Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited published.

30 May: Three Blind Mice was the BBC’s and Agatha Christie’s 80th birthday present to Dowager Queen Mary, who asked them for a radio thriller. QM’s fond­ness for gay men was also catered for in the character of Chris­topher Wren, who liked Sergeant Trotter very much and gave upright Giles the willies. Female perversion is barely hinted in ‘gruff, mannish’ ex-magistrate Mrs Boyle. Christie recycled the material into The Mousetrap, which celebrated 25,000 performances in 2012, and is the longest-running play ever.

3 December: Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire opens on Broadway. It comes to London 1949. The 1951 film removes any reference to the homosexuality of Blanche’s husband. Brando in the film does for the white T-shirt what Clark Gable did for the vest in It Happened One Night in 1934.

10 January: Gore Vidal publishes The City and the Pillar, at some risk to his literary career. His char­acters are strikingly butch, in contrast to the prevailing sissylit. The protagonist Jim Willard is an athlete who, at the end of the book (in its revised version) rapes his boyhood sweetheart. But he walks away from his defiance of social convention unpunished, even stronger. There are extended pictures of gay life in the forces during WW2. The book causes so much outrage that papers refuse to review Vidal’s subsequent work for many years, forcing him to publish under pseudonyms such as Edgar Box.

Radio play by Dr Jacob Bronowski, The Face of Violence, is an apocalyptically urgent post-nuclear piece, about the need to come to grips with man’s limitless ap­petite for destruction. Homosexuals appear on the sidelines as irremediable addicts of excess and triviality. Not a great advert, but the first mention of the subject by the BBC.

Jean Genet makes his only film. Un Chant d’Amour, an erotic silent film about the relationship between an older and younger convict and the power play with the prison guard, is banned for many years; it receives its premiere in a cut version at the Cinémathèque Française in 1954, but is not seen in the UK until 1971. Hull’s Metropolitan District Council refused it a screening as recently as 1989.

André Gide dies.

Spring Fire by Vin Packer published. The genre of lesbian pulp fiction is created.

Angus Wilson publishes his first novel, Hemlock and After. Bernard is given money to start a writers’ colony, and struggles to do so while coming to terns with his homosexuality. His next door neighbour, Mrs Curry, procures boys for paedophiles. The decayed middle-class ambience will become typical of his writing. Written in less than a month.

The lavender menace comes to Ambridge as Lady Hylberow tries to lure Christine Archer away to view Coptic churches in Ethiopia. She is disillusioned when she discovers Christine plays the field: ‘Her main interest would seem to be with “boyfriends” as she calls them.’

Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile is published. A gay psychiatrist tries to find out what has happened to his friend, who disappeared. A plea for ‘tolerance’ and a realistic picture of the gay subculture masqureading as a thriller. Having a central character who is gay and a psychiatrist gives the book added authority

8 June: The new Queen, Elizabeth II, attends the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s latest opera Gloriana, with his very public partner Peter Piers playing the romantic male lead. The opera, with its less than hagiographic portrait of the needy, vain Elizabeth I, goes down like a lead balloon.

7 September: Hidden away on the Third Programme, the most positive representation of an older lesbian until the 80s. Henry Read’s The Private Life of Hilda Tablet is based loosely on Ethel Smyth, but Hilda is an avant-garde composer, the inventor of musique concrète renforcée. ‘Throw your voice at the note, but for God’s sake, miss it!’ Hilda is a force of nature, randy, unapologetic and separatist feminist avant le jour, with a monstrous ego which she inflicts on her ‘companion’, Elsa Strauss. The occasional series continues through the 1950s.

January: Calamity Jane is released in the UK, and Secret Love becomes a lesbian and gay anthem after it tops the charts for nine weeks in April–May. The tune is based on a theme from the first movement of Schubert’s piano Sonata D664. Doris Day’s performance as the girl who just doesn’t ‘get’ femininity strikes a chord with many a lesbian. If gay men were Friends of Dorothy, gay women were now Friends of Doris.

22 August: In Love and Miss Figgis (BBC Sunday Night Theatre) classics mistress Miss Figgis persuades her star pupil to give up thoughts of marrying her electrician boyfriend in order to go to the University of Oxford. The feminist Miss Figgis is described as a ‘child of Sappho’, and quotes the Greek poet extensively.

