Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011) and God’s Own Country (Francis Lee, 2017)

by Fiona Underhill.

The English class system pervades every aspect of the popular culture that comes from there, including gay representation on film. The popular image of the gay man in British culture is the upper-class fop – probably because the most famous gay man for at least a century was Oscar Wilde (the fact that he was actually Irish, not English doesn’t affect the image of him as a cut-glass toff). Wilde has been portrayed by two English celebrities who are openly gay – Stephen Fry in 1997’s Wilde and Rupert Everett in 2018’s The Happy Prince. The 1970s and 80s perpetuated this image of the dandy gentleman – first with the raconteur Quentin Crisp (played by John Hurt in The Naked Civil Servant 1975), Kenneth Williams (known for affecting an overtly camp and posh persona in the Carry On films) and then through the period works Brideshead Revisited (TV series, 1981), Another Country (1984) and Maurice (1984). It was, however, the 1980s that also introduced the first real representation of working-class gay men on screen (and an inter-racial romance, no less), in 1985’s My Beautiful Laundrette (directed by Stephen Frears and starring Daniel Day Lewis).