Vicious but not very funny

In 1965, Julian and Sandy (played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams) began to make their weekly appearance on the BBC radio comedy show Round the Horne.  In whatever role they were inserted into the narrative, they always announced themselves with the same mincing line: "Ooh ‘ello! I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy!"

The brilliance of the script (by Barry Took and Marty Feldman) was its ability to smuggle outrageous references past the BBC censors and into the consciousness of those who had ears to hear. When the pair turned up as lawyers, Julian said, "We've got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time". On another occasion, Sandy spoke of Julian’s piano-playing as “a miracle of dexterity at the cottage upright".

These were subversive jokes. Private homosexual acts were still punishable by imprisonment. Most gay men had no choice but to stay in the closet. Did Julian and Sandy promote a stereotype? Of course. But a camp manner and a language of sexually charged double-entendres was the only style in which a gay identity could be made visible, or (for the radio audience) audible. Portrayals of gay life were either outrageously comic or suicidally grim. Normal was not yet an option.

Now a crack team of writers and actors are, for some reason, recycling a dismal version of the same old stuff – gay with all the gaiety knocked out of it. In Vicious, a new ITV sitcom, revered classical actors Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi play a couple who have been living together for 48 years, which means they must have met the year Julian and Sandy made their first appearance. Coincidence? Probably. But if we imagine them as Julian and Sandy grown old, they’ve also grown mean. Judging from the first episode, they’ve sunk into a state of mutual loathing and are reduced to addressing each other in carping put-downs.

In this case, context is all. Julian and Sandy were a force for progress. They were part of the cultural climate that made it possible for the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 to decriminalise homosexual acts in private. Who was offended by Round the Horne? Daily Mail readers, perhaps. Half a century later, I find myself harrumphing at the telly – screaming queen jokes just aren’t that amusing any more – while the Daily Mail declares the new show “an instant classic”.

I don't blame the actors. Actors have to work and must make the most of the script they're given. The writers are Mark Ravenshill, a respected playwright, and Gary Janetti, who was executive producer of Will and Grace. Both of them are gay, so I have to assume they know what they’re doing. I don’t.

Redefining marriage? What's so new about that?

The US Supreme Court is currently debating whether to uphold or overturn the 1996 Defence of Marriage Act, an attempt by Congress to obstruct the spread of same-sex marriage across individual states. On this issue American politicians are still divided largely on party lines. 

Here in Britain the Conservatives have seen the benefits of indulging popular support for same-sex marriage, an inexpensive way of shedding their image as the nasty party while continuing to grind the faces of the poor. Opposition is left to backbench traditionalists and church leaders, most vocally the Catholics and of course, standing precariously on their established status, the Anglicans.

In Britain, the state got into the business of regulating marriage in 1753, while leaving the Church of England largely in control. Oddly, the legislation established some kind of exemption for Jews and Quakers, though not for Catholics, who had to continue being married by clergymen whose status they didn’t recognise. 

In 1836 the Church lost its monopoly, when parliament introduced civil marriage. Now, like any other religious organisation, the Anglicans can refuse to preside over a wedding ceremony, but have no power beyond that to decide who may or may not marry. On the question of same-sex marriage, they’re entitled to their opinion but it really isn’t up to them.

I’ve got some tangled history with this subject. I was raised Catholic but at 16, prompted by a wildly rebellious urge, joined the local Anglican choir. I learnt to sight-read hymns in four-part harmony and acquired the knack (an Anglican peculiarity) of reading the words of a psalm from one book and the music from another. For this I will always be grateful. I also discovered to my surprise that the vicar thought highly of historical figures I’d been taught to think of as villains, such as Thomas Cranmer. Not many years later, no longer considering myself a Catholic, I got married in an Anglican Church.

After I was divorced (a humane solution beneficial to both parties) I went out for a while with a nice Catholic girl, until she told me she’d have to break it off because I was a married man. Young and naïve as I was, and something of a literalist, I consulted a Catholic priest. After some questioning he told me that my marriage needed no annulment being null from day one, since, while still technically a Catholic, I had neglected to seek the permission of a Catholic bishop, permission that would have been granted on condition that my fiancée and I undergo a course of training on the significance of marriage.

(The vicar who married us had, in fact, delivered his own, very Anglican, version of marriage preparation. I remember a meeting in the vicarage during which he blushed and stammered, said ‘You’re clearly both intelligent people’ and handed us a pamphlet which instructed us that sex was ‘very, very pleasant’.)

