Fagburn asked his favourite author - JOE MORAN! - author of the amazing book above, what he thinks about the gays on the 70s tellybox, like John Inman and Larry Grayson and were they good or bad and that.
Joe,
It's become a narrative bio cliche for gay men who grew up in the 70s and 80s to say they saw the likes of John Inman and Larry Grayson and say they FEARED becoming... one of them.
As a kid, I always loved them, and dreamed of becoming "like that".
You?
Richard
PS Hope this isn't too abstract...
[Joe is straight by the way, sadly. Another one off Fagburn's future boyfriend list *sighs*].
Hi Richard
Maybe as a child I was particularly slow on the uptake, but I never really thought of John Inman, Larry Grayson or any of the other camp characters on TV in the 1970s (Bruce Forsyth on The Generation Game now seems pretty camp in retrospect) as ‘gay’ – they just were and I’m not sure you thought about it much. Larry Grayson I always liked for his dry wit and gentleness. John Inman not so much, but that may be because I always found Are You Being Served? unfunny, and depressing in the way that the Carry On films were depressing – the suggestion that all English love lives (gay or straight) were unfulfilling.
I think what was happening in the 1970s was that a lot of the TV stars were middle-aged and had been involved as young men in a camp tradition full of innuendo – for example there was a lot of cross-dressing and gay subculture lingo in army gang shows and entertainment troupes (CF Peter Nicholls’s wonderful play Privates on Parade) – and they came up against a younger gay culture that was about the equal rights and identity politics that also infused feminism and anti-racism at the time. So Grayson and Inman got quite a hard time from gay activists. Now perhaps the politics are slightly less earnest and people are more willing to embrace that kind of camp and innuendo.
Dunno if that helps at all. I used to have more to say about this sort of thing but it’s a while since I finished the TV book now (over a year) and my head’s in a slightly different space …
Best wishes
Joe.
Thank you, Joe.
I love you!
You can buy Joe's wonderful Armchair Nation here.
Maybe as a child I was particularly slow on the uptake, but I never really thought of John Inman, Larry Grayson or any of the other camp characters on TV in the 1970s (Bruce Forsyth on The Generation Game now seems pretty camp in retrospect) as ‘gay’ – they just were and I’m not sure you thought about it much. Larry Grayson I always liked for his dry wit and gentleness. John Inman not so much, but that may be because I always found Are You Being Served? unfunny, and depressing in the way that the Carry On films were depressing – the suggestion that all English love lives (gay or straight) were unfulfilling.
I think what was happening in the 1970s was that a lot of the TV stars were middle-aged and had been involved as young men in a camp tradition full of innuendo – for example there was a lot of cross-dressing and gay subculture lingo in army gang shows and entertainment troupes (CF Peter Nicholls’s wonderful play Privates on Parade) – and they came up against a younger gay culture that was about the equal rights and identity politics that also infused feminism and anti-racism at the time. So Grayson and Inman got quite a hard time from gay activists. Now perhaps the politics are slightly less earnest and people are more willing to embrace that kind of camp and innuendo.
Dunno if that helps at all. I used to have more to say about this sort of thing but it’s a while since I finished the TV book now (over a year) and my head’s in a slightly different space …
Best wishes
Joe.
Thank you, Joe.
I love you!
You can buy Joe's wonderful Armchair Nation here.
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