Outlaws in the Living Room

A retrospective from the British Queer Archive. Curated by Daisy Asquith.

The first documentaries about homosexuality on British television were broadcast in 1964 and 1965 when it was still illegal to be homosexual. At the time the This Week strand was the tenth most popular programme on television, with an average audience of 6m viewers. The programmes were followed in 1967 by a pair of BBC Man Alive documentaries Consenting Adults: The Men and The Women on 7 and 14 June, just a month before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 brought in partial decriminalisation. These documentaries, the first factual representations of queerness on British telly, give us an extraordinary insight into attitudes of the time. Many of the interviewees identities are concealed by dark shadows, and the medical experts authoritatively construct homosexuality as an illness and a social problem. The courageous LGBTQ people that appeared on screen, even in silhouette, were of course immediately identified by their friends, families, colleagues anyway, becoming queer celebrities overnight. Dream A40 opens the session with a sense of the fear that characterised forbidden love at the time. Quentin Crisp’s unseen interview from 1968 is as cutting, articulate and joyously camp as he is best remembered, on the ambivalence of acceptance. And finally, a newly filmed interview by Daisy with one of the participants of This Week: Lesbians 55 years on, offers a cautious but celebratory note to the end of the set of films.