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The novelist
Patrick Gale
delights in the unfurling scenes of gay life in Channel 4’s Queer as Folk and revels in its inconclusive and questioning finale
Being a gay television viewer can be a twitchy experience. Most of the time you find yourself so unrepresented on the small screen that you lurch between being pathetically grateful for any gay programming that comes along (and feeling honour bound to watch it lest your ungrateful lack of interest halt any gay programming in future) and being indignant that said gay broadcasting is distorted, unrepresentative and/or embarrassingly crap. Gay television viewers, like generations of gay filmgoers before them, become adept from childhood both at projecting themselves into the unremittingly hetero scenarios before them and at hungrily falling on and analysing-to-death the merest suggestion that some situation is not quite as straight as it seems. Such, is even the average, level of skill at this kind of codified viewing that above-the-parapet programming for and about gay people can strike its target audience as tasteless. There’s also an old established tradition of gay claiming: seizing on and claiming a product that wasn’t perhaps meant for us initially. Thus one finds a show that is merely camp, like the (marvellous!) Stephanie Beacham vehicle, Connie, being cherished by gay and lesbian audiences at the expense of shows overtly aimed at them.
Queer as Folk was more celebratory than erotic
I was lucky enough to grow up in the Seventies, when terrestrial channels still screened several subtitled films a week and thus shooed in all manner of gay and lesbian material by Fassbinder and friends under a late night, highbrow, parents-safely-asleep banner. Without scrabbling for my gay broadcasting encyclopaedia, however (yes there is one, Broadcasting It by Keith Howes, hot pink, published by Cassell, riveting stuff), I can remember only a handful of overtly gay programmes before Queer as Folk.
First the dramas. As early as 1977, the surreal ABC comedy series, Soap, featured Billy Crystal as a wildly confused (now he’s transgender, now he’s bi) young gay father. So what if he had bad hair and no boyfriend? He was shown in the centre of a more or less loving family and was cuter and considerably less camp than John Inman. At the opposite dramatic pole were two one-offs, The Naked Civil Servant (1975) from Thames, in which John Hurt was saintly and safely effeminate (and single) as Quentin Crisp, and the BBC’s Coming Out (1979) which offered Anton Rogers and Nigel Havers in the least sexually-compatible romantic pairing since Rock Hudson and Doris Day. Altogether more cheering, if marginal, were the nice gay couple who lived upstairs from the Anna Raeburn character (played by Maureen Lipman) in the LWT sitcom Agony. These actually made it through three series from 1979 to 1981 before one of them lost his teaching job, got depressed and killed himself and even then, hey, his bereaved partner found a nice, blond Australian replacement. One does not mention Stephen in Dynasty.
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