Screen Addiction Threatens Family Gatherings

 

Here, there and everywhere: why the world is still crazy about the Beatles

Now and Then may be the band’s final song, but the appetite for books, exhibitions, films and TV series about the Fab Four seems never to wane. 

By NEIL SPENCER, The Observer, Sunday, October 29th, 2023

Perhaps the real surprise behind this week’s release of the “final” Beatles song, Now and Then, is not that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr wanted to resurrect the band one last time – uniting them with the “crystal clear” voice of John Lennon from a 1970s home tape, a feat enabled by technology Peter Jackson developed for his 2021 Get Back documentary – but that there remains a seemingly insatiable thirst for all things Fab Four.

It is now 60 years since Beatlemania engulfed first Britain and then, via America, the world. No one then imagined that in 2023 we would still be entranced by the group. The shelf life of pop acts was measured in months, or at best years – the Beatles themselves didn’t make it past their 1970 break-up. Yet this month sees a fresh surge of interest. Accompanying Now and Then are expanded versions of the Red and Blue compilations first issued in 1973, Philip Norman’s biography of George Harrison (to go alongside his tomes on Lennon and McCartney), and an Apple TV series, Murder Without A Trial, examining the 1980 killing of Lennon outside his New York home.

Until the end of last month, the National Portrait Gallery was running Eyes of The Storm, McCartney’s evocative exhibition after his “discovery” of a cache of photos from 1963-64. And you can still enjoy National Trust tours of John and Paul’s Liverpool homes, and hear Hey Jude ringing from English football terraces.

Some reasons for the ongoing obsession are straightforward. Since even the humblest contribution to Beatledom is guaranteed global attention, more products keep arriving. Then there is the nostalgia of baby boomers for their youth – not least in the US, where the likes of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen were inspired to pick up guitars by the Beatles’ celebrated appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.

Behind it all lies the enduring quality of the music – the exuberance of the early hits, the inventive plunge into psychedelia, the gentle beauty of the love songs – and where the Fabs pioneered, the rest followed. Their career still describes the perfect arc of pop success, from early gigs in Merseyside and immersion in the crucible of Hamburg lowlife to becoming local heroes, national sensations and international icons. Unlike their peers the Rolling Stones, they didn’t stick around to become a vainglorious tribute band to themselves.

The foursome’s panache – the “Beatle cuts”, the casual ostentation of their clothes, their gritty ambition – helped make them the personification of an era in which optimism, hope and social mobility were possible. They radiated an infectious joyousness which now seems remote and beyond reach, and even when they were naive – Maharishi, Apple – they were brave. As Harrison put it: “They [the public] gave their money, and gave their screams, but the Beatles gave their nervous systems. They used us as an excuse to go mad, the world did, and then blamed it on us.”

Now and Then may be the Beatles’ “final song”, but it won’t be the final word in their story. McCartney, who has cannily curated the group’s legacy, may yet find another cache of photos, while one day, perhaps, we may get to read Lennon’s Dakota diaries, briefly glimpsed after his murder but swiftly recovered by Yoko Ono and kept secret ever since.

FREEDOM FOR PALESTINE

 

Alcalá de Guadaíra, the Story Behind a Name

 By TONY BRYANT

Sur in English, September 15th, 2023

The earliest settlements in the area around what is now Alcalá de Guadaíra, a town not far from Seville (a mere 14 kms), in Southern Spain, date to prehistoric times, as confirmed by the discovery of Chalcolithic dolmens at the archaeological site of El Gandul. However, the origins of the current town can be traced back to the Tartessians, who called the settlement Irippo.

Some historians claim that the first part of this name, Ir, signifies "rushing river", in reference to the Aira river, later called Guadaíra, and therefore Irippo meant "the city of the river" in Tartessian. The Greeks called the town Hienipa, meaning "underground water", and this name was later converted by the Romans to Ordo Hinipense.

The town achieved importance during the Muslim era because it was located on the river and was part of the defensive belt of Isbiliya (Sevilla). The inhabitants, whose main income was agriculture, used the river to transport the wheat they cultivated to Seville.

The Arabs named it Al Kalat Wad Aira -the fortress on the River Aira- in reference to the importance of the 12th -century Almohad castle, and it is from this name that the current toponym derives.

