We still see "coming out films" choking film festivals every year with their furtive glances, their awkward advances, their surprise outings, their familial retributions and their community reinforcement. And we still line up for them.
What is it in this common experience that pushes our buttons so furiously? Why do we keep coming back? What is it in us that we want to relive? To celebrate... ad infinitum.
You know what's coming, don't you? You're about to get my coming out story. And it is going to be paired with my favourite coming out film, a film ever so slightly inter-linked.
Aren't you lucky...
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With these things it is difficult to know where to start. I could start with the first time I showed my sister Beautiful Thing, thinking its sweet, fairy-tale-told young love could cut through the familial fears (it didn't - where I saw young love, she saw emotional abuse).
A better kicking off point is probably the rusted on metaphor I’ve used to explain all this since the late '90s. It's a coming out image, and like all good images it did the work for me. It answered most of the questions that I used to get asked. It is not something I pull out anymore; thanks to a mix of open living and social progress, my time of needing to come out on a daily basis has long passed.
Coming out, I used to say, is like a kernel of corn.
I never really thought about the gay thing. I always knew it was there. But it was small. Insignificant. It sat in the pit of my stomach. It was easily ignored. It didn't impinge on the life that was laid out before me. A tiny, self-contained kernel is nothing in the face of suburban bliss, a wife, 2.4 kids and key parties every evening.
Somehow, with that little of kernel tightly packed away, the two weren't incompatible.
But say the words. Externalise it. Pop the kernel and everything changes. A world of expectation is inverted. Things that were possible are now impossible. And things that were quietly tucked away now become all-consuming. Everything turns inside-out.
That was coming out for me.
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The scope of coming out films is pretty limited. That's the beauty of shared experience. Beautiful Thing starts in a familiar, and much feared, place: the sports field - the stuff of gay nightmares. At least young Jaime (Glen Berry), who has "forgotten" his sports uniform, doesn't reach the field. Like many of us, he's a regular absconder.
I never had to worry too much about bullying. I think my camouflage tactics were more refined. I still played reasonably often, though I usually managed to manoeuvre myself into some position where the ball was never going to come anywhere near me. I don't cope well with stress and balls flying at my face (with the concomitant performance expectations) always reduces me to a quivering mess.
Jamie just bolts. But not before sharing a brief moment of connection with the bullies' less-willing accomplice, Ste (Scott Neal).
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Jonathan Harvey was up front about the fact that his play was a fairy tale. Hettie MacDonald took that fairy tale and gave it life with delightful incongruence. It takes place in London but it is always sunny. It is the '90s but it is soundtracked (gloriously) by The Mamas and The Papas. It deals with the gays but there's not an activist or an "AIDS victim" in sight, and this at a time when the lingering shadow of Thatcher and HIV were tearing the community apart.
In short Beautiful Thing was just that, a pocket of passing, fantastical beauty in the middle of a social and cultural shitstorm. It is no wonder that it was eaten up. That identifiable moment of almost-on-field bullying is but a momentary stare into the void before Jamie is whisked away through the sun-kissed cement walkways of his Thamesmead estate on a cloud of four part harmonies.
To the tune of 'It's Getting Better', MacDonald sets the lay of the land, the gangwayed public housing geography, the cultural diversity, the petty neighbourly rivalries, and the sniping humour - most of it shared between Jamie, his imperious mother, Sandra (Linda Henry), and Leah (Taneka Epson), their Mamma Cass obsessed neighbour.
With Ste and his abusive family, the situation is much more tense. He’s set upon by both his father and his brother.
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Coming out comes (out) in stages. It is a never-ending process (even if it slows down in later life, like gay menopause).
The first time I came out was to my ex-girlfriend. She was only recently ex. We'd spent six years in a sexless relationship (and I only add the sexless thing in there because it is the one question that the kernel metaphor doesn't cover - no, I have never touched a vagina).
We'd been together since Year 10. Her family was fucked up (in a father-left-mother-for-best-friend kind of way), mine was fucked up (in an I-can't-stay-here-without-sibling-arguments-turning-into-violent-brawls kind of way). We had a relationship of situational co-dependence. I spent a lot of peaceful time at hers. She spent a lot of time with my family, who, for her at least, were not fucked up.
