Gay lib in the arts

Yesterday I read an article in The Guardian in which film-makers and writers recalled 'gay' film scenes that had a profound effect on them; I also read quite a few of the comments of the article's readers remembering theirs; and it occurred to me that I could hardly recollect my own 'firsts'.

Maybe this is because I had to do without any while still struggling with who I was. As far as I can remember, the first film I saw that had homosexuality as one of the main topics was the 1994 Fresa y chocolate; and unless I'm much mistaken the first gay kiss I saw on the silver screen happened in 1997's The Full Monty (provided it was actually a kiss and not just an embrace) or in Wilde of the same year. But I had come out in 1989, and experienced my own first loving kiss - and more - in 1991.

Not that literature was any better. The first 'gay book' I came across was the 1993 anthology The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. Up till then there were just hints (which I often even failed to decipher as such at that time), at best a minor character who was gay but not allowed to do more about it than say so.

In short, I had no 'revelatory' experiences of this kind. For all that, each time I watched or read somebody daring to go further in breaking the taboos surrounding us, it was a source of immesurable pleasure to me.

SM as a substitute

In a sort of afterword to the 2016 edition of his Lanark: A Life in Four Books, Alasdair Gray mentions: "I was terribly stimulated by the highly coloured American comics which first came to Britain in the late 1940s when I was in my early teens. They showed [...] females with figures and faces like glamorous film-stars of that time, but wearing much less clothing, and since the representation of normal sexual practice was forbidden by the USA moral code their adventures involved them in capture and bondage instead." I have a different yet similar experience: coming into my teens at a time when homosexuality was more or less a taboo topic, it simply didn't occur to me to have 'bona fide' sexual fantasies; mine instead involved the other form of male-to-male touch: fights, captures and so on.

Nederlands II

Last autumn I began learning Dutch. A couple of weeks I had to give it up. Being first of all an English speaker, working where another language is spoken, trying to lose neither my Gaelic nor my French, and learning Swedish is time-consuming enough even without dabbling in yet another tongue.

But I have a soft spot for the Dutch ever since back in the summer of 1990, hitch-hiking in England, those giving me a lift would sometimes ask me whether I was Dutch myself*. So several years from now, once I'm satisfied with the level I'll have (hopefully) achieved in Swedish, I intend to start again.



* The reason for which is as mysterious to me today as it was then. I can see why my tall blond friends would usually be mistaken for Swedes and the swarthy dark-haired one of average height for a Frenchman, but why should a spindly post-adolescent in corduroy trousers and corduroy jacket be repeatedly taken for a Dutchman beats me.