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For Christ's sake, man, we could be anything
Sam Ashby's The Colour of His Hair (2017) is not the short film of that name commissioned by the Homosexual Law Reform Society in the British queer-rights no-man's-land between the 1957 Wolfenden Report and the Sexual Offences Act 1967. That film was a 26-page plea for tolerance scripted by Elizabeth Montagu, half-sister of Lord Montagu of Bealieu whose high-profile trial and conviction for "homosexual offences" had spurred the creation of the Wolfenden Report; this one is a 23-minute meditative collage of contemporary and archival materials anchored in the stacks of the Lesbian and Gay News Media Archive and the tape-recorded recollections of a pre-decriminalization activist. It tells its story in T-shirts and buttons, home movies and newspaper clippings, fireworks and pornography, and yet through this mosaic of self-preserved, self-asserting history, fragments of Montagu's never-produced script keep surfacing, though they are none of these things. The question is why. The answer is worth waiting for.
At first these fictional scenes feel as out of place in a dreamy study of queer marginalization and activism as a Martian in a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Shot in sandy 16 mm on the single set of an intellectually decorated flat, they introduce us to a pair of young men in crisis, John Brown (Sean Hart) fair-haired, strong-jawed and tight-lipped, Peter Smith (Josh O'Connor) darker and more volatile, more naive. Their conversation is clipped and coded even in outbursts of agitation, as if their own books and knick-knacks and stacks of sheet music might be listening; slantwise it emerges that they are being blackmailed—they suspect but cannot prove a mutual acquaintance who's "not—queer" but with whom Peter has had some (social, financial, sexual) intercourse in the past. Quick as Alan Turing, he's all for ringing the police, an attitude his lover regards as if he'd just suggested jumping feet-first onto a land mine. John's a doctor; sometimes the police call on him for professional reasons. Just the other day the local constable told him a howler about a pair of men discovered "in a blue funk . . . tearing up their love letters. Couldn't see them for smoke." He's known suicides, always condescendingly described as the ones with "guts." Peter argues nonetheless until family comes into it; at the thought of the news reaching his father, he folds as fast as an umbrella, a rough-haired lanky mantis of a man looking suddenly lost. "He'd strike me dead. He'd use those words, I can hear him. Strike the bugger dead." John lays a hand over his shoulder and he grips it, their one fierce gesture of intimacy; his lover's sea-blue eyes are red-rimmed from crying. "Oh, my God. What are we going to do?" By dint of summary, I have made this thread sound more contiguous than it is; the scenes are fractured, oblique, clearly excerpts. They seem at first one more piece of the bricolage illustrating the incredible climate of state-sanctioned persecution in which half a dozen headlines of queer men's blackmail and suicide barely scratch the surface, of which John Alcock interviewed in 1985 could recall without exaggeration, "I thought that every policeman was coming up to me in the street and going to arrest me. I always looked over my shoulder when I was bringing a gentleman home to entertain. I got so frightened, I came home and"—two queers up the road at No. 29, you know them—"I burnt all my love letters." Increasingly, though, their stiff upper strain and their neat interior sets lean out of key with the sexiness and the casualness of the footage quietly unearthing itself onscreen, shot after shot of the slow blurred color-soaked grain of Super 8 of men alone and together smiling for the camera, posing cheekily, laying out a picnic, horsing around, merely walking with their arms around each other's waists, goofy and tender and unafraid. "I feel quite sure," Alcock remembers over all these warm and soundless but not silenced portraits, "that young people will look back—as I'm sure they look back today—and they'd never be able to understand how we could persecute men in such a barbaric way." Where does that leave John and Peter, so careful, so buttoned-up, so frozen in time?
The clue comes from the film's other narrator, the historian Matt Cook. As an archivist onscreen rolls out drawers of back issues of Gay News and Gay Times and T-shirts from OutRage! and the Lesbian Avengers and the Gay Liberation Front ("I Can't Even Think Straight," "Dyke with Attitude," "I Can See Queerly Now," "Queer as Fuck") and photographs and badges and banners and flyers and scrapbooks, Cook explains, "There's always a problem with histories and with archives . . . Part of the history of sexuality and the history of homosexuality in particular is about what we don't know, we can't know. And these archives will always be partial and will always represent those that are articulate and those that have left their traces and those that have left material. And so, for example, if you take the archive from the early to mid-'70's at face value, you'd think that all gay men and lesbians were activists . . . And so what you're having to do when you enter any archive is think about who isn't here." John and Peter aren't here. They are the photographs never taken, the letters never saved. For all the comfortable artistic taste of their nicely furnished flat, there are no personalized mementos lying around, no photo albums, if they had access to Super 8 you can't see them recording their vacations, living as circumspectly as they do, so circumspectly that anyone might think they were merely flatmates, instead of what they are, two terrified men in love. They are not activists; they are the most acceptable form of victimized homosexual that could be dramatized in the late '50's and early '60's, nice-looking young white men with good professions and no camp manners and they don't even seem to have letters to grieve over destroying. They kept their heads down. They kept themselves off the record. How can we know what happened to them? They left no trace.