October: Films and Filming magazine is founded by Philip Dosse, one of a stable including Dance and Dancing, Plays and Players etc. These are intended by the publisher to reach out to a homosexual ‘community’ which barely exists at the time. It is not long before they run gay personal ads.

18 October: The first commercially viable transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, goes into production in the US. The ‘trannie’ becomes the most popular communication device in history and sells billions of copies over the next 25 years. Many a CHE group on a picnic would have ‘trannies’ – in both senses of the word.

12 December: Peter Cushing and André Morell strike a particular chord with homosexuals watching Nineteen-Eighty-Four on TV. For them the portrait of a society where you had to watch every look, every word and every gesture is not something set in the future.

First edition of Homosexuality by D. J. West.

1 June: Premiere of Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, with its iconic image of Marilyn Monroe standing over a New York Subway grating with her white dress blowing above her knees.

29 July: This is Your Life premieres on BBC TV, with Eamonn Andrews. The much-parodied show is remarkable for the way it air­brushes the lives of the famous, including homosexual and bisexual guests. It moves to Thames TV in 1969.

22 September: First franchises set up by the Independent Television Authority start broadcasting. The first advert is for Gibbs SR toothpaste. As a spoiler, the BBC kill off Grace Archer the same night. Over the next 15 years independent television proves more daring in its handling of homosexual themes in both documentary and fictional strands.

27 October: Release of Rebel without a Cause, which confirms James Dean’s iconic status after his Oscar-nominated performance in East of Eden. Dean dies before the film is released. Though far too old to play a teenager, Dean graphically conveys his disturbance, and his combination of vulnerability and slightly ethereal beauty gives him huge appeal to both sexes. Everything which has come to light about his sexuality since has only confirmed his magnetic appeal. And his mystery. Pint-sized co-star Sal Mineo plays Plato, clearly but wordlessly in love with the troubled Jim, and is Oscar-nominated aged 16 for his performance. Mineo bravely comes out as gay in the late 1960s, and directs Fortune and Men’s Eyes on Broadway. He is robbed and stabbed to death in 1976.

Granada TV’s Youth Wants to Know, a current affairs programme for teenagers, discusses homosexuality.

James Baldwin publishes Giovanni’s Room, a complex tangle of hetero, homo and bisexual relationships which also explores themes of alienation which the writer felt suspended between two cultures. This is reflected in the central relationship between the American writer, David, and the eponymous Italian waiter. Though there is a great deal of tenderness between the two, there is exploitation between young and old, the tale ends in murder and execution, and the book never quite gets over the feeling that to be homosexual is to be less than a man.

Granada TV Documentary feature Homosexuality and the Law coincides with the publication of the Wolfenden Report.

Tom of Finland, the artist of exaggerated homoerotic masculinity, first published in Physique Pictorial in Los Angeles.

15 May: In Emlyn Williams’ Accolade, an MP is exposed as someone who attends orgies. The bisexual Williams intended this as a metaphor for homosexuality. Much talk of wrestling with ‘strange forces’ in his nature.

Trouble for Two is a weekly sitcom written by and starring Jacqueline Mackenzie and others. Two showbiz women live together, and employ an effete cleaner called Humphrey. Twenty years ahead of its time in terms of gender portrayal, the show mixed quick-fire ‘bachelor girl’ dialogue, kooky clowning (women wrestling!), bursting into song and jokey references à clef which would have been libellous, except that to sue would be to out oneself. Nancy Spain made a guest appearance in one episode. Taken off after seven episodes, alas.

John Stephens opens his first boutique in Carnaby Street.

Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy published: A semi-autobio­graphical study of an enclosed adolescent male community in wartime, the centre of the book is the love relationship between Brendan and Charlie, who is gay. Behan is as explicit as he dares, and clearly has a physical relationship with Charlie, although not gay himself. Also a book about growing up and finding that life isn’t as simple as the propaganda might suggest.

Iconic girls’ comic Bunty first appears. Most girls in the 1960s look forward to their weekly ‘fix’ of the Four Marys and Lorna Drake – except the lesbians who didn’t want to be ballet dancers. Reviled in some quarters for its sexist stereotyping and its crude class assumptions, Bunty still manages to respond to the times as gradually the young female characters become more self-reliant and have more interesting things to do.