The town was taken from the Moors by King Fernando III in 1244. Under the Christians the town lost its economic prosperity, and only regained it in the 20th century, when agriculture was mechanised. Some of the watermills built during the Moorish era can be still found in the area, and because the town once provided most of Seville's bread, it became known as Alcalá de los Panaderos (Alcalá of the bakers).

In 2001, the Town Hall approved adding the accent to the word Guadaira to make it Guadaíra. This was based on the pronunciation of the word by the locals. This slightly adapted spelling became official on 23 April 2003.

Lea. Lisez. Read.

 

Gig Etiquette

 

Un idioma es una forma de ver el mundo

Se ha observado en experimentos que se dan respuestas distintas a cuestiones morales cuando se plantean en la lengua materna o en un segundo idioma. Los traductores simultáneos automáticos pueden hacer menos útiles tareas como la traducción o el aprendizaje de un segundo idioma.

Por DANIEL MEDIAVILLA

El País, 19 de agosto de 2023 

Hay un experimento clásico que pone a un voluntario en el brete de decidir qué hacer con un vagón que avanza descontrolado hacia cinco trabajadores que no pueden verlo. El voluntario observa la escena desde lo alto de un puente junto a otra persona. Si le empuja a las vías, ese individuo morirá, pero detendrá el vagón y salvará cinco vidas. Cuando el experimento se realiza con personas que hablan dos idiomas y responden en su lengua materna, el 20% deciden que sacrificar a una persona es aceptable por salvar a cinco. Cuando responden en su segundo idioma, la cifra se eleva al 33%. El efecto se explica porque, cuando se habla una lengua extranjera, se tiende a tomar decisiones menos emocionales y más utilitaristas.

Ese cambio, tan importante en un ámbito tan personal como la moral, muestra que el idioma no es solo un modo de percibir el mundo o codificarlo. Cada lenguaje activa distintas regiones neurales que pueden cambiar el modo en que nos relacionamos con lo que nos rodea. Borges defendía que el inglés, más sintético y directo, producía una evocación más definida y poderosa de la realidad, mientras en el español estaba enmarañado por localismos que ofrecían muchos sinónimos, pero no más posibilidades de expresarse con precisión.

¿Puedes aprender idiomas mientras duermes? Viorica Marian dirige desde el año 2000 el Laboratorio de Investigación en Bilingüismo y Psicolingüística de la Universidad del Noroeste, en Chicago (EE UU), donde estudia de forma sistemática estas diferencias. Uno de los puntos de partida de Marian, nacida en Moldavia, es que la psicolingüística se ha centrado durante mucho tiempo en las personas monolingües, mayoría en EE UU, pero menos frecuentes en el resto del mundo. La investigadora recuerda que la realidad es una recreación producida por nuestro cerebro y que diferentes idiomas activan diferentes redes neurales. En su último estudio, publicado en la revista Science Advances, se muestra cómo tanto personas bilingües como monolingües agrupan y recuerdan las palabras que suenan igual, aunque su significado sea diferente.

Los angloparlantes que no hablaban otro idioma, por ejemplo, cuando escuchaban la palabra candle (vela en inglés), además de esa palabra, le prestaban atención a una palabra similar como candy (dulces), aunque tenga un significado completamente diferente. En los bilingües que también hablaban castellano la cosa se complica, porque su interés se dirige también a las palabras de su otro idioma. Por ejemplo, en el caso de candle, además de a candy, su atención se dirigía a la palabra candado.

Estos resultados sugieren que “en los bilingües los dos idiomas siguen activos y esto influye también en la memoria, porque las personas que hablaban dos idiomas, cuando se les preguntaba por los objetos que había en la lista que les habíamos enseñado, los recordaban mejor que los monolingües”, señala Matías Fernandez-Duque, primer autor del trabajo. Estos datos, plantea Fernández-Duque, apuntan a una mayor flexibilidad cognitiva en las personas que usan dos idiomas, algo que tiene efectos fisiológicos. “Hay estudios que han visto que la aparición de los efectos del alzhéimer en bilingües se retrasa hasta cinco años en comparación con individuos monolingües con condiciones similares”, ejemplifica.

Con este estudio se muestra, según los autores, “que la experiencia del idioma no solo influye en cómo la gente percibe su entorno, sino también lo que recuerdan a largo plazo”. “Esto puede explicar en parte por qué el mismo suceso puede ser recordado de forma diferente por distintas personas”, añaden. Como plantean otros resultados del equipo de Marian, aprender un segundo idioma cambia nuestro cerebro, la forma de sentir y recordar, y hasta las decisiones que tomamos.

