Manipulative or mesmerising? Alan Cumming as Max in Martin Sherman's Bent. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
To be honest, I think I am the worst person I know at spotting homophobia. Perhaps I am too thick-skinned; or maybe it is because I have encountered so little of it personally - though when you do have its sinister, unnerving hand on your shoulder it is a thoroughly miserable experience.
One of the last places you would still expect it is in theatre. But now the actor Simon Callow and the playwright Martin Sherman have accused the Telegraph critic Charles Spencer and the Sunday Times critic Christopher Hart over their reviews of Sherman's Bent, running at London's Trafalgar Studios and starring Alan Cumming.
Sherman is more explicit. He tells the latest Pink Paper: "These two reviews are homophobic. There's no question about it. The Telegraph is shockingly so. Absolutely shockingly so." Callow, in an article for the Times, calls them offensive but does not use the H-word.
So what has caused the row? Well Spencer hated how cheerily the audience received Bent - a play about the awful suffering of gay men in Nazi Germany. He said: "The half-naked cast kissed each other, its star Alan Cumming put his hand on his heart and gave a showily humble bow."
He went on: "The mood of showbiz sentimentality was overwhelming and struck me as entirely disgusting." He quotes a homophobic comment about the play from the 70s, one he agrees with, and concludes: "The whole piece feels false and exploitative, as the dramatist bums a lucrative lift on the Holocaust, turning unimaginable suffering into manipulative entertainment and gay propagandising."
Hart in the Sunday Times clearly loathed the play: "There is no truth here, and it all adds up to a grievous insult to the dead: the Jewish, Romany, gay, handicapped. All of them."
As ever with these things it is not cut and dried. I am not sure either review was definitely and incontrovertably a homophobic review. I remember reading them and being shocked at the language and them leaving an unpleasant taste in my mouth.
Maybe, as I say, I'm not sensitive enough. But I also remember seeing Bent, being at the same performance as Spencer and Hart, and being mesmerised and terribly moved by Sherman's play. Maybe Spencer and Hart's reviews were not homophobic - but they were wrong.