4 May: Birth of US artist/gay activist Keith Haring. By the 1990s, a Haring print was a fixture in many a gay flat, with its jolly cartoon outlines orchestrated like the Mr Men in an orgy.

16 October: First broadcast of Blue Peter, triggering nearly sixty years of gossip and speculation about the presenters’ sexu­ality. In 1962 Valerie Singleton, the object of much gossip in the LGBT community, had provided the narrative voiceover for the skinflick Nudes of the World.

BBC current affairs show In The News features an episode on ‘The Homosexual Condition’. Talking heads panel includes C. R. Hewitt (founder member and later Chairman of the HLRS under his nom de plume of C. H. Rolph) and ‘a former homosexual’.

Bisexual Colin McInnes publishes Absolute Beginners. A celebration of the new vibrant coffee bar culture, the novel features large numbers of young Afro-Caribbeans, homosexuals, unapologetic rent boys, and drug addicts. The jazzy poetic dialogue casts a golden glow over some less savoury situations.

March: The belated release of The King and I in the UK gives homosexuals another ‘Secret Love’ anthem with the song ‘We Kiss In A Shadow’: ‘Alone with our secret forever we sigh/For one smiling day to be free…’ Cliff Richard records the song in 1961. ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story will fulfil a similar function, though the lyrics aren’t so directly pertinent.

14 May: Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon don drag to escape gangsters. Much anthologised last lines: Jerry: ‘We can’t get married at all.’ – Osgood: ‘Why not?’ – Jerry: [normal voice] ‘I’m a man!’ – Osgood: [shrugs] ‘Well, nobody’s perfect!’

24 November: South, an ITV Armchair Theatre, shows Peter Wyngarde as an exiled Polish officer in the Deep South, disintegrating as he realises the depth of his feeling for a young man. Very discreet, highly melodramatic, but blessed with a bravura leading performance, and brave for its day. Peter Marshall thunders in the Daily Sketch, ‘There are some indecencies in life that are best left covered up.’

30 November: The TV series Probation Officer features the first clear TV representation of a gay male couple.

Oscar Wilde year. Peter Finch in The Trials of Oscar Wilde slugs it out at the box office with Robert Morley in Oscar Wilde. Better than either was Micheál Mac Liammóir as Wilde in the On Trial BBC TV series (5 August). Unlike the movies, the aptly named Peter Lambda’s script allows Wilde his male prostitutes, who are rather jolly.

4 March: Hammer Films’ Never Take Sweets From a Stranger breaks taboos in British films in its treatment of heterosexual child sexual abuse, with the usually cuddly Felix Aylmer as the (un­speaking) abuser. It bombs at the box office, because of the discomfort of audiences with the subject and the uneasy mix of courtroom and horror genres. It has never been shown on British TV.

22 March: Joan Henry’s Look on Tempests opens at the Comedy Theatre. It examines the effects on his family when a man is accused of gross indecency. It is the first play to treat homosexuality on the West End stage after the Lord Chamberlain lifted his ban on the subject the year before. Gladys Cooper stars. Joan Henry is married to the film director J. Lee Thompson, who is best remembered for Cape Fear and The Guns of Navarone.

11 May: Harold Pinter’s The Collection on Rediffusion. A gay couple’s relationship is threatened when one of them may (or may not) have had sex with a woman. Her husband is drawn into seduction/ power games too. Rarely has sexual tension been so creepy.

31 August: Victim released. The film stars Dirk Bogarde as a bisexual barrister who is blackmailed by a former (male) lover. It will initially be banned in the US.

14 September: A gala Leicester Square opening for A Taste of Honey: 17-year-old Jo meets black sailor Jimmy and gets pregnant by him. She befriends a gay textile designer. Jeff, whom she invites to move in with her, and they resolve to look after the baby together, maybe even get married: ‘You need someone to love you while you’re looking for someone to love.’ The dream is shattered when Jo’s mother moves in with them. Blessed with a blistering performance from Dora Bryan as the mother, and one of great sensitivity and integrity by Murray Melvin as Jeff, A Taste of Honey was the first film to posit that what every straight girl needs more than anything is a gay best friend.

