1. Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated The Modern World - Gregory Woods
Magnificent, magisterial, massive, a masterpiece.
2. The Descent Of Man - Grayson Perry
3. Keeping On Keeping On - Alan Bennett.
4. Party Animals: My Family And Other Communists - David Aaronovitch
5. Suspicious Minds: Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories - Rob Brotherton *
* This was actually published right at the end of 2015. If you feel chronologically insulted feel free to imagine Who Rules The World? by Noam Chomsky or Shrinking Violets: A Field Guide To Shyness by Joe Moran here.
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.
'On Thursday 6 July
1972, halfway through an edition of Top of the Pops, David Bowie
performed his new single, Starman. Dressed in a multicoloured lycra
jumpsuit, he put his arm languidly round his guitarist Mick Ronson and
looked seductively into his eyes. Now, exactly 40 years later, Dylan
Jones has written a 200-page book, When Ziggy Played Guitar, all about those three-and-a-half
minutes of television. "It was thrilling, slightly dangerous,
transformative," writes Jones, who was 12 at the time. "For me, and for
those like me, it felt that the future had finally arrived."
'...But did this moment really "create havoc in millions of sitting rooms
all over Britain", as Jones suggests? We do not know, because no fossil
record of its contemporary effect on viewers remains. In 1972 there were
no Twitter hashtags to collate an instant collective response, and it
was only in the 1980s that newspapers, faced with declining readerships,
really began to cling parasitically to the younger medium of television
as a source of comment and gossip. So Bowie's performance inspired no
press coverage or public reaction at the time, simply vanishing into the
ether to make way for The Goodies at 8pm."
Joe Moran - one of Fagburn's most favourite writers by the Billy way - in The Guardian questions the hype, fetishism, overstatement and false memory syndrome about Ziggy Stardust.
A great piece as per.
I think it's safe to assume if this book he writes of is by Tory dickwad Dylan Jones it'll be as crap as a dog turd.
Joe, I've never figured if you're gay, but if you are, drop us an email and we can go for a date.
I have discount vouchers for Pizza Express.
Warning! I'm even more boring in real life.
Though that might be a come-on to you.
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