The next generation of gay men will be far more boring

Last week we broadcast my BBC radio Great Lives episode on Kenneth Williams. The effervescent comedian and presenter Tom Allen chose him. It was just enormous fun. You don’t, as a presenter, need talent to lead a programme on Williams: you just play archive clips and everybody falls about laughing. We certainly did. Funniest of all was his ‘Julian and Sandy’ sketch, about a holiday in Portugal. In the ‘Polari’ gay lingo Williams popularised, he described how they’d both been badly stung. ‘Portuguese man o’war?’ asked their interviewer. ‘I never saw him in uniform,’ Williams replied.

And I fell to thinking: if in 1967 the BBC had broadcast a documentary dealing in anything other than condemnatory terms with promiscuous gay sex, all hell, and Mary Whitehouse, would have broken loose. Yet actors and comedians like Williams (or, in Are You Being Served?, John Inman, and — to a degree — Frankie Howerd in Up Pompeii! and so much else) managed to escape general disapproval, though homosexual acts were imprisonable until 1967, and these performers’ trademark double-entendres were more than risqué: they were downright filthy.

So how did they get away with it? By being funny, self-mocking, and so outrageously camp that there could never be anything remotely threatening in their performances or personae. In a sense their acts mocked homosexuals, but affectionately. We were to be seen as harmless and ridiculous, a different breed from other men, rather like the eunuchs in India. Gays were to be perhaps pitied a bit, but liked. After all, ‘it wasn’t our fault’.

I was 18 in 1967. In those days gay men didn’t just adopt this almost pantomime carapace for dealing with the outside world: many adopted it in our dealings and conversation with each other.