En los próximos años, es probable que las tecnologías de traducción simultánea reduzcan el interés por aprender otros idiomas. En un paso más hacia la homogeneización de la población global. Los políglotas, ahora multitud, pueden empezar a ser una rareza. En todo el mundo, solo el 1% de las 6.000 lenguas registradas tienen más de medio millón de hablantes, y solo el 10% supera los 100.000. “Si pensamos que los idiomas afectan a cómo pensamos, que se pierda un idioma no solo es perder una forma de acceder a una cultura. También se pierde una forma de ver el mundo”, opina Fernández-Duque. “Creo que es importante que pensemos en cómo proteger estos idiomas en peligro de extinción”, concluye.

MUST RESIST

An aerial view of protesters holding banners during a demonstration in Tel Aviv against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial overhaul plans. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Israeli cities for the ninth straight week, on Saturday March 4th, to fight a government plan to overhaul the country's court system. 

Drone photo by Or Adar

Black Mirror_series

Black Mirror (Netflix) is a British science fiction television series written and created by Charlie Brooker and centered around dark and satirical themes that examine modern society, particularly with regard to the unanticipated consequences of new technologies, reminding us that to revere our digital gadgets is to become their pathetic slaves. Episodes are stand-alone works, usually set in an alternative present or in the near future. All genuinely unsettling and thought-provoking.

Stories tap into the collective unease about our modern world. Over the last fifteen years, technology has transformed almost every aspect of our lives before we've had time to stop and question it. In every home; on every desk; in every palm -a plasma screen, a monitor, a smartphone- a black mirror of our 21st Century existence. A must-watch series. Take my word for it.

Check the plot summary of Black Mirror's 28 episodes (6 seasons) on Wikipedia or on radiotimes.com only after you have watched an episode. I personally recommend the following stories:

The National Anthem

The Entire History of You

Nosedive

Shut Up and Dance

San Junipero

Hated in the Nation

Black Museum

Smithereens

Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too

Joan is Awful

The Times view on racist abuse of football players: Spain’s Shame

When English football was shamed by the racist abuse of players in the 1980s, the response by both the government and football authorities was robust. The Football Spectators Act of 1989 introduced banning orders of up to ten years for anyone found guilty of using racially threatening, abusive or insulting words. In 1993 the Kick It Out campaign was established by the English game’s governing bodies, including the Premier League and Football Association, to tackle discrimination at a grassroots level and provide a facility for fans to report incidents of abuse. No one would claim that the English game today is perfect — racism abounds on social media — but incidents of racist abuse at matches are now extraordinarily rare, and English football has become a model of diversity and inclusion for the rest of the world.

Compare this record with the shameful scenes in Spain at the weekend when fans chanted insults at a visibly distressed Vinícius Júnior, Real Madrid’s 22-year-old star Brazilian forward, during a match against Valencia. Nor was this the first time Vinícius had been the target of such abuse. The Spanish league has made nine formal complaints for racist abuse against the player over the past two seasons, most of which have gone nowhere. While some fans have been fined and banned from stadiums, so far only one faces a possible trial.

Vinícius has clearly been let down at every level of the Spanish game: by a referee who failed to take the players off the pitch on Sunday in line with international protocols and even ended up sending off Vinícius in the 97th minute after an altercation; by La Liga, which runs the league, and the Spanish football association, which have conspicuously failed to tackled racism in their sport; and by the police and prosecutors who have failed to bring any of the player’s tormentors to justice. Yet when Vinícius wrote on Instagram that “racism is normal in La Liga”, the response by Javier Tebas, La Liga’s president, was to attack the player for not turning up to meetings to discuss the problem.

Nor is Vinícius’s treatment an isolated case in Spanish football. Other black players have been subjected to abuse. That points to a wider problem in the Spanish game. Unlike football authorities in other countries, La Liga does not have the power to hand down punishments to fans on its own, but can only pass racism cases to local prosecutors. La Liga expressed “tremendous frustration” yesterday at the lack of sanction and convictions by the sports disciplinary bodies, public administrations and jurisdictional bodies to which it has reported racist incidents. It says it will request a change in the law to give it more sanctioning powers, including the right to require the partial or complete closure of venues, the ability to ban individual fans and impose financial penalties on clubs.

