Jamie film

[dramanodrama]

I've name changed for this due to privacy concerns but HQ would be able to confirm I'm a regular on this board and am above board.
My Dd is watching this film as part of her drama GCSE. I've not personally heard of it. Dd says it's about a boy who is gay, something to do with drag and discrimination and Section 28. We have been discussing the misogyny of drag today and Dd told me they were watching this film. I think they've only recently started it and she doesn't know much about it but deems it boring.
I'm wondering if it's appropriate and thought here was the best place to ask for considered opinions. The teacher is gay and saying he and Jamie had things in common and that when he was in high school 15 years ago (2009) there was no gay people around, not in the media etc and he felt isolated. I left school in 1992 and there were gay lads at school, Freddie Mercury was big news, gay actors, other gay musicians etc. I don't remember many gay women though 🤔 but my point is that I left school in 1992 and there was plenty of gay people around so how was there less 17 years later?

Maybe Dd has misunderstood his explanation. Maybe it's standard drama GCSE material. Maybe I'm just a bit paranoid after two Dd have been through the school and had issues due to being GC.

The school is on the surface fully stonewalled with pride flags flying and printed on the walls but there are teachers who are GC from what I've seen in my contact with them.
Is this film an issue or a non-issue? I hate drag and its misogynistic woman face and am not sure if it has a place in GCSEs.

In the late '80s one of my work colleagues was a Lesbian. Everyone knew this, but it was rarely mentioned as she was a colleague like everyone else, respected for her work. She may have encountered some unpleasantness but if so I was not aware of it. And I remember Kenneth Williams as a much loved media personality who was accepted as an actor/comedian by people you might have expected to disapprove.

Undoubtedly there was still a lot of prejudice and nastiness, but people were at least starting to realise that that is what it was. That these attitudes continued through the '00s and still exist today is surely no surprise, but I have seen a lot of change to more acceptance during my lifetime, including individual people questioning their old attitudes. Same sex marriage wouldn't have stood a chance politically when I was a child.

Is this film an issue or a non-issue? I hate drag and its misogynistic woman face and am not sure if it has a place in GCSEs.

I think this depends on whether this teacher would allow any of the girls to say they feel drag is misogynistic and accept a feminist critique of it or whether he would accuse them of bigotry.

It's slick but the storyline about the prom is cliché and misses the more salient question which is why have school proms with their stereotyped outfits become a thing?
I want to see a play about a group of teenagers rejecting the whole commercialised, sexualised, overhyped circus. End of term disco dress up, dress down, dress to party. That would be much more complex and nuanced.

I'm glad I posted and knew I'd get good comments here.
Dd would not feel safe to openly say anything at school. She has had problems in the class recently after being put with all boys where she was treated with complete disrespect and the teacher did nothing. I recently watched a school performance and he did nothing to try and control the behaviour of those who were behaving inappropriately in front of the audience. This was a filmed gcse performance too. It was embarrassing.
At school using gay as an insult is perfectly acceptable 😡

How is that “clearly”?

Yes but they passed so well, you'd never have noticed them...

I left school in 89 and don’t recall a single gay pupil, when there must have been! My son’s school is totally different. It’s all boys, but they have a number of openly gay teachers and boys. I’m so pleased things have moved on. My friend’s son is gay and cross dressed and has acted in the Jamie musical.

Brokeback Mountain was 2005. So would have been on tv by 2009.

Stephen Fry.
Ian McKellen was Gandalf all through the early 2000s.
Will Young won Pop Idol.
Elton John
George Michael
Alan Carr
Boy George
Julian Clary
Rupert Everett
Graham Norton

All successfully lived in the closet until post-2010 keeping their homosexuality hidden from would-be teachers growing up gay in small town Britain 🙄.

As LM of drama I’d be interested why they’re using a film (ANY film) rather than a filmed live performance. There are so many freely available to schools on national theatre, globe online and so on - that would be a way to open a discussion.

tbh I’d be as concerned about the misogyny and homophobia you describe; these should absolutely be on schools radar to stamp out.

When I was in school I quite confidently announced I was bisexual to a few close friends when I was 13 and it ruined my life. Homophobia was completely tolerated by teachers who at best would tell kids to hush as they screamed slurs across the classroom. And this was a decent school. I remember a few lads who were gay but only one who was open and again got slurs chucked at him everyday but chose to brazen it out, a few came out practically the day we left. this was 2005.

The “only gay in the village” is a really stupid example to use as gay representation as again this was used as ammo against gays at the time. It’s like using examples of black face to say media had black representation. Freddie mercury as well denied his sexuality for most of his life, that’s not gay representation. I won’t claim there was no gay representation in films or tv back then as i remember will and grace and carol in friends . But if that teacher felt isolated and didn’t have positive representation then that’s his experience. Maybe there’s additional context like he’s not white and he meant no one who looked like him. As I can remeber from above posters examples knowing that “Gandalf was gay” and Graham Norton was big then.

I suspect what's being heard here is the grim frustration of older gay people, as per usual, having their experience and views and lives totally dismissed by the Bright Young Things because life only really started when they did.

Any minute now we'll be reminded that lesbian means absolutely everything except actually homosexual and if we weren't all so stupid, obsolete, past it and irrelevant we'd be gladly embracing straight sex and calling it whatever we were told to.

@aodirjjd I agree re Freddie Mercury, he never came out as gay. George Michael admitted he was gay after he was caught cottaging. Elton John had been around since the 70s and came out in the 90s.