19 December: The Children’s Hour was William Wyler’s second crack at a movie version of Lilian Hellman’s play of a subconsciously lesbian idyll destroyed by a vengeful and malicious pupil. Despite a more open climate, Wyler fought shy of allowing the teacher couple to show their affection. And the queer still dies.

Journalist Michael Davidson publishes his frank memoir, sex and all, The World, the Flesh and Myself. ‘This is the life story of a lover of boys.’

The first complete authentic text of De Profundis, Oscar Wilde’s long love-hate letter to Bosie, is finally published. Wilde’s executor, Robbie Ross, donated the manuscript to the British Museum library in 1905, on condition that no-one should see it until 1960, thus preventing Lord Alfred Douglas from seeing it.

6 June: In Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent, a Senator (Don Murray) is blackmailed over his homosexuality by Charles Laughton in order to secure a nomination for Secretary of State. Threatened with exposure, he commits suicide. The theme resurfaces in Gore Vidal’s The Best Man two years later, when a presidential candidate is similarly ‘compromised’. No suicide this time.

11 September: TV version of Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train, scripted by John Hopkins, has a boozy muckraking lesbian journalist as its central character, hot on the heels of an East European spy ring. Her girlfriend, Janet, eventually gives up on her obsessive if drunken devotion, and marries a businessman.

20 November: The L-Shaped Room shows an unmarried pregnant Frenchwoman moving into an anonymous boarding house in order to have the baby or to abort it. The house becomes a surrogate family, and among the members is Mavis, an old Variety trouper who laments the loss of her female friend, and Johnny, who has to listen to the man he loves having sex with the heroine in the room next door – the first black gay character in British cinema. Individually depressing but collectively uplifting about the possibility of renewal and acceptance in these squalid surroundings.

10 December: Gay men viewing Lawrence of Arabia permit themselves a certain frisson at the scene between the Bey (José Ferrer) and Lawrence (Peter O’Toole); the portrayal of Lawrence’s sadomasochism is subtle enough for the film to slip into the ‘A’ certification (PG now) while being entirely credible. And O’Toole is beautiful.

City of Night is published – John Rechy’s erotic novel of cruising in San Francisco.

Meeting Point, the BBC’s Sunday God slot, devotes its whole 30 minutes to Towards a Quaker view of sex. The programme echoes the book in using the word ‘affection’ a lot. There are numerous complaints.

18 March: The Sunday Mirror TV Critic complains about young Tim going to see his doctor (Dr Bennett on 24-Hour Call) because he is worried about being homosexual. ‘If this gets around doctors will be pestered to help with anything from a leaking tap to parking the car.’

Jane Rule’s popular lesbian romance Desert of the Heart is published.

Publication of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. This simple, eloquent account of a day in the life of a middle-aged professor getting over the loss of his long-term partner set new standards of realism and emotional depth in its treatment of gay male characters. A very Buddhist novel too.

8 March: The Leather Boys is a classic study of unrequited love between gay/straight best mates, set in the contemporary biking world. Straight boy Reggie loses interest in sex with Dot (Rita Tushingham) when biker Pete comes into his life. When Pete takes him to a gay bar, he realises what’s going on, and rejects his friend. Reggie is last seen walking away from the camera with the word ‘Dodgy’ on the back of his leather jacket. Maybe there is still hope…?

6 May: Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane premieres at the New Arts Theatre. It is put on thanks to the sponsorship of Terence Rattigan, who invests £3,000 in West End transfer. The cheerful comedy of bisexual competition for sexual favours is broadcast on ITV on 15 July 1968, and filmed two years later.

3 June: An episode of Z Cars is introduced in the Radio Times as follows: ‘A man attempts to blackmail Frank Wood. Wood has only to go to the police… Given normal circumstances, Wood’s course of action is plain, but Wood is a homosexual, a man outside the law and unable to go to the police without incriminating himself.’ Somebody …. Help is scripted by John Hopkins.

23 November: House of Glass is set in an army detention centre. Noel Currer-Briggs, whose brother directed it, thought it worth writing to Antony Grey to alert Albany Trust supporters to the interest of this ATV production. Features a pre-Compo Bill Owen, and Leonard Rossiter.