The government would do well to give La Liga these powers, if that is what it takes to drive racism out of the game. Spain is preparing to bid alongside Portugal and Morocco to host the 2030 World Cup. It is surely unthinkable that Spain could be chosen for the tournament unless and until it takes decisive action to drive racism out of the domestic game. After all, La Liga is second only to the English Premier League as the richest football league in the world. Its matches attract a global audience. What kind of signal does it send to the world if it cannot protect a prodigious young talent such as Vinícius from abuse by fans? Thirty years after Britain, Spain needs to Kick It Out. (The Times, Tuesday May 23, 2023)

I AM (TV series)

I Am... is a female-led drama series of standalone stories produced by Channel 4. Each of the 7 episodes is developed and written by Dominic Savage in collaboration with a top British leading actress, and centres on a titular character which the episode is named after, with improvised dialogue and themes including relationships, mental health, and empowerment. Each 47-minute film follows different women as they experience moments that are emotionally raw, thought-provoking and utterly personal. The filmmakers wanted an intimate but cinematic look for the episodes. The whole series was shot hand-held, as though we are eavesdropping on the characters, in order to add to the documentary feel of the drama. Totally engaging to watch. Available on streaming at Theflixer.tv and on COSMO.

See related article: I am, Channel 4

Plastic: Remaking Our World

The exhibition Plastic: Remaking Our World, presently on display at Lisbon's futuristic Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), looks at a revolutionary and deeply controversial material that we refer to by the generic term “plastic” but which, in fact, includes a universe of synthetic products, with different characteristics and uses. 

Plastic is everywhere, it’s the fabric of everyday life. Used and experienced differently across the globe as product and waste, it is essential yet superfluous, life-saving and life-threatening, seductive but dangerous.  Never has there been more urgency to understand the evolution of this man-made material over the past 150-years and to unpack the wondrous, yet cautionary tale of its invention and use. Plastic: Remaking Our World charts the material’s unparalleled rise, enormous popularity, and the dawning realisation of its destructive power. Probing design’s role within this story, it asks how plastic has both enabled extraordinary innovations and new ways of living, and at the same time contributed to the inescapable environmental pollution crisis we are experiencing today.

Divided into three sections, the exhibition opens with a film installation exploring the relationship between plastic and nature at a fundamental, geological level. The second section traces the history of plastic from its natural origins to the scientific experiments that were carried out with synthetic materials in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It continues with the rise of the petrochemical industry and its impact on the scale of production in manufacturing as well as the concern for the planet that grew towards the end of the twentieth century. Finally, the third section takes stock of contemporary efforts to rethink plastic and to implement alternatives, to reduce production and consumption and encourage reuse of plastic.

With this look to the future, Plastic: Remaking Our World is a call to action at this time of climate emergency.

Exhibition produced in partnership with MAAT, Vitra Design Museum, and V&A Dundee. Lisbon, 22/03--28/08/2023

maat

NOTHING LIKE THE SUN on RadiUS

'Nothing like the sun' es un espacio de divulgación cultural en RadiUS centrado en la producción literaria y artística en lengua inglesa que coordinan los profesores Ricardo Navarrete, Michael Gronow y Juan Ignacio Guijarro, a quienes se suman otros docentes entusiastas en la materia como Esther de la Peña y José de María Romero Barea, así como estudiantes de la Facultad de Filología Inglesa de la Universidad de Sevilla.

De periodicidad quincenal, 'Nothing like the sun' es un espacio sonoro que se articula a partir de una tertulia sobre el autor que protagoniza el programa, un diálogo en el que, además de los coordinadores del programa, toman parte diversos expertos y estudiosos en la materia.

Desde el ámbito académico, para todos los públicos y a favor del pensamiento crítico, 'Nothing like the sun' pretende ser una iniciativa radiofónica contra el pragmatismo de los resultados, a favor del placer de las humanidades en tiempos de crisis.

Según sus coordinadores, se trata de un programa, en definitiva, dirigido a "quienes amamos las palabras, en cualquier idioma, los y las que nos dejamos guiar por la forma en que las historias logran expresar la amplitud y profundidad de nuestras experiencias”.