We shared good times. We were the best of friends; six years would have been a long time to spend in a relationship with someone I didn't get along well with. We were, to all outsiders looking in, the perfect couple. But there was that kernel. While it didn't impinge on our daily lives, I could feel it pressing. Getting heavier. And, eventually, post-high school, post-university, when the question of marriage reared its veiled head, crunch time arrived.
Will it ever happen? No. But it's not you, it's me. All the clichés. I took the coward's way out. School holidays ended and I left without explanations.
I stewed. She stewed (and rightly so). After six years, she felt I owed her and explanation, and she was right. When we caught up after that school term, through tears I agreed to lay it all out. I couldn't do it then though. We made plans to meet the next day.
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There’s a delicacy to how Jamie and Ste feel each other out. Harvey presses them together through exterior pressures – Leah, pasted in a face pack, singing ridiculously loudly to 'One Way Ticket', the entire tenement (including Ste’s thuggish brother) banging at her door, the lockout and the burnt bubble'n'squeak and the scuffed shoes - but when they arrive in each other's laps (or bumping each other's top and tail - thanks to Sandra on both counts), the tentative comfort is relatable. Relatable in that their mutual recognition, though furtive, immediately feels safe.
Nothing happens. For the boys it is a moment of mutual solicitude, even a brief affirmation of their own worth in the cocoonish respite from the more brutal world outside.
Certainly there are "what-if" pulses racing. That's not specific to coming out (I still experience it) or to gays, but it does hold a particular significance when the ache at hand goes so much further than "does he like me?" You dodge the question because if the answer is yes there are so many more things do deal with in your life all at once.
But the butterflies don't stop because you'd still eagerly risk it all.
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I couldn't say I was gay at the time. That's a pretty common thing, I'd imagine. It gives Harvey one of his most realistic exchanges once Jamie and Ste have finally "gotten on", as we used to say in high school.
In actual fact, I didn't say anything when it came to the crunch. I wrote a letter. Even then I didn't write I was gay. I wrote: "I think I am like Donald." Donald was (and is) a dear, Pet Shop Boys obsessed mutual friend, who had bravely been the pride flag bearer of our joint friendship group. I handed her the letter and absented myself to the shower.
It was a long letter. About six pages from memory. I wish I had it to read again. I know she wishes she had it to read again. But I had her burn it as soon as she was done. As soon as I had torched her life. I can't imagine how horrible it would have been to read that letter. I was too caught up in my own oblivion to think about that though. There were tears. There was finality.
POP!
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I realise all of this probably sounds incredibly depressing, so I want to snatch some time for a brief but important aside. I want to say that, yes, while there is certainly an element of fear and accompanying sadness in any coming out, there is also a lightening sense of optimism that wells up as the closet is left behind. This is something that Beautiful Thing captures like few other coming out films, mainly because it is so concerned with its supporting characters.
The closet is opaque. It stops you from seeing what is right in front of your face. There can be happiness just within your grasp but you don’t reach for it because you believe that if the truth came out, that happiness would no longer be available to you. That’s a difficult thing to capture on film.
What Harvey does well (and what MacDonald translates so colourfully to the screen) is the life that goes on around Jamie and Ste. Most of this life emanates from Leah. Drunk or sober, she is the film’s sparky heart. But there are other pockets of joie de vivre. The eye rolls of Leah’s mother, the salubrious banter of Sandra with her bestie, Louise, even the dowdy neighbours provide sprinklings of humour. All of this is readily accessible to the boys but for their closet-driven self-involvement – the beauty of Beautiful Thing is how they gradually come to look around at what’s on offer.
If there is a catalyst in this process, an element that binds the community around Jamie and gets burnt up in the process, it is Sandra’s hippy boyfriend, Tony (Ben Daniels). Shouts go out to Tony. Bless his soppy, left-leaning, blunt-smoking heart. He’s a softener on so many levels, helping everyone till he gets chewed up and spat out. He’s Beautiful Thing’s out of water comic lubricant. He’s the guy that smooths the way to happiness.