The Killing of Sister George opens at the Bristol Old Vic, with Beryl Reid as George and Eileen Atkins as Childie. The author, married to a lesbian, intends it as a farce, but it becomes an ‘issue’ play because there is so little lesbian material around. Beryl Reid wins a Tony for her portrayal of George on Broadway in 1966. The film version runs into censorship arguments over the seduction scene (not in the play) and only achieves a limited release in cinemas. Even today the sex scene is usually left out when the film is shown on TV.

January: The BBC’s first successful TV soap, Compact, acquires its first effeminate character, Eliot, played by Maurice Browning, (who also made a camp villain in The Avengers). Completely bald, pouting, temperamental, his favourite novel is Little Women and he carries a small velvet cushion. He pours a healthy dose of vinegar over the heterosexual preoccupations of a thinly-disguised Women’s Own. The BBC scraps Compact before Eliot can embed himself.

18/25 January: Two-part story in the series Hit and Run. Lying, self-denying queer breaks down in the dock and admits he killed a pedestrian and pins blame on the friend who rejected his advances, as an act of revenge.

10 March: BBC Wednesday Play Horror of Darkness, starring Glenda Jackson, Nicol Williamson and Alfred Lynch. Edgy Pinteresque dialogue when Lynch’s old college chum Nicolson turns up to reclaim his love. Cop-out ending with death of the queer. Lynch plays many gay characters in the 1960s, and, in addition to his life partner Jimmy Culliford, has flings with Nureyev and US gay playwright Doric Wilson.

25 March: ‘Hello, I’m Julian, and this is my friend Sandy.’ As Hugh Paddick intones those immortal words, Julian and Sandy mince into the national consciousness on Round the Horne, where they hold court for four years. They give comfort to many a young queen over his Sunday lunch, while his parents have no idea what they are talking about.

25 March: Conscience on a Rack, an episode of The Human Jungle, stories from ‘a psychiatrist’s case-book’. Teacher Flora Robson is discovered to be sending blackmail notes to herself out of guilt and fear that she may have ‘corrupted’ a younger girl.

Maureen Duffy publishes The Microcosm, a gynocentric novel with lashings of lesbianism and a sharp portrait of The Gateways.

29 January: In Honeymoon Postponed, an episode of Armchair Theatre, two honeymooners have to move in with their parents. Dad is in permanent mourning for the death of his ‘best mate’. Son can’t consummate the marriage, leading to the suggestion he may be homosexual. The family greet the possi-bility with remarkable understanding. But he isn’t. Transferred to film as The Family Way (1966).

25 March: Dusty Springfield’s most commercially successful single, You don’t have to say you love me, is released by Phillips. Originally an Italian hit for Pino Donaggio (Io che non vivo), its tremulous emotional masochism ows a certain debt to Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas, and Springfield so identified with it, it took her 47 takes to get the recording right.

11 May: The Connoisseur, a rare excursion for BBC1, is set in a public school where a cynical housemaster (‘a connoisseur of antiques … and boys’) turns a blind eye to dark doings in the dorm, possibly including rape and prostitution, in order to stay in with his best cricketers, including pretty Ian Ogilvy. An allegory of political corruption and a prototype of If…

David Hockney paints A Bigger Splash, one of a series of Californian paintings reflecting a new, calmer sybaritic lifestyle.

In Mrs Dale’s Diary (trendily renamed The Dales), the doyenne of radio soaps, Mrs Dale (Jessie Matthews) discovers her brother-in-law is homosexual. It makes a change from worrying about Jim. The first sympathetic portrayal of a homosexual as a leading character in a soap, but an odd choice of character to ‘out’, given his long history of uncomplicated heterosexuality in the programme.

15 February: First TV appearance of proto-Python Graham Chapman, on At Last the 1948 Show. Chapman is almost the only ‘theatrical’ to come out in the early 1970s, and features with his lover David Sherlock on the cover of an early Gay News. Chapman is one of the major funders of the magazine.

5/14 June: Man Alive runs two gay programmes, one on men and one on women, to coincide with the passing of the Sexual Offences Act. The male programme shows mostly scared lonely men with backs to camera, but ‘a married woman with two children, and… what seemed a very happy, very settled couple of women’. The lesbian programme features shots of the Gateways Club.

6 September: A week after the SOA comes into force, a hotel manager wants to throw out a middle-aged man (George Cole) and his young USAF lover. C. P. Taylor’s Friends twists the knife of class consciousness and convention; the manager retreats when he discovers they are both officers. And fathers.