OBJETIVOS

“La literatura en otros idiomas nos permite conectarnos con los demás para darnos sentido a nosotros mismos. Cobramos vida a través de la exposición a otras lenguas, otras narrativas, a menudo diferentes a las nuestras, pero que resuenan en nuestra personalidad", comenta Ricardo Navarrete.

A su juicio, un programa de radio sobre literatura en inglés "debería ser una invitación a entrar en otros mundos". 'Nothing like the sun' nace con ese empeño. Pretende ser un portal a la producción literaria en esa lengua, una forma de explorar nuevos pensamientos, un sitio donde desmontar y examinar, contextualizar y empatizar con el idioma de Shakespeare, para asomarse a los puntos ciegos del propio.

CONTENIDOS

Además de la tertulia, este programa cuenta con varias minisecciones fijas, como la que lidera Juan Ignacio Guijarro comentando la canción del día, así como aquellas adaptaciones al cine de obras inmortales de la literatura inglesa y norteamericana.

Asimismo, Esther de la Peña, en su sección ‘Esther y sus amigos’, entrevista a personalidades relacionadas con el mundo literario. Michael Gronow y un grupo de estudiantes de la Facultad de Filología leen en inglés y castellano un poema alusivo al tema en cuestión. Por último, José de María Romero Barea, en su apartado ‘Words, words, words’, se ocupa de aquellas novedades editoriales del ámbito anglosajón dignas de ser reseñadas.

En las dos primeras entregas este espacio de RadiUS se ocupará de dos autores clave, como son James Joyce, con motivo del centenario de la publicación de su novela Ulises; y Charles Dickens, "cuya producción literaria sigue redundando en las sucesivas crisis que nos asolan", explica Navarrete.

Billy Wilder: Hollywood Comedy’s Caustic Social Chronicler

Compound Adjective Practice

Billy Wilder, who died on 27^th March 2002 at his Beverly Hills home at the age of 95, was the most pungent and literate creator of movie comedy in mid-20^th century Hollywood. As a writer and director, he helped shape an evolution in style and taste from the pre-war innocence blended with verbal sophistication of screenplays like Midnight and Ninotchka, via the satirical tragicomedy mixed with resonant one-liners (“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille”) of Sunset Boulevard (1950), to the hectic, irreverent slapstick of his best-known comedy Some Like It Hot (1956).

That the same man directed the hardboiled thriller Double Indemnity, a classic of film noir, the archetypal Hollywood drama about alcoholism The Lost Weekend and the Oscar-winning sweet-sour romantic comedy The Apartment made Wilder a caustic social chronicler almost without peer in western cinema in the last century.

A European refugee who fled Germany in 1933, he showed a fondness for fish-out-of-the-water tales. In Ninotchka, stern Bolshevik Greta Garbo falls for pleasure-loving American Melvyn Douglas. In Ball of Fire mild-mannered linguistics professor Gary Cooper tangles with goodtime girl Barbara Stanwyck. Both these movies were scripted, for other directors, by Wilder and his then regular collaborator Charles Brackett. When Wilder himself began directing, in 1942 with The Major and the Minor, the same misfit themes recurred in films as diverse as Ace in the Hole, his hard-hitting satire on newspaper reporting; the prisoner-of-war drama Stalag 17; the wistful Audrey Hepburn romantic comedy Sabrina; and the strident but fiercely idiosyncratic comedies he made from the mid-1950s with new screenplay collaborator I.A.L. Diamond.

Wilder’s cinema reflected, albeit in a comical distorting mirror, the life of a man tossed about from country to country since his teens. Born in Vienna in 1906, Wilder first flirted with law studies and journalism in Austria. He soon migrated to Berlin, working variously as a reporter, as a so-called taxi dancer and finally as a script collaborator in half a dozen German films.

As one of a legion of refugees from Nazism in Hollywood, Wilder soon became the most American of immigrant film-makers. His brash, wisecracking style set a pace few natives could equal. He used favourite actors over and over —Fred MacMurray, Shirley MacLaine, Walter Matthau, above all Jack Lemmon— to help shape his world of abrasive dialogue, astringent romance, hapless physical comedy and defiant optimism. The final line of Some Like It Hot became the most famous in screen comedy history —when millionaire Joe E. Brown’s “fiancée” Lemmon (in drag) confesses that he is a man, Brown shrugs, smiles and says “Nobody’s perfect”.

