Prejudice and Pride: The People’s History of LGBTQ Britain last night concluded its illumination of the fight for gay (and other) rights via the medium of treasured possessions of people who have lived through it.
Teacher Austin Allen has kept his copy of Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin (“the sickest school book in Britain” claimed the Sun on its publication in 1987) – a sign of hope at a time when he had just been sacked for answering honestly a student’s inquiry about whether he was gay. Ian Elmslie has kept his programme from the one-night-only, unrecorded performance of Before the Act, a show comprising only material from gay writers and musicians and during which Neil Tennant, Stephen Fry and Alan Bennett officially came out. Author Bright Daffodil lives in her most treasured possession – a flat decorated to mimic 1990s nightclub Trade. After growing up being threatened, spat at and beaten up in her Midlands hometown, her first night in the London club was “light – pure light”. Emma Riley has kept the papers accepting her into the Women’s Royal Naval Service and the discharge papers she received three years later, when a colleague on the HMS Cornwall told higher-ups that she was gay. “I was so lucky,” she says. “My parents were wonderful.”
Many more such moving stories unfolded over the hour, including some from the presenters – Stephen K Amos and Susan Calman – themselves. Encapsulating the particular high that progress in pop culture brings, Calman revisited the famous Brookside kiss between Beth and Margaret. It was written by Shaun Duggan, who said he had his childhood “stolen from me” by the misery and violence engendered by growing up gay on a northern housing estate. “Two attractive young women falling in love,” said Calman, watching it again on the verge of tears and laughter. “It was truly exhilarating.” Amos’s story showed the lows that lack of public progress brings – his friend Jody Dobrowski, a show manager at the comedy store Jongleurs, was beaten to death in 2005. It was for the same hateful reasons that four people were killed and 70 injured by a nailbomb planted in a Soho gay pub, the Admiral Duncan, in April 1999.
The documentary’s embedding of personal stories within the larger history and the evocation of different times and places was masterly throughout. Allen, and Geoff Hardy and Peter Roscoe, who were busy bringing up their son when clause 28 was introduced to tell them their family was unnatural, were symbols of the effects of that sterling little piece of Tory policy and of the reasons for its galvanising effects on the gay community. Calman and Amos did a wonderful job of keeping their comedic lightness of touch without ever becoming flippant or playing anything for laughs. Everyone had space to breathe, to tell their stories – sad, joyous, or both at once (“I had to position Gerrie so I couldn’t see my mother,” remembers Susan Douglas-Scott of her and her wife’s wedding day. “She had a face like fizz!”) – and show their strength and dignity. The lockstep in which suppression and progress march was made clear, without ever losing sight of the sorrow at its heart.
I have some thoughts about 10 Puppies and Us, now halfway through its four-week run. They are partly about how much I long for a spaniel to call my own, but mostly about the woman who lives in a first-floor two-bedroom flat in south London and is about to take delivery of a leonburger puppy that will grow to the size of a Shetland pony, because she “really loves big dogs” and wants to feel “a presence” in her home. Despite being, according to the voiceover, “a professional clairvoyant”, she cannot see any problems arising. In the spirit of openmindedness, optimism and tolerance with which Prejudice and Pride has temporarily infused me, however, I shall refrain from saying anything about the selfishness of all this until we see whether the next two episodes bring her enlightenment. I am not even an amateur clairvoyant, so I cannot predict how it will all end, but I have to say my hopes aren’t high. I’ll just have to go out and howl at the moon until then.