Art model Quentin Crisp publishes his memoirs, The Naked Civil Servant. It sells only 3,500 copies until the TV version is broadcast in 1975.

Allan Ginsberg, always a challenging poet where his homosexuality is at issue, publishes Please, Master, a delirious sadomasochistic love poem to Neal Cassady. Still one of the most sexually explicit poems ever written. In 1982 he bemuses punters in ‘Heaven’ nightclub by reading it, anonymously, for an Amateur Talent Night. He comes second.

17 June: US Release of The Queen, a ciné vérité documentary about a drag beauty contest in New York. Grade A bitching and much conversation about sexual identity and avoiding the draft. Criticised for its stereotyping and praised for its honesty in equal measure. A must for a CHE group cinema trip in the early 1970s.

28 August: BBC Wednesday Play features Simon Gray’s Spoiled. Maths tutor has a ‘moment of weakness’ with a boy he’s cramming in both senses of the word. Very indirect – ‘It was the kind of thing we talked about once.’ Mary Whitehouse approved because it did not ‘normalise or justify deviation… but showed it for the tragedy it is.’

September: Bryan Forbes’ Deadfall released, with Michael Caine. A hysterical farrago of bisexuality. Eric Portman plays an older gay man who betrays his lover to the Nazis then screws the man’s wife. He incestuously marries the resulting daughter rather than explain  ...

6 September: Pasolini’s Teorema released: gorgeous angel Terence Stamp appears to a bourgeois family and shags each member in turn, plus the maid. Each character makes confession, and is transformed by the sex. A Catholic/ Marxist/Jungian vision which so confused the Church that it gave Pasolini a special award at the Venice Film Festival, then withdrew it.

27 September: Hair opens in London at the Shaftesbury Theatre, having waited for the Theatres Act 1968 to abolish stage censorship. It will run for five years, until forced to close when the roof of the theatre collapses. Its tasteful nudity and cheerful praise of ‘Sodomy’ in the eponymous song make it notorious.

19 December: Premiere of Lindsay Anderson’s liberating, visionary If… Bobby Phillips of the incomparable forelock watches bewitched as prefect Wallace works out in the gym. A few scenes later they are seen asleep in each other’s arms, having in the meantime presumably developed a passionate relationship. The homosexuals are on the side of the revolutionaries, as pretty Bobby mows down teachers and dignitaries with a submachine gun.

John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy is widely seen as a portrait of a repressed gay relationship between the cowboy Joe (Jon Voigt) and Ratso (Dustin Hoffman), despite the stream of anti-gay abuse from both characters’ mouths. Voigt’s pretty boy looks and dazzling performance help to make this an iconic film, a cult among gay men of the time, and the only X-rated film to win an Oscar to date.

In The Gay Deceivers two young men set up home together in order to avoid the military draft. The first film to be officially turned down by the BBC on the grounds that it was offensive to gay people.

August/September: Staircase is not the camp comedy it is marketed as, but a study of emotional dependency, a kind of queer Steptoe and Son; the couple in question Harry (Richard Burton) and Charles (Rex Harrison) are barbers and long-time lovers. Their relationship is threatened by Charles’s impending court case for importuning a policeman. Burton plays a blinder, deeply committed, very touching, but Harrison seems determined to distance himself and emphasise his heterosexuality by a truly appalling attempt to swish. It’s also saved by dialogue which elevates bitching to poetry. Infinitely better than Vicious.

Gay Lib comes to crime writing when Joseph Hansen introduces gay private eye Dave Brandstetter in Fadeout.

Maurice, E. M. Forster’s gay novel inspired by a visit to Edward Carpenter, is published. After he finished the first draft in 1914, Forster spent much of his life tinkering with it, but thought it unpublishable because he insisted on a happy ending for the gay characters. By the time it appears, the zeitgeist has moved on and it seems old-fashioned.

17 March: The Boys in the Band makes it to the big screen after over 1,000 performances on Broadway. A movie which divides gay opinion still, it is hampered by the very theatrical setting and the US cliché of using games as a dramatic device (cf. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). On the one hand it is praised for its recognisable portraits of homosexuals at the time, complete with camp defences masking zilch self-esteem – ‘We all know gays like that.’ On the other hand, don’t we deserve more positive representation? Either way, a milestone and a yardstick for the 1970s.