It was rare until relatively recently, for film stars or pop stars to come out. If the drama teacher said there were few people that he felt represented him, then that's obviously his experience. He may come from a homophobic background where he didn't feel able to express himself.

I grew up in the 1970s and went to university in the 80s. I knew plenty of openly gay people throughout that time.

@aodirjjd The “only gay in the village” is a really stupid example to use as gay representation as again this was used as ammo against gays at the time.

Yes, but The Only Gay in the Village was portrayed by an actual gay man. It would be akin to a black man doing black face.

It was a gay man mocking the gay men who saw their sexuality as WHO they are, not WHAT they are, mocking people who make their sexual orientation their entire identity and personality.

It's also ironic that Little Britain's Emily was requested to be the mascot of a few trans charities, David Walliams declined the request.

This does mirror my school experience too in the early 00s.

Section 28 was active, but had little effect, we had PSE lessons on homosexuality and there were openly gay boys about. Those in their 20s today going on about the long lasting effect of Section 28 are not being truthful.

The openly gay boys were excessively camp and were allowed long term sick notes so that they never had to do any PE. There would be bullying, but there would also be bullying of others for being different too.

I do feel that people like Jamie (who I once say on the Tube with his mother and he was excessively overdressed in a bright pink suit with lots of ruffles and Pat Butcher earrings), is that they use their campness as a weapon and rebelliousness, which is why he dragged up for his school prom, which TBF if you're going to take a lot of it at school you might as well give a bit back.

I think you're missing the point.

The teacher was almost certainly referring to the - factual and documented - fact that there was very little positive representation of gay people in the media in and around 2009. It was beginning to change, but hadn't yet changed.

Citing a range of representation of gay people that were either deeply negative, or citing gay or bi figures who weren't actually publicly out sort of proves the point this teacher was making.

To illustrate it with statistics - in the US in 2007, 1% of regular characters on mainstream broadcast TV were LGBT+. In 2021 that was 12%.

Here again - Kenneth Williams cited as some sort of example of positive representation.

His characterisations on TV and film were reduced to camp and innuendo - not unlike the Mr Humphries character on Are You Being Served. As a public persona, he never really spoke about his private life apart from revealing how lonely and despondent he felt.

If this is the sort of example you think shows that there have been positive portrayals of gay people in the media, is it any wonder you're entirely out of kilter with the lived experience of this teacher.

When I was in primary school (80s) half the acts in my copy of Smash Hits were gay!

But I guess every generation needs to think they were the first to do anything?

Maybe DD should bring up Jimmy Somerville/Bronski Beat and the epic song ‘Smalltown Boy’?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/5CfhTDdRpsVC4wwLSsxY1kK/smalltown-boy#:~:text='Smalltown%20Boy'%20was%20a%20distinctive,serious%20debate%20over%20these%20issues.

Queer as Folk, as a PP pointed out, was broadcast in 1999 and I believe is something of a touchstone among millenial gays for its positive, joyful representation of gay men, and because AIDS wasn’t mentioned at all (combination therapies for HIV had come in a couple of years earlier, IIRC). Although I never watched it, around that time I remember gay friend of mine enthusing abut Will and Grace.

Gay culture was there in the 80s if you looked for it, it just wasn’t blatant. As a naive teenage girl growing up in a small town who liked boys, even I realised what was going on with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Bronski Beat. Gay contemporaries of mine have also cited the Pet Shop Boys and Erasure as being important to them. And I was so disappointed when Daniel Day Lewis’s character Johnny got off with Omar in My Beautful Launderette.

All the examples so far have been men.

These aren't fictional portrayals, they are real people who were lesbian icons before the 2000s: kd lang and Martina Navratilova - especially after they came out as gay, obviously, but they were positive icons even before that.

And there used to be a programme on TV all about lesbians called the L Word, which was on mainstream telly from 2004.

It's almost as if anything before the T was added to LGB is being written out of history. The slogan 'No LGB without the T' is being taken literally - if it didn't have T in it, it didn't happen.

I'm GC. I also love Everybody's Talking About Jamie. I've seen the live stage show and the film.

I'd recommend maybe watching it and drawing your own conclusions. There are some differences between the show and the film, most notable the 1980's aids flashback scenes from Hugo.

Just putting this down because it really is an iconic song & video.

released 1984 and made it to no 3 in the charts (when the charts really meant something!)

The album was called ‘The Age of Consent’ in reference to the difference between hetero and homo consent laws.

There's been a steady progress in gay rights starting well back in the last century. So most of us have the experience of watching things improve over our lifetime.

Young people are usually in the vanguard with social change. But teenagers are not - they more or less live in the middle ages. So schools are still homophobic when parts of adult society have moved on. Gay teenagers will still have to go through a difficult process of accepting themselves and coming out even when most of the adults around them and society in general are not longer homophobic.

I think there is also a big difference in how gap people were viewed depending on where you were brought up.

In a northern, working class community even in the 90's you would keep it hidden. I was at university/working near Birmingham in the 90's and there was a distinctly different attitude there than there was back in my home town. Very few would feel able to come out at school back there.

That’s true Borogovia - I’m sure the actual process of self discovery and coming out is still difficult for todays teens.

But the idea that there were no gay people in the media when this drama teacher was a lad is preposterous - Paul O’Grady’s Lily Savage hosted Blankety Blank in the late 90s and you don’t get much more mainstream than a tea time game show!