After The Apartment won Oscars for Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay, Wilder’s work declined in vitality and inventiveness. The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes, Avanti! and Fedora were ambitious but thinly scripted whimsies. The Front Page and Buddy Buddy tried to re-ignite the spark of the Lemmon-Matthau partnership Wilder himself created in the 1966 Meet Whiplash Willie (aka The Fortune Cookie), which won Matthau an Oscar.

In the 1980s and 1990s Wilder toyed with projects that never saw the light, including directing Shindler’s List. He also gave his time to befriending younger directors, one of whom, Cameron Crowe (of Jerry Maguire) published in 1999 a definitive book-length interview with him, Conversations with Billy Wilder.

As a movie artist, Wilder left no one indifferent. Detractors included Pauline Kael, the New Yorker critic, and David Thomson, who in his Biographical Dictionary of Film called Wilder “a heartless exploiter of public taste who manipulates situations in the name of satire. He prefers dialogue to character, sniping to structure”. For others, Wilder combined a classical command of craft with iconoclastic courage in confronting taboo subjects. 

© NIGEL ANDREWS, Financial Times, 2002

Task 1 Look up the underlined compound adjectives that you did not know.

Task 2 Learn the expressions highlighted in pink.

Hallelujah, a Queer Dance

Historic Montreal Church Is Backdrop for Queer Love Story Dance Video

June 3, 2019/by Francis DeBernardo, Editor

The dancers soar across the church aisles and the altar, embrace as they spin and cover each other in blue and red chalk. They do this after opening video clips of homophobic protests and violence have flashed across the screen. All of this accompanied by a recording of Jeff Buckley’s popular song, Hallelujah. Near the end the two men share a brief kiss.  The final image is a large banner they create that reads ‘Choose Love,’ raised high over a backdrop of stained glass.

This dance performance video, entitled Hallelujah, was set and filmed in Quebec’s historic Church of St. Pierre Apôtre. It is a queer love story produced by Matthew Richardson –and the church leaders were happy to host it.

A still from the video.

“They welcomed me, my message, and our creation with open arms,” said Richardson, the show’s creator and  a former Cirque Du Soleil performer. Hallelujah is one of five dances he will direct as part of his CircusQueer Project. The video is deeply intimate in a deeply Catholic setting.

There is much to praise in this project: Richardson’s work and vision, the stunning grace of the dance in this particular space, the warm welcome of the Catholic community in Montreal, and the attention that it is getting in multiple publications. Further projects like Hallelujah are necessary in continuing to emphasize the beauty found in LGBTQ+ relationships in a long-denied religious setting. These initiatives, and their visibility, are essential to fulfilling the love that Catholicism promises to support and provide.

The hidden gay lives finally being uncovered

In the past, the amazing stories of LGBTQ+ people were actively suppressed – which is why fiction writers are now diving into queer history and filling in the gaps, writes Matt Cain. 

15th June 2021 BBC Culture BOOKS

Earlier this year, the TV miniseries It's a Sin rightly won acclaim for its depiction of the Aids crisis in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s. But when I heard people raving about the show, written by Russell T Davies, I was struck by how many of them admitted to knowing little about the epidemic – and the destruction it wreaked among the gay community.

That’s because, even in today's much more accepting society, the history of the gay and lesbian community is largely a forgotten history. For a long time, the mainstream public didn't want to hear our stories. "I would venture to say that the public were disgusted and outraged," says author Crystal Jeans. She points to the response to the watershed lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall in the 1920s as just one famous example of the way authors have caused hysteria simply by acknowledging queer lives. Despite the book containing just two very mildly suggestive sexual references, "everyone went berserk and it was banned", she says.

Stephen Hornby, national playwright-in-residence for the UK's LGBT History Month, argues that our stories have long been actively suppressed. "The only interest used to be in censoring or denying any queer elements of the records of the past. So, things were kept from public display, passages were omitted from books and sexual relationships were presented as passionate friendships. That was wilful and deliberate distortion." But now society is becoming much more welcoming of queer people, there's a huge appetite to hear our stories. And there are so many amazing stories to tell. 

The range of queer stories

On the one hand, there are the tales of famous figures like Greta Garbo, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich, Tchaikovsky, Josephine Baker and Hans Christian Andersen, all of whom experienced same-sex desire or engaged in same-sex activity in societies that didn't welcome it, often channelling their frustrations into creating remarkable work that went on, in some cases, to determine the course of Western culture. On the other hand are the invisible stories of the millions of everyday men and women whose lives made less of a mark but included events as dramatic as familial rejection, professional dismissal, social exclusion, blackmail, criminal conviction, imprisonment, torture, electric shock therapy, chemical castration, and execution.