6 June: Quentin Crisp’s TV debut in a World in Action feature. The first glimpse of the famous tiny squalid Soho flat.

12 June: The Kinks release ‘Lola’, the story of a confused flirtation between the singer and a possible TV/TS person. The song is characterised by a gentle humour at the expense of the singer and affection for the eponymous subject. It gets into trouble with the BBC over product placement – the reference to Coca-Cola, which is replaced by ‘cherry cola’ in the TOTP performance.

3 August: Much-delayed release of Cammell’s and Roeg’s Performance, starring Mick Jagger and James Fox. Dazzlingly filmed mindfuck between a gangster on the run and a reclusive rock star. Some voyeuristic lesbianism, but the homoerotic element between the guys is undermined by the fact that, in spite of the lippy and swish, they are never seen in bed together.

6 August: Ian McKellen and James Laurenson have the first onscreen gay kiss, in BBC2’s televising of the Prospect Theatre Co’s production of Marlowe’s Edward II. Bette Bourne, later founder of Bloolips and Neil Bartlett regular, has a small part. He joins GLF a few months later.

1 October: Last Train Through Harecastle Tunnel., by Peter Terson. Railway enthusiast Alan aches for his son (Richard O’Sullivan) to be a real man like him, despite his obviously being a queen and spending most of his spare time trolling the toilets and cruising the streets.

4 October: 13-part BBC TV version of Sartre’s Road to Freedom. Daniel Massey plays the main (tortured) homosexual character. The first TV play to show – discreetly – male homosexual sex (with a rent boy).

10 October: First of 69 episodes of LWT’s Upstairs Downstairs, a historic precursor to the much inferior Downton Abbey. The first series goes out at 10.15 p.m., which allows it to explore ‘adult content’. Originally a very feminist conception by actors Jean Marsh and Dame Eileen Atkins, the central relationship is between Miss Elizabeth and her maid Rose (Marsh). Elizabeth has a homosexual husband. Rose shares a room and often a bed with an under maid played by Pauline Collins. The first episode is written by Fay Weldon, the second, The Mistress and the Maids, by CHE vice-president Maureen Duffy, although she asks for her name to be taken off the credits. For Episode 5 (A suitable marriage – 7 Nov), in which homosexuality features strongly, Jean Marsh tries in vain to explain to the producer why it’s a bad idea to call a gay German visitor Baron von Rimmer.

2 December: Michael Tippett’s Knot Garden premieres at Covent Garden. The opera features a mixed-race gay couple.

10 December: ITV play Roll on Four O’clock, written by Colin Welland, depicts homophobic bullying in a school. One teacher reassures the young pansy: ‘As you get older you’ll find other boys and men… you’ll learn to live with it.’

14 January: W. Stephen Gilbert’s Circle Line hits the screens as a BBC1 Play for Today after a nervous delay of a year. In it a sexually experimental second-year university student goes to bed with an eager 14-year-old. A cheerful justification of the therapeutic benefits of casual sex, and guaranteed to épater la Whitehouse. The NVLA lists it in its top ten horrors of the year. ‘How long can the BBC get away with this?’ thunders the Sunday Post. The BBC takes fright and wipes the tape within three months of broadcast.

29 March: A man and a woman sit plunged in grief in The Waiting Room of a hospital in the play by John Bowen. He has lost his lover in a road accident, she her husband. Slowly they realise that this is the same man. Unsentimental study of loss, and the way supposed mutual friends melt away, embarrassed by tragedy.

1 May: Visconti’s much-misunderstood Death in Venice premieres in London. Dismissed by some as tawdry, the film yearns after ideal, unachievable beauty as Visconti photographs Tadzio (Bjorn Andressen) as if he were Michaelangelo’s David.

2 July: After a number of personnel changes, Queen performs its first live gig with its classic line-up. Farrokh Bulsara has just changed his name to Freddie Mercury, and is joined on stage by Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon.

Panorama runs 18-minute feature on GLF. 24 September: GLF members appear on Thames TV’s Today programme.

