The BBC’s First Homosexual
Teachers’ Club, Dublin
★★★★☆
In 1954 the BBC produced its first radio documentary about homosexuality. Amid the arrest and prosecution of John Gielgud and Lord Montagu for “immoral purposes” and “gross indecency”, the topic had become such regular tabloid fodder that the broadcaster was stirred to investigate what it dubbed “the homosexual condition”. Yet the programme was kept on ice for several years and finally broadcast in heavily edited form in 1957.
This new play by Stephen M Hornby, performed as part of Wilde Stages (formerly International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival), combines a carefully researched reconstruction of that controversy with the story of a young gay man trying to find his way in a hostile world.
The BBC’s First Homosexual opens with two young producers contemplating a project that seems at once “impossible” and “historic”. Notwithstanding vague tensions between Barry McStay’s fastidious public schoolboy and Max Lohan’s more laid-back grammar-school scholar, both are intrigued by a challenge that could make or break their careers.
Neither will express such personal ambition directly, however (and we sense there is much else that the pair are leaving out). One of the strengths of Hornby’s script is how it situates euphemisms applied to same-sex desire within an entire culture defined by circumlocution and evasion. Getting their programme approved will therefore require contorted framing within the BBC’s Reithian principles of informing and educating the public.
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Oli Hurst’s crisp 70-minute staging moves back and forth between these journalistic tussles and Tom, a 19-year-old Mancunian tailor undergoing a fraught sexual awakening. Having seen a colleague arrested and fired for “immorality”, he is at once eager to avoid the same fate and entranced by the opportunities for physical contact with other men that his job provides. There ensues an anxious visit to a dismal gay bar and a sensitively portrayed initiation into cottaging.
Tom’s mother meanwhile manages to fix him up with a girlfriend over tea. Her devout Christianity both spares him from having to consummate the relationship and, in one of the play’s funnier moments, offers a graceful exit when he proclaims himself an atheist. Scandalised newspaper reports then alert Tom to the gay culture of Soho, where he will finally taste romance on repeated weekend trips from Manchester.
These sequences alternate between wry yet heartfelt monologues and interactions with lovers, colleagues and others who pass through Tom’s life (all played with nimble dexterity by McStay and Lohan). As Tom, Mitchell Wilson deftly navigates a complex emotional register, pivoting between awkwardness and excitement, underlain by the constant dread of exposure.
His character serves to illustrate how an isolated and apprehensive gay man might have reacted to the 1957 broadcast. Partly based on original transcripts, Hornby’s play ultimately issues an understated yet damning judgment on that “study of opinion on a social problem”, which became a showcase for pseudo-expertise and conversion therapy.
The exposition becomes a little uncertain towards the end. But The BBC’s First Homosexual is a poignant and revelatory look at an era when gay liberation remained a mirage.
The BBC’s First Homosexual is at the Teachers’ Club, Dublin, as part of the Wilde Stages festival, until Saturday, May 16th