I discovered this film on the Criterion Channel, which has cleverly paired it with Basil Dearden's Victim (1961); I was unable to find it on the internet for free, but it's available on both Vimeo On Demand and DVD as part of Peccadillo Pictures' Boys on Film 18: Heroes (2018). I had never especially wanted a film version of Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953) before, but Ashby has a real ear for mid-century rhythms and even though Hart, whom I last saw in Dimensions: A Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads (2011), here plays the doctor, it may be the case that I have mentally cast O'Connor, whom I last saw in God's Own Country (2017), as "dark, narrow-headed, nearly good-looking" Alec Deacon. Jessica Sarah Rinland's cinematography could stand more deep-focus for the decade, but she catches the actors at their most interesting angles; the score by Leslie Deere is ambient and electronic, haunting and questioning. (Think of all those other queer lives farther from the center than our camouflaged couple. Where would you even start to look for them?) Ashby himself is the founder and co-editor of the queer film magazine Little Joe as well as a first-time director; I hope I can look forward to future films and issues both. The title, of course, comes from the A.E. Housman poem. I have an absolutely stupid number of movies in the backlog to review, but I couldn't let an intelligent queer film get away without mention, especially when in context it would be the wrong kind of irony. This document brought to you by my articulate backers at Patreon.
At first these fictional scenes feel as out of place in a dreamy study of queer marginalization and activism as a Martian in a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Shot in sandy 16 mm on the single set of an intellectually decorated flat, they introduce us to a pair of young men in crisis, John Brown (Sean Hart) fair-haired, strong-jawed and tight-lipped, Peter Smith (Josh O'Connor) darker and more volatile, more naive. Their conversation is clipped and coded even in outbursts of agitation, as if their own books and knick-knacks and stacks of sheet music might be listening; slantwise it emerges that they are being blackmailed—they suspect but cannot prove a mutual acquaintance who's "not—queer" but with whom Peter has had some (social, financial, sexual) intercourse in the past. Quick as Alan Turing, he's all for ringing the police, an attitude his lover regards as if he'd just suggested jumping feet-first onto a land mine. John's a doctor; sometimes the police call on him for professional reasons. Just the other day the local constable told him a howler about a pair of men discovered "in a blue funk . . . tearing up their love letters. Couldn't see them for smoke." He's known suicides, always condescendingly described as the ones with "guts." Peter argues nonetheless until family comes into it; at the thought of the news reaching his father, he folds as fast as an umbrella, a rough-haired lanky mantis of a man looking suddenly lost. "He'd strike me dead. He'd use those words, I can hear him. Strike the bugger dead." John lays a hand over his shoulder and he grips it, their one fierce gesture of intimacy; his lover's sea-blue eyes are red-rimmed from crying. "Oh, my God. What are we going to do?" By dint of summary, I have made this thread sound more contiguous than it is; the scenes are fractured, oblique, clearly excerpts. They seem at first one more piece of the bricolage illustrating the incredible climate of state-sanctioned persecution in which half a dozen headlines of queer men's blackmail and suicide barely scratch the surface, of which John Alcock interviewed in 1985 could recall without exaggeration, "I thought that every policeman was coming up to me in the street and going to arrest me. I always looked over my shoulder when I was bringing a gentleman home to entertain. I got so frightened, I came home and"—two queers up the road at No. 29, you know them—"I burnt all my love letters." Increasingly, though, their stiff upper strain and their neat interior sets lean out of key with the sexiness and the casualness of the footage quietly unearthing itself onscreen, shot after shot of the slow blurred color-soaked grain of Super 8 of men alone and together smiling for the camera, posing cheekily, laying out a picnic, horsing around, merely walking with their arms around each other's waists, goofy and tender and unafraid. "I feel quite sure," Alcock remembers over all these warm and soundless but not silenced portraits, "that young people will look back—as I'm sure they look back today—and they'd never be able to understand how we could persecute men in such a barbaric way." Where does that leave John and Peter, so careful, so buttoned-up, so frozen in time?