17 December: David Bowie releases 'Queen Bitch' as part of the album Hunky Dory. The first of Bowie’s genderfuck bisexual offerings, heavily influenced by Lou Reid and the Velvet Underground. A swirling ambiguity of pronouns makes it slightly unclear exactly who the singer’s so jealous of, but the use of ‘cruising’, ‘swishy’ and the title itself pushes it firmly to the effeminate male side. ‘She’s so swishy in her satin and tat. … My God! I could do better than that.’

Under the Age has a queenie bartender, Suzie, presiding over a group of young toughs, all of whom are drinking under age and some having sex under age as well. A conversation piece by gay playwright E. A. Whitehead, and directed by Alan Clarke, best known for Scum but ever a sympathetic portrayer of dispossessed youth. In a pioneering move, BBC2 stages a studio discussion immediately afterwards, in which GLF’s John Chesterman attacks the negative characterisation of a gay bar. This rather misses the point, that young people will respect those who respect them, especially people who are themselves oppressed.

Escape from the Shadows, Robin Maugham’s candid autobiography, describes his struggle to free himself from his bullying father, his cynical and manipulative queer uncle Somerset Maugham, and from the guilt occasioned by his homosexual feelings.

Gay anthems start to appear: Madeline Davies’ Stonewall Nation, produced by the Mattachine Society; Alan Wakeman’s A Gay Song, recorded with Everyone Allowed and distributed free; Eric Presland’s We Were In There, premiered improbably at an Oxford May Ball.

January: David Bowie outs himself as bisexual in an interview with Melody Maker; John, I’m Only Dancing, in which the singer reassures his boyfriend that he has no sexual interest in the girl he’s with, follows in September. Despite the subject matter, the single has ample airplay and reaches No.12 in the UK charts. However, TOTP ban the video, featurong Lindsay Kemp’s androgynous mime troupe.

5 February: David Hockney becomes the first openly gay castaway on Desert Island Discs. His chosen book for the island is a work of pornography – Floyd Carter’s Route 69.

13 February: Film version of Cabaret released in the US; in it, bisexuality is seen as rather fun.

17 March: John Waters’ Pink Flamingos is released in the US. Refused a certificate in the UK, it became a cult thanks to club screenings, and causes 20 years’ controversy as to whether Divine actually ate dog poo for the movie – Waters says he did in his memoir Shock Value (1982)

8 September: Pilot episode of Are You Being Served?, part of BBC Comedy Playhouse. In the pilot Mr Humphreys is a minor character and not at all effete. Writers David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd ask him to camp it up, in the face of stiff opposition from within the BBC.

26 October: A Life is Forever. Bleak prison drama in which a young gay prisoner, McCallister, pursues his heterosexual cell-mate, looking for love and protection. The straight man beats him up, but later punches another man who’s abusing the boy. It seems McCallister has found his protection. Praised at the time for its realism and Tony Meyer’s cute bum.

Lou Reid’s Walk on the Wild Side reaches No 10 in UK singles chart, in a bowdlerised version which omits lines about oral sex. The version from the LP is popular at gay discos, and Goodnight Ladies, also from the album Transformer, often closes proceedings.

Rita Mae Brown publishes Rubyfruit Jungle. What might have been seen as just another coming-of-age lesbian novel is made unique by its savage sense of humour and its Southern setting. In its day its explicitness was remarkable.

Francis Bacon paints the Black Triptych, reflecting his grief at the suicide of his partner George Dyer.

6 March: Granada’s World in Action broadcasts Conversations with a gay Liberal.

26 March: Death of Noël Coward.

13 July: Fassbinder scripts and produces Tenderness of the Wolves, about a homosexual rapist and murderer who drinks the blood of his boy-victims, strips their flesh for dinner parties with his cannibal friends, and boils the bones for soup. Makes Cruising look like Love Story. Later claimed as a satire on the predatory commercial gay scene. Come now, The Fridge was never like this.

29 September: Death of W. H. Auden.

8 October: LBC starts broadcasting in London.

30 October: Armchair Theatre’s Golden Road sees Cass and Jim take in a lodger, Anna, and Cass and Anna end up sleeping together. Jim walks out, taking their daughter with him. It’s clear that the only way Cass is going to see her daughter again is by stopping seeing Anna. The play ends on a shot of Anna standing at the front door, locked out of the house. Heart-breaking. Nowadays this would be a great campaigning tool for lesbians, but this was pre-video recorders for most people.