and Kate in the brilliant Last Tango in Halifax. It was a mainstream BBC family saga on a Sunday evening – and they had a long running story about a lesbian couple. They were planning their wedding and even had a bun in one of the ovens. At last, here I was seeing myself represented on the telly, not as a tragic or sexualised lesbian, and not in prison, but doing the normal things I did in my life: negotiating the parenting of strong-headed teenagers, juggling teaching and family, starting a new family with new babies in later life, and, although there was some disapproval, finding myself largely supported by most family members and friends. No talk of ‘pretended families’ now. We weren’t being over-sexualised, objectified, or made miserably Abject (well, only by the mother, but everyone told her she was being a dinosaur).
And then all those tired old clichés of tragic doomed gay love kicked in. Kate had to go and die in a car accident. On the day after her wedding day! That was a pretty extreme way to bring the donor back into the story, I thought. But no, the writer claimed she had no choice. It was the only way that the mother and now widowed daughter would be able to start talking again, apparently.*
Really? It is the 21st Century, yes, in North Yorkshire, too. I know, because it’s been my adopted home for the last two decades.
The Equality Act was a decade ago now. I need to update my icons. I want to see myself reflected in mainstream media and literature. I want to be able to see people like me having kids, getting married, getting divorced, being as boring and untragic as everyone else. I wanted Caroline and Kate to be my icons. But for now, Johnny and Omar will have to do.
*After receiving criticism for joining in with the Dead Lesbian Syndrome, Wainwright said she realised her decision was a mistake. She has now fully redeemed herself in the eyes of the lesbians of the world thanks to her series Gentleman Jack!
See video here:
https://hml.yorksj.ac.uk/player?autostart=n&fullscreen=y&width=320&height=260&videoId=6428&quality=hi&captions=n&chapterId=0
My review of the 2019 play of My Beautiful Laundrette is here.
My review of God’s Own Country by Francis Lee (2017) is here.
My reflection on going to see Farewell My Concubine by Chen Kaige in China in 1993 is here.
My thoughts on the LGBT storylines in Deutschland 89 is here.
My Black History Month blog post on Olaudah Equiano is here.
Saffron Muses 