So, amongst all this downbeat navel gazing, let’s take the time to raise a glass to Tony and all those don’t-give-a-fuck people who kind of make coming out bearable.
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My second coming out was just as orchestrated. More so, actually. I told my sister. I told my sister so my mother would have someone to talk to when I came out to her the next day.
Always being one to pick my times well, I chose to tell her on our way home from the cinema. After we'd exhausted all the talking points we could drag out of Dragonheart (there's only so much you can say about a film with Sean Connery as a talking dragon), I announced I had something to tell her. "Grip the wheel," I said, then I lobbed the grenade.
We didn't crash. But she did think it best we pull over. We talked it through in a MacDonald's car park in Kardinya.
Did I want to see a psychologist? That's the only question I can remember - for some reason that was the go-to line back then. We chatted for a while, we drove for a bit. We pulled over and we chatted some more. She worried about the lonely life I'd lead, she worried about AIDS (it was that time), she worried about me turning into the bitter old queen who worked with her.
To be honest, she worried about all the things I worried about (sans bitter old queen). I guess we shared the same social conditioning. It wasn't the most comforting conversation.
I told her I was going to tell mum. I told her she needed to be there for her.
I still hadn't shaken the idea that I might be chucked onto the street.
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Every film needs a centerpiece, and while it is a shame that Beautiful Thing's comes after Ste finds himself on the wrong end of his brother's fists, the scene is so tender and so gloriously camp, that even Ste may admit that something good came from him pushing back.
A moment of fragility. A moment of recognition. A moment of care-filled bravery. A bottle of Body Shop peppermint foot lotion. And Rodgers and Hammerstein.
This is the moment my sister put down to someone being taken advantage of in the face of domestic abuse. I still, even now, struggle with her reading of the situation, not least because it comes from a place that considers Ste a victim and homosexuality psychologist-worthy.
I think being queer and having lived through similar experiences gives us a different different angle on the situation, as it does with many other much more coded ones (see Vito Russo). Actually, where my sister perceived reticence in Ste's refusal to respond to Jamie's initial advances, I only saw an (entirely endearing) desperation to hide his adolescent "response-to-stimuli." Funny how the world taints out inputs.
Thankfully, Sandra is always on hand to break the tension with the gayest Chekov's gun in the history of cinema, screaming through the door "Who played the Baroness?"
And when that gun goes off it, hearts explode, and Richard and Oscar's 'Sixteen Going on Seventeen" is queered to fuck.
We really do have to claim what is ours.
In direct response to my sister though (because I still feel the need to counter her reading of the film even now), Harvey and MacDonald play the consummation scene with exceptional poise and balance. Both boys put themselves on the line. In contemporary parlance, there is never any question of mutual consent.
And I don't think there would have been any question of the advantage taken of his abusive situation if he found love in the arms of a girl.
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I'm not above abuse myself. Emotional at least.
Coming out to mum was a long game. Six months out I told her I had something important to tell her. It was the only way I could build myself up to do the deed. In retrospect, it was a horrendous way to do it. It must have been excruciating for her. It's not like we didn't talk over that time, we still spoke on the phone regularly but I refused to be drawn on what the important something could be. The more she needed to know the more I knew I couldn't back out of telling her.
I did try to give hints though. I left her with a copy of Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake (the one with the exceptionally handsome male swans) and other film recommendations that edged suspiciously into gay erotica. Quite frankly, given the fact that my father had been calling me a fairy since the age of five, it shouldn't have been any surprise. But it was.
And, again, did I want to see a psychologist?
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Happy fucks don't immediately turn into happy endings, not in a world seeped in homophobia. Harvey's slant on Thamesmead my be fluttered with summery affectations but it doesn't escape the blanket of oppressive fear or the bleakness of self-hate. When Jamie hunts down the object of his newly outed affection at a house party, chav'ed up and selling pills, things aren't quite as pukka as Ste professes. Outside the sanctuary of Jamie's bedroom, there's a lot more air to suffocate in.
