Queering the pitch

February marks LGBT History Month, in celebration of how far things have come in culture Jason Jones looks back at the most important queer moments from contemporary culture

Maybe it happened, as so many things do, with our desire to dance, have a bevvie and generally cut loose and have a good time, in a little-known bar on New York City’s Christopher Street called the Stonewall Inn when its sexual Magimix of patrons decided it was enough already with police harassment and time to rise up and stand their gay ground.

Maybe it was down to that gay stalwart, Madonna, who siphoned off myriad homosexed iconographies and spiked the mainstream with them.

Or maybe it was Tom Hanks, picking up an Oscar for his portrayal of a queer lawyer in Philadelphia, and tearfully thanking his (gay) high school drama teacher and a classmate before a billion – predominantly conservative – movie fans around the world.

Maybe it happened aeons ago,

when Sappho reached for her biro and waxed lyrical about the laydeez.

Maybe it happened hundreds oftimes since time immemorial, in ways just as memorable and just as forgettable. It’s never easy to trace the roots of a revolution, especially in something as quicksilver and ephemeral as culture.

But, however it all began, look at where it’s led. Here’s our rundown of the major tipping-points of contemporary gay culture.

Decriminalisation of homosexuality

Back over this side of the Pond now, and the law that finally made us men legal. Whereas lesbians have never been criminalised? Largely thanks to Queen Victoria who thought they could never possibly exist; mind you, she did love her Prince Albert, it wasn’t until the 1967 Sexual Offences Act that man-love got the greenlight. Well, sort of.

Unlike gay men, it didn’t go all the way and was only a partial decriminalisation of male homosexual behaviour in England and Wales. If they wanted to do the dirty, they had to be over 21, in complete privacy (behind blackout curtains and under a 100-tog duvet?) and “fully” consenting.

Strangely, us gays call sex without consent the same thing the straight world does: rape. As Catherine Tate’s Lauren would say, “Whatever!” It was a start all the same.

Paul O’Grady

At first glance this is a tad on the frivolous side, but think about it. He was a club-circuit drag act who made it onto primetime via Blankety Blank and Lily Live! in full asbestos-acerbic mode dressed as a Slim-Fast-ed Divine and shooting everyone down with a splatter-gun delivery and he was accepted? – and loved? – by the nation’s multi-demographics. A gay man clobbered-up as a clapped-out old hooker on Saturday night mainstream telly, how subversive can you get?

Currently to be found in civvie drag drawing them in at teatime, he’s giving the epitome of smug marrieds, Richard & Judy, a run for their book club which is the ultimate in cosy acceptance.

Equal Age Of Consent

The age of consent was finally universally equalised on November 30 2000, but like a circumcised man, it didn’t come easily.

Predictably, religious groups went stratospheric, spouting the same old, clichéd arguments that gay men roam the streets, lubed-up Lotharios continually raring to go and recruiting fresh meat with no teen safe? Let’s face it, if we wanted gay sex on tap, we’d join the Catholic Church.

Die-hard homo-objectors from both Houses of parliament reared their ugly mugs to mobilise their displeasure as well as the usual hand-wringing from the Daily Mail-ers gobbing off their outrage at The Debasing Of This Great Country Of Ours. You know the type: people who are still valiantly trying to get over women having the vote and the end of apartheid in South Africa.

The Stonewall Riots

Often credited as the genesis of the modern gay movement as we recognise it today, the Stonewall riots, like most historical events, is subject to much fevered debate; was it pre-empted by the death of perennial gay icon, Judy Garland?; was it down to police harassment?; was it started by a bunch of bewigged, bespangled drag queens?; or was it just the right time?

Some details, however, are certain. In the early hours of June 28th 1969 (the day after Garland’s funeral) the police raided NYC’s Stonewall Inn, a private members-type club with a predominantly queer clientele. It was the second time that week the bar had been targeted by police, and other gay bars had also been raided in prior weeks. The Stonewall’s staff and a few drag queens were arrested, prompting a minor demonstration that mushroomed into a violent, prolonged stand-off, leading to more organised confrontations later that summer. And so the kernels of gay lib were sown…

Rock Hudson’s AIDs -related death

On October 2nd 1985, Rock Hudson, erstwhile big-cheese movie star, beefcake pin-up and bastion of hetero-maxed machismo, died from what was being tagged at the hysteria-ravaged times “the gay plague.”

Although he remained firmly in the closet throughout his career, Hudson finally came out towards his final days, thus shocking the world – and his ex-celluloid partner-in-crime Doris Day – in the process, and forcing an ultra Right-wing America deep in denial to take the disease seriously for the first time and, more importantly in our celebrity-suckered age, giving it a face.

Ironically for someone who rigorously resisted publicly acknowledging his gayness, Hudson’s death proved a turning-point in our collective attitudes towards AIDS (the concept of HIV didn’t even exist then) and galvanised Elizabeth Taylor to become the epidemic’s first star crusader and surprisingly powerful lobbyist.