Simon Callow: In Praise Of Gay Sweatshop

When I was asked, by this to me at the time hilariously named Gay Sweatshop, to read for the part of Toby in Martin Sherman’s play Passing By, I was highly sceptical. I was out, all right, to every one in my circle, and joyously romping around in the gay pleasure gardens. I endorsed gay liberation with every fibre of my being, I believed that more and better sex was the solution to everything, but I could not see the point of this sort of ghetto theatre. What next, I thought. Plays by chartered accountants, about chartered accounts, for chartered accountants?

Then I read the play – a very simple, highly romantic piece about two sweet young men who have an affair – and I was stopped in my tracks. I realised I had never read another play in which two men have a romantic affair and never once mention being gay. I immediately said yes. But I had no inkling of what performing that play in front of a gay audience would be like. The sense of their truth being told, of them in their ordinary lives suddenly existing, was overwhelming. I don’t believe I’ve done anything more rewarding or more emotionally overpowering on any stage or in any medium...

Simon Callow writing in The Guardian. 

Founded in 1974, one of Gay Sweatshop's declared aims was; ‘To make heterosexuals aware of the oppression they exercise or tolerate, and expose and end media misrepresentations of homosexuals.’

There is a history here.

Thought For The Day: Dame Simon Callow

While I often told interviewers I was gay [in the 1980s], they never printed it. So I thought, "I've got to get this out in the open air," and I wrote the book [his 1983 autobiography, Being an Actor]. Many people were concerned on my behalf about the consequences, but as it happens, it was [using the book] to attack the power of the directors in theatre that might have had the biggest consequence. Some directors probably said, "That actor will never work again."

Simon Callow in the Independent reminds us that once upon a time, you could scream it from the rooftops that you're gay as a daffodil, but some journalists thought it best not to mention that sordid business.

PS She's doing Crackanory on Dave this month.

That's not some pervy kink thing - Dave is the TV channel, and Crackanory is the name of the programme.

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!

Thought For The Day: Simon Callow

Callow has found turning 60 a more agreeable process than turning 50, but with advancing age come intimations of mortality. “I had a very good friend who died recently,” he muses. “It’s a terrible thing, this way in which contemporaries fall off when you least expect it. But, generally, when you get to 60 it gets better. You say, 'Right, that’s it.’ You are never going to be young any more. You have peaked.”
Compensation has come in the form of his partner, Sebastian. The two met last year. “It is a strong and rich relationship,” he says. “He’s 30. We get on very well because I, on the whole, find younger men attractive, and he, on the whole, finds older men attractive. So it’s nice and neat.”
He lives a quieter life now. “I did quite well quite quickly in life, so made quite a bit of money. But, of course, I squandered it all, on meals, aeroplanes and romance – taking some gorgeous person to the south of France, or something like that.” 
Does he ever do that now? “Can’t afford to.”

Daily Telegraph - who interview the luvvies' luvvie quite a lot.

Charles Dickens: More??!!

Blurb: "This book offers a radically new reading of Dickens and his major works. It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents a distinctly queer corpus, everywhere fascinated by the diversity of gender roles, the expandability of notions of the family, and the complex multiplicity of sexual desire. The book examines the long overlooked figures of bachelor fathers, martially resistant men, and male nurses. It explores Dickens's attention to a longing, not to reproduce, but to nurture, his interest in healing touch, and his articulation, over the course of his career, of homoerotic desire..."

Queer Dickens is published by Oxford University Press.

It's an academic book so costs a fortune - maybe you could order it from one of those library things that keep being closed down?
Though I get the feeling it may be an interesting essay stretched out into a book.
Here's a Times Higher Education review.
Simon Callow is all over the media right now pushing his new biography. *
Fine by me, I like the fruity old dude.
Best fact I learned today; Charles Dickens used to refer to himself in the third person as "Dick".
Obviously Fagburn thinks the greatest fag in Dickens is Fagin...

* "If Dickens were alive he would be writing about everything because he always focused on everything. He would have been up there with the anti-capitalist protesters. He would have walked the city non-stop."

The Independent: The Day I Came Out

"I really enjoyed reading this article.
My only criticism would be that everyone interviewed seems to be from an upper middleclass background, going to university etc.
Why not find out what it was like for a joiner or a binman on a council estate in Glasgow coming out to their parents? LGBT people are everywhere and do all different jobs."

Reader's comment from KennyH288 posted after an article in The Independent, 'The Day I Came Out' featuring Simon Callow, Ben Bradshaw, Stella Duffy, Heather Peace and Stephen K Amos.

Stella Duffy replies;
"I'm not at all from a middle class, or upper-middle-class background. As the youngest of 7, I benefited hugely from the education that comes to a) the youngest, and b) growing up in NZ 1970. (ps - I'm 48, not 38!) I totally agree there is a class issue to be addressed, but I don't think your assumptions are necessarily correct about the people featuring in this collection of interviews, nor the implied suggestion that working class people - ie, my family - can't 'cope' with a gay child."

Thought For The Day: Ian McKellen

“I wasn’t one of those closeted actors who lied about it, but I avoided talking about it. It was easy. Nobody ever asked me. If I had told someone I was gay in an interview, the lawyer would have taken it out anyway because it was considered a terrible thing to say about anyone. Simon Callow would talk about being gay in interviews but it would never be reported. In the end he had to write a book to come out!”

Sir Ian McKellen, interviewed in The Times.
He was promoting the Albert Kennedy Trust video he's appeared in highlighting homelessness amongst LGBT youth.
I'm still waking up and at first I read that he said; "Simon Cowell would talk about being gay in interviews but it would never be reported."
Eh?

Thoughts For The Day: Simon Callow

You were one of the first mainstream actors to come out publicly. What made you do it?
I’m a very unconvincing liar.

Are you surprised in this day and age that someone like David Laws felt pressured to “stay in” — and torpedo his own career?
Yup. The longer you leave it the harder it gets. All those lies to all those people over all those years.

Are you bored with being asked about gayness all the time?
Nope.

You’ve said recently you don’t care about Oscars. Is that because you’ve never won one?
Yup.

Simon Callow on fruitily good form in The Sunday Times today.