I've always found Ste's squeaking anger here exceptionally endearing and I've long applauded MacDonald for her excellent casting. On both counts, really. Scott Neal and Glen Barry came out onscreen when they were just shy of 18. They both looked younger. They both acted younger. They both captured that awkward, uncertain, pre-formed wonder that goes hand in hand with coming out, no matter how late it happens.
I love the discomfort of this scene, under the garden lights, down by the cement-bound lake. It's about as close as MacDonald could get to the edge of the von Trapp's lake in Thamesmead. It's the perfect setting for part one of Ste and Jamie's showdown. It gives Jamie a twinkling setting to smooth over Ste's concerns.
And it provides a stark contrast to the heavy shadows and glaring streetlights when the boys face off against Leah and her grassroots truths.
Communities, no matter how broken, can always find a way to break more.
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A lot of coming out is done internally, a lot of churning things over. A lot of worrying. As scary as they are, the external coming outs are actually rather exciting. Even the silent ones. Buying your first gay rag is probably one of the most identifiable rites of passage. I didn't tuck mine under my shirtfront like Jamie (I didn't steal anything in my youth except for the flyer for this film, which I grabbed from the pin-up board on my way out of the cinema that night); I was a sandwicher.
I would lurk in the aisle. I would case out the covers. I might sneak a flick through if there was nobody else in the newsagent's. If I could pluck up the courage, I would grab some innocuous movie magazine and a copy of TV Week and I'd chuck the gay mag in between. Heart racing, I'd step up to the counter and flippantly thrown them on the counter as if I didn't even know what I'd selected. Hands shaking, I'd pay. Then I'd bolt, the booty stashed safely away in a paper bag, and maze through a few random streets in case someone had seen me.
The closet is a paranoid place.
Thinking back, it is not at all surprising that the first time I had the balls to buy one I was out of town. I was on conference in Broome, I bought a copy of 'Outrage'. I went back to my hotel room. I locked the door. I read it cover to cover. I'd never read a magazine cover to cover before. Ever.
I even snipped out the mail order form for a soft core porn video (The Chain Reaction starring Johan Paulik, for those who are playing along at home).
It was then that I made the decision that enough was enough.
A few weeks later I was handing over that now-burnt letter.
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Jamie's gently, gently approach to Ste eventually pays off. He comes out of his shell in the end. He doesn't bring a gay mag over to Jamie's. He brings a fucking ugly beanie.
Besides, Jamie already has the magazine. Gay Times. With a low-rent Marky Mark lookalike on the cover (back when their covers weren't overloaded with muscles). The boys flick though with obvious delight. They read each other columns. As all new community members do, they fuck up the lingo. Laughably, I think the frottage/yogurt thing stuck in my head for some years.
Page 94 opens a doorway to the real life gays. The Gloucester. Drag queens, nellies, same sex kissing. The stuff of life.
I'm sure most gays remember their first trip to a gay bar. I do but it was not a particularly formative moment for me. Due to my inexperience in going out, I rocked up to the bar on a Tuesday night. They were launching Massive Attack's 'Mezzanine' and I was expecting a bevvy of hot, hot, trip-hop obsessed men.
I was the only one there.
All they did was play the album end to end. Kind of depressing really. Not the most auspicious start to my gay socialising.
What I do remember more vividly is the first time I went to the cinema alone. Seeing as I wasn't one to leave the house at night and not one to drive somewhere by myself, my decision to do so raised eyebrows at home. My mother asked why I wasn't going with my ex and hit me with a barrage of questions. My father, probably suspecting his recently single son was on my way to some new vaginal conquest, brushed all that "mothering" aside.
If he'd known that I was going to watch a film, this film, he probably wouldn't have been so supportive.
I went to The Gloucester. I can't remember what it was called IRL, and I (again) rocked up at a time that there was nobody around. But it was there and it was across the way from Greenwich Park. It was a pilgrimage of sorts.
It is not there anymore. This makes me sad. Sadder than it probably should.
Part of me wanted to run through Greenwich Park like Jamie and Ste. I wanted to make my own kind of music. I wanted that explosion of relief and connection. I wanted that happy moment where the cares of the entire world dropped away and there was just another pair of lips and arms and playful games.