Arguably, even the most ordinary queer person of a certain age has lived an extraordinary life. And, when you consider the impact that the challenges they faced must have had on their emotions and relationships, you have the ingredients for gripping, moving, rousing drama – and characters that modern-day audiences are now ready to root for.

This is what inspired me to write my latest novel, The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle. It's about a lonely, socially awkward and secretly gay postman living in a fictional town in the north of England who hits retirement, realising he wants to turn his life around and finally be happy – but to do this, he needs to find the love of his life, a man he hasn’t seen for nearly 50 years. His search for his lost love is interspersed with a series of flashbacks to his youth that gradually reveal the pressures their relationship found itself under as a result of the social climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s – and ultimately how these pressures tore them apart.

I'm not the only writer who's introducing queer history to a popular audience. My novel The Secret Life Of Albert Entwistle is riding on a wave of interest that dates back in the UK to 2017 and the 50th anniversary of the beginning of decriminalisation of homosexuality. That same year, the so-called "Alan Turing law" offered pardons to 49,000 British gay men who’d been convicted of homosexual acts – following a campaign arguably bolstered by the greater awareness brought about by The Imitation Game, the hit film that depicted the conviction and chemical castration of the Enigma-codebreaking computer scientist.

The increased interest in queer history is by no means limited to the UK. Loving by Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell is a book of photos from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (found in flea markets and car boot sales) that show men who appear to be in love. It was launched in the US and internationally in October 2020 – and is already entering its fifth print-run. Over on Instagram, The Aids Memorial shares photos and stories of people – predominantly gay men – who died of the disease, written by those who loved them. It now has 185,000 followers. Meanwhile, on Netflix, 2020 documentary A Secret Love tells the story of a US lesbian couple who kept their relationship secret from their families for nearly seven decades.

However, it's fiction that’s very much driving the phenomenon of bringing "lost" stories of gay life from the past to light. Over the last five years, a trio of Irish writers have delivered stunning gay-themed novels set predominantly in periods of history that didn't welcome them – John Boyne (The Heart’s Invisible Furies), Graham Norton (Home Stretch), and Sebastian Barry (the Costa Award-winning Days Without End). In the theatre, Matthew Lopez's exploration of gay male history The Inheritance triumphed in London before transferring to New York, where it opened the year after a well-received revival of Mart Crowley's seminal 1968 play Boys in the Band. Last year, the latter was remade as a film for Netflix by Ryan Murphy.

Indeed, Murphy has led the way with fictionalising queer history for a popular TV audience: having finished its third and final season last week, Pose blew open the drag ball culture scene of New York in the late 80s, and last year's Hollywood was a LGBTQ+-themed fantasy set in 1940s Los Angeles. Elsewhere on the small screen, It’s a Sin's five episodes have had a total of over 18 million views in the UK, while it earned near-universal raves on both sides of the Atlantic. Add to this recent queer-themed period films Carol and Call Me By Your Name, plus the French indie hit 120 Beats Per Minute, a love story set amongst the Aids activist movement of 1980s Paris, and it is clear that there is now a huge scope for telling queer stories in mainstream film and TV. Most recently, the internet exploded with behind-the-scenes photos of Harry Styles from the shoot of new film My Policeman, an adaptation of Bethan Roberts's 2012 novel starring the pop superstar as a closeted gay man in the 1950s.

Why fiction is leading the way

As a novelist, it interests me that fiction is at the forefront of this dissemination of queer history. This may be because any historians wanting to write about real-life characters are faced with a very serious problem. Most queer people from the past went to great lengths to conceal their identity – sometimes marrying and starting families, at the very least destroying all evidence. After their deaths, if families found letters, diaries or photos, they usually destroyed them (which explains why those photos featured in the picture book Loving come with no caption or explanation). This has made it all too easy for historians to erase our existence from the record and deny the contribution we’ve made to society.

Even when evidence does exist of same-sex relations – as is the case with 19th-Century Yorkshire landowner Anne Lister, the subject of BBC/HBO series Gentleman Jack, or Queen Anne, subject of Oscar-winning film The Favourite – this is often coded, covert or patchy. We have to rely on fiction to fill in the gaps.