The clue comes from the film's other narrator, the historian Matt Cook. As an archivist onscreen rolls out drawers of back issues of Gay News and Gay Times and T-shirts from OutRage! and the Lesbian Avengers and the Gay Liberation Front ("I Can't Even Think Straight," "Dyke with Attitude," "I Can See Queerly Now," "Queer as Fuck") and photographs and badges and banners and flyers and scrapbooks, Cook explains, "There's always a problem with histories and with archives . . . Part of the history of sexuality and the history of homosexuality in particular is about what we don't know, we can't know. And these archives will always be partial and will always represent those that are articulate and those that have left their traces and those that have left material. And so, for example, if you take the archive from the early to mid-'70's at face value, you'd think that all gay men and lesbians were activists . . . And so what you're having to do when you enter any archive is think about who isn't here." John and Peter aren't here. They are the photographs never taken, the letters never saved. For all the comfortable artistic taste of their nicely furnished flat, there are no personalized mementos lying around, no photo albums, if they had access to Super 8 you can't see them recording their vacations, living as circumspectly as they do, so circumspectly that anyone might think they were merely flatmates, instead of what they are, two terrified men in love. They are not activists; they are the most acceptable form of victimized homosexual that could be dramatized in the late '50's and early '60's, nice-looking young white men with good professions and no camp manners and they don't even seem to have letters to grieve over destroying. They kept their heads down. They kept themselves off the record. How can we know what happened to them? They left no trace.
I discovered this film on the Criterion Channel, which has cleverly paired it with Basil Dearden's Victim (1961); I was unable to find it on the internet for free, but it's available on both Vimeo On Demand and DVD as part of Peccadillo Pictures' Boys on Film 18: Heroes (2018). I had never especially wanted a film version of Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953) before, but Ashby has a real ear for mid-century rhythms and even though Hart, whom I last saw in Dimensions: A Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads (2011), here plays the doctor, it may be the case that I have mentally cast O'Connor, whom I last saw in God's Own Country (2017), as "dark, narrow-headed, nearly good-looking" Alec Deacon. Jessica Sarah Rinland's cinematography could stand more deep-focus for the decade, but she catches the actors at their most interesting angles; the score by Leslie Deere is ambient and electronic, haunting and questioning. (Think of all those other queer lives farther from the center than our camouflaged couple. Where would you even start to look for them?) Ashby himself is the founder and co-editor of the queer film magazine Little Joe as well as a first-time director; I hope I can look forward to future films and issues both. The title, of course, comes from the A.E. Housman poem. I have an absolutely stupid number of movies in the backlog to review, but I couldn't let an intelligent queer film get away without mention, especially when in context it would be the wrong kind of irony. This document brought to you by my articulate backers at Patreon.
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You're welcome!
(That's a good seasonal icon.)
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There were, and are, a lot of people who don't say a lot of things.
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I am glad that you did know people who could tell you.
(Who was your great-great-uncle Arthur that he had biographies?)
There were, and are, a lot of people who don't say a lot of things.
I really appreciated that the film made room for their absence. It reminds the viewer of all the other people who didn't go into the archives, which doesn't mean they weren't real.
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I didn't know for sure until I queried someone about an unusual piece on eBay, and the seller explained that it had been given to him by Uncle Arthur's (much younger) final boyfriend. I think he was then that gentleman's younger boyfriend, which is why he'd ended up with the kind of piece that I'd never seen before. A lot of the really good ones remain in the family, because my grandfather was Arthur's only nephew, but this was exceptional (actually, it was exceptional enough that before I heard the story I thought it was misattributed!) It makes sense that he gave it to someone he was very fond of.
But I'd suspected for years. This was just the confirmation.
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That's fine. Mostly what I was wondering was whether I had known of him without knowing he was your family.
A lot of the really good ones remain in the family, because my grandfather was Arthur's only nephew, but this was exceptional (actually, it was exceptional enough that before I heard the story I thought it was misattributed!) It makes sense that he gave it to someone he was very fond of.
Agreed. That's a nice chain of inheritance.
(My grandmother was a sculptor. We have some of her pieces for similar reasons, although not the one she made for a temple that was stolen. All we have of that one are photographs.)
But I'd suspected for years. This was just the confirmation.
I'm really glad you got it.
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Not the Housman poem I'd been expecting, after that line about "the ones with guts".
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Fair enough!
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Thank you. It's just such a good celebration and contextualization of community history—of the act of telling history at all. (I just realized it could pair just as well with Who Will Write Our History (2018) as the short the JFEC actually chose.) Nothing is comprehensive except time itself and time doesn't always keep notes for the rest of us.
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I really liked it! It got a lot into its less than half an hour.