Gay & Lesbian

Growing up gay before the internet, you took your queer images where you found them – I still remember the frisson when, not quite a teenager, it dawned on me that the girls in ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’ weren’t just simpatico but actually, you know, gay. At the time, such moments had a revelatory intensity, but they were less rare than they seemed.

As part of the redeveloped BFI Southbank’s constantly expanding Mediatheque programme – an online archive accessible for free from 14 terminals at the revamped NFT – almost 100 hours of gay- and lesbian-themed British moving images are being made available this month. Dubbed ‘Beautiful Things’, the treasure trove of aesthetics, entertainment and social history ranges from silent shorts – women’s rights in ‘Ladies’ Skirts Nailed to a Fence’ (1899), effete boxers in ‘Battling Bruisers’ (1925) – to Captain Jack in BBC3’s ‘Torchwood’. Key feature films are included – from ‘Victim’ to ‘Nighthawks’ to ‘Beautiful Thing’ – but the real finds are among the less familiar TV titles.

From the mid-’60s, for instance, two editions of ITV’s current affairs magazine ‘This Week’, on ‘Homosexuals’ and ‘Lesbians’, provide fascinating insights into the subculture of the time and the often patronising attitudes of would-be reformers. Later factual programmes gave their subjects more of a voice: ‘Lol: A Bona Queen of Fabularity’ (a ‘40 Minutes’ from 1981) follows a middle-aged drag queen in her daily life and then on stage, and offers a delicious exchange with a policeman who pulls Lol over driving in full get-up. She also mentions in passing the coming of the clones, making them sound like an army of ‘Doctor Who’ foes.

The amount of vintage TV drama with openly gay content is also surprising: the ‘Wednesday Play’ broached the subject twice in two months in 1965, in ‘Horror of Darkness’, about a married artist’s college friendship with another man, and the boarding-school-set ‘The Connoisseur’. The ’70s saw ‘The Naked Civil Servant’ in the same slot, as well as John Mortimer’s marvellous ‘Bermondsey’ – aptly billed as ‘“Brokeback Mountain” in south London’ – while ‘Play For Today’ showed ‘The Other Woman’ and ‘Coming Out’. 1979’s ‘Only Connect’ – inspired by EM Forster and early activist Edward Carpenter – sees a young academic forging a moving rapport with an ageing link with the past.

Curator Robin Baker notes that the Mediatheque can also house less obvious material of contextual or curiosity value. Take ‘Carry On Constable’ (1960): ‘We wanted to make sure a range of key gay performers were included, and it’s the movie where Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey spend a lot of time in drag.’ Or Michael Powell’s ‘A Canterbury Tale’: ‘If you’ve got your lesbian head on, there are more lesbians in that than any other British film of the ’40s.’

There’s also a popular entertainment component, with episodes of ‘Steptoe and Son’, ‘Are You Being Served?’ and ‘At Home With Larry Grayson’, a 1983 mince down memory lane in which Janet Street-Porter accompanies Grayson back to his primary school and the pub where he made his professional debut, as one of the Four Fairy Lights, singing ‘In the Bushes at the Bottom of the Garden’. No explicit mention of homosexuality is made, but then it doesn’t need to be.

One of the most remarkable entries is a three-part 1976 story from Granada’s long-running ‘Crown Court’, the daytime trial show with a ‘real’ jury. In ‘Lola’, a trannie is charged with importuning and assaulting a ‘pretty policeman’ in a gay bar – depressingly common charges even then – and the witnesses include a callous hack, a beastly psychiatrist and Lola herself, sworn in wearing full drag. The defence is mounted by Ben Kingsley.

Bringing things up to date are flagship dramas like ‘Fingersmith’ and ‘The Line of Beauty’ – evidence of how mainstream certain types of gayness have become even as others have lost visibility. When it comes to queer images, today’s young viewers are more generously served than generations past, but these earlier, rarer, more varied treats from the vaults offer a remarkable selection to savour.

Book a Mediatheque slot on 020 7928 3232, or just turn up