"Filling the gaps in is my speciality," says British writer Patrick Gale, whose 2017 BBC TV drama Man in An Orange Shirt explored the fallout of same-sex desire echoing through three generations of one family. "In fact, I’m only drawn to fictionalising true-life material where there are gaps in what can be known or proved." Gale's 2015 novel A Place Called Winter saw him draw inspiration from the story of his great grandfather Harry, who left his family and emigrated to Canada in the early 20th Century. However, as a way of explaining the mystery surrounding why Harry left behind everything he knew, Gale imagined a situation in which he was forced to leave as a result of a gay affair being exposed. "[His story] had these echoing spaces in it which I could join by using my imagination and wondering how I’d have behaved in his position."

Gale is taking similar imaginative leaps with his next novel, which is about the British poet Charles Causley. "He was quite clearly queer – to judge from his private letters and diaries – and yet not remotely ready to be comfortable with admitting that, even to himself," he explains. "We know he was in the Navy and that he wrote poems which suggest his war experiences carried a powerful emotional charge; we know that he kept until his dying day a letter from a fellow officer with whom he seems to have had some kind of relationship. So what fiction can do, which a straightforward biography cannot, is to solve those mysteries in an emotional nourishing way. It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t true because it would have been true for other men in a similar situation."

The challenges in recounting the past

Crystal Jeans's latest novel is The Inverts, which tells the story of two best friends – one a lesbian, the other a gay man – who enter into a fake marriage in the 1920s. She believes that queer history offers writers a rich territory to mine but points out the constraints of working from real-life testimonies. "From what I’ve noticed our pool to fish from is a bit limited. Most original source material – diaries, books etc – was written by privileged people. White and wealthy. You’d not catch many queer coal miners jotting down their stream-of-consciousness memoirs between shifts. Vita Sackville West left us her letters. Gladys Bentley did not."

This was another reason I wrote The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle; I wanted to tell the story of one ordinary young gay man trying to express his love for another at a time when this would not have been accepted. But I also wanted to contrast this disturbing, sometimes horrifying picture with what life can be like for a gay man within today’s much more accepting society in the UK – and celebrate how much progress we’ve made. My inspiration was a series of interviews I conducted with older gay men whilst I was Editor-in-Chief of Attitude magazine, as part of our celebration of the 50th anniversary of the start of decriminalisation. I was stunned by the emotional impact and intensity of these stories of relentless persecution and oppression, of lives dogged by fear and shame. And I wanted to make sure stories like these weren’t lost – and reached as large an audience as possible.

When it comes to written – rather than verbal – evidence of working-class queer lives, this is often ambiguous. For Stephen Hornby's last play, The Adhesion of Love, he researched a group of working-class men from Bolton who set up a Walt Whitman appreciation society in the 1880s. They entered into regular correspondence with America’s great queer poet – and two of them even travelled to New York to visit him. In the play, Hornby has inferred that the men were what we'd now call gay. "If we look at the record that does exist of the Bolton men’s lives with the assumption that they were heterosexual," he says, "we're just left with a lot of puzzles and unanswerable questions. If we flip it, and assume they were interested in men sexually and emotionally, then all those puzzles disappear, and all the questions are answered."

But Hornby is careful to point out that before writing any play he carries out extensive research. "I've been working with the primary archival materials for weeks. I’ve read the contextual histories of sexuality in the period. I've visited the sites of the events. And then, crucially, I've made a homonormative assumption and told my story from that position."

As a fellow patron of the UK's LGBT History Month, creating an authentic fictional history is a responsibility I took equally seriously when writing The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle. I carried out extensive historical research into the context of the period I was exploring and returned to the interviews I conducted while at Attitude. I wanted to do justice to the men who'd lived through similar experiences but didn't survive or weren't able to make their stories heard. And while my hope is that I've created a story which straight people will find interesting, I'm aware that, for the LGBTQ+ community, the stakes are much higher. 

"What we see all through history is that people are denied their past as part of a way to control them," says Hornby. "The fascist playbook is always to destroy the history and culture of the minority it is repressing. History empowers us. At its most fundamental, it says, 'We have always been here. We have a place.'" For the LGBTQ+ community, telling our stories and knowing our history is a matter of both self-discovery and survival.