I’m not going to say I haven’t found that (by the next time I visited Greenwich, I’d kicked off my own short lived fairytale), but MacDonald and Harvey wrap this moment up in such a splendid bubble of perfection that it still thrills me.
Yet, it is not without its own touch of melancholy, a sad inflection on The Mamas and the Papas’ soaring accompaniment:
“You're gonna be knowing the loneliest kind of lonely,
It may be rough goin', just to do your thing's the hardest thing to do.
But you've gotta make your own music, sing your own special song,
Make your own kind of music even if nobody else sings along."
I still wonder why this scene didn’t push this track into the repertoire of drag performers the world over.
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Community is a fine thing but isolation doesn't dissipate as soon as the closet doors are flung open. It is not easy to embrace a community you've spent so long disassociating yourself from. It is not easy to accept a community's queer glory when you're still an introvert at heart. And it is not easy to embrace a community with fresh arms and a fluttering heart when those who have been committed, badge wearing members for years are, shall we say, jaded.
I sympathise with Ste when he admits his dislike for the crew at the Gloucester. There's a lot of "that's not me" to process. There's a lot of "I don't want to be a part of that".
In my case, still finding my own skin, and located far from anything that could be considered gay culture, I began to define myself in opposition – I became what my friend would later call a “darksider” (a story for another time).
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Jamie’s inner turmoil and his confrontation with Sandra is brief, fiery and, true to their relationship, vindictive. As is the way with these things, both are arguing from a standpoint deep within an imagined future, Jamie’s bleak with homophobia, Sandra’s with loss and expected loneliness for her boy. Both lash out as if by yelling at each other they can avert this hopelessness.
But these imagined futures aren’t destined to eventuate in real life. Community and family are stronger than that, or they were for me. For Jamie, for Sandra, for me, for my mother, my sister, we were trying to work things out in the unknown. And the unknown only remains unknown until you stare into it. My life. My mother’s relationship with me, and my sister’s, eventually normalised. There wasn’t loneliness, at least no more than most. I’m still something of a unicorn to them all but in a good way.
It took my mother about a year to come round to that realisation. It took another film, Héctor Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. She doesn’t remember now but her first allusion to my sexuality post my coming out was simply: “Go eat your bon-bons!” A reference to William Hurt’s negligée draped character in the film. She doesn’t remember it now but it was a poignant moment of recognition for me.
Sandra’s acceptance doesn’t take anywhere near as long. If you need any proof of Harvey’s commitment to dressing his coming out story in a fetching fairytale frock, Sandra’s defiant happy ending charge is it. And it still stands as one of the most jubilant climaxes in queer cinema. Jamie’s off-handed invitation to her and her friend to join Ste and Leah at the Gloucester, the friend’s raised eyebrows and Sandra’s matter of fact admission: “I will never have grandchildren.”
MacDonald and Harvey and Mama Cass aren’t content by something so insular though. Quivering in the face of Thatcher’s attacks on the community is not an option. Wicked witches never win in fairytales. They take it to the estate. They take it into the sunshine. They take it to the cement gangways. They take it to the homophobic heartland. And they take it big. Rainbow big. They dream in front of everyone. They dance.
Ste and Jamie together, blanketed in sun flare. And Sandra, reunited with Leah, stares down the entire estate like a fucking lioness. She’d have ripped Thatcher’s iron tits off. Lovingly, of course.
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To some degree, Beautiful Thing was portentous. It was a cinematic popcorn kernel. It popped. Society followed suit.
Sure, we were already pulling in that direction but Harvey framed his coming out tale so touchingly and so optimistically that the communities many spectres barely cast their shadows. He and MacDonald pointed to a future defined by love, and for many of us that has come to pass.
There is much to be said on how that’s working out in these increasingly troubling times but not here.
Here is for dancing on hot cement.
Here is for rainbows.
Here is for young love.
Here is for popcorn.
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Beautiful Thing is #46 in my Personal 100, a journey back through my hundred most beloved films.
You can track my progress here.
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