I immediately told the nice Catholic girl that it was OK, I wasn’t married after all. I saw to my dismay that she wasn’t as thrilled with this news as I had been. I would later be told often enough that ‘It isn’t you, it’s me,’ but would never again be dumped with the line, ‘It isn’t me, it’s the Pope.’  

By the time I was ready to get married again (to Leni Wildflower) I’d lost interest in organised religion, but Leni had spiritual inclinations and was quite keen to be married in the eyes of some god or other. So I approached a friend who happened to be an Anglican priest of a fairly liberal kind. He turned us down because of that first marriage, which he told me remained sound as far as the Church of England was concerned whatever the Catholics might think.

So Leni asked a rabbi, a professional colleague in California, who said, ‘I don’t do mixed marriages’. Since the rabbi was female this hair-raising response could not be blamed on a strict adherence to orthodoxy.

In the end we settled for a California Methodist who allowed us to stamp on wine glasses to cries of mazel tov, and to say whatever we wanted about God, Vishnu or the cosmos.  

Papa don't preach

I’m thinking of a Catholic boy, coming of age in 1950s Scotland, having been raised in a culture that conflates sexuality with sin and does its best to keep the lid on both. Unfortunately, for a boy at this time and place, it’s not girls he finds himself attracted to. The practices that invade his imagination are not only associated with profound social shame, they are also punishable by imprisonment. What tempts him is categorised by his own church as one of the 'four sins crying to heaven for vengeance'.

He throws himself into academic work and is eventually drawn to the priesthood. By the time parliament decriminalises homosexual acts between consenting adults in private, he has been ordained and has put that whole complicated issue behind him, taking refuge in a life of celibacy.  He serves as a curate, a teacher, a parish priest. He’s good at his job.

In mid-life he is put in charge of the spiritual development of young men training for the priesthood. Beyond the walls of the seminary it’s a hedonistic time. There are pockets of wild liberation where gay men are indulging their sexual appetites, no longer fearful of judicial punishment and untroubled by thoughts of hell. Is he influenced by this? Or by the knowledge that his life is half over and half his nature lies dormant? Denied the normal comforts and companionship of marriage to which most people eventually aspire, does he find loneliness creeping up on him? Or does his position of unquestioned authority provide an opportunity he simply can’t resist? In the language of his Church, has his job become one continuous ‘occasion of sin’?

Is this a true story, or an outline for a novel by Colm Tóibín?

How about this one? A senior cleric approaching the end of a distinguished and respected career, about to fulfil the sacred duty of voting for the next pope, faces accusations that thirty years ago he made inappropriate advances to four seminarians, accusations that he denies. Now we’re in Philip Roth territory. In The Human Stain, Coleman Silk, a professor of Classics charged with showing prejudice towards two black students, could clear his name by revealing his own deepest secret that he is himself (in a certain ethno-cultural sense) black, though sufficiently light-skinned to pass as white. What if, like Coleman, our senior cleric has it in his power to replace one scandal with another by revealing a long-standing secret – a relationship, for example, consensual and mutually beneficial, with a woman of his own age? In a strange twist, he surprises his conservative supporters by suggesting that the Church should consider allowing priests to marry, a coded intimation of his desire to normalise his private life and finally assert his long-obscured identity.

Perhaps the truth is even more implausible – something Dan Brown might have dreamt up. The whole thing is a conspiracy led by a villainous Italian cardinal with papal ambitions. Our hero is a tough, plain-talking Scot with the rugged good looks of a rugby player, who has made a name for himself by standing up to politicians cravenly seeking popularity with their liberalising agendas, particularly their plans for gay marriage, 'a grotesque subversion' as he sees it. True to form, he opposes the worldly Italian. Whether politically motivated or bribed with promises of advancement, his accusers, like the four assassins of Thomas à Becket, set out to rid their master of this turbulent priest, to neutralise him, at least, for as long as the Cardinals sit in conclave.  

But enough of fantasies and speculations. The important story is of an institution so blind to its own failings that it projects them out into the secular world, condemning the rest of us for our self-indulgence while it covers up its own crimes, a body so damaged by scandal that no one is much surprised by one more accusation, or much impressed by a heated denial or a half-hearted apology. Perhaps some of these many charges are false. But the credibility of the Church is so damaged in this area that, for someone accused, to be a member of its hierarchy makes guilt seem more likely rather than less.

It’s exactly fifty years since the death of the great reformer, John XXIII, who did his best during his brief papacy to bring daylight into the Catholic Church. I wonder if there are enough cardinals interested in renewing that interrupted process. I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile the Church might concentrate on its strong suits, such as concern for the poor, and leave questions of sexual ethics to ordinary people.