Simon Callow: For Weddings (GEDDIT???)

When I went to work at the National Theatre in the late Seventies — fully 10 years after the legalisation of sex between men — if I ever wrote or spoke about the man I was then living with, it was censored or repressed, either by the ever-vigilant press officer (“Simon, I can’t allow you to destroy your career”) or by the press itself, which helpfully refused to report any admission of homosexuality — they didn’t want to be told, they wanted to find you out. Never mind whether what they were doing was legal or not, they wanted to expose people. Even as late as the Nineties, Nigel Hawthorne, frail and frightened, was confronted on his doorstep, in his dressing gown, after being nominated for an Oscar, his filthy secret revealed to all the world: all these years he had been living quietly and happily with a male partner. Partners was the word now, a useful phrase, to be sure, nicely neutral — you could be business partners, after all, partners in a law firm, partners in crime, wha-hey!

Simon Callow writes on gay marriage and cultural change for the Evening Standard.

The Standard has a rainbow in its masthead today. Wha-hey!