“[A] taste of the world we live in” - LGBTQ+ Histories from Wales on screen

A selection of film and broadcast clips are now showing in NLW’s Peniarth Room to mark LGBTQ+ History Month (February). In this article we take a closer look at the figures and histories represented by the clips.

On Show: Gwen John (BBC Cymru Wales, 2003), explores the journey to freedom and creativity for Gwen John, a Welsh artist who was little known during her lifetime, overshadowed by her artist brother, Augustus John. Now internationally recognised, her paintings were “profoundly real”, with “deceptive simplicity”; “earnest and unsparing”. Growing up in Tenby, John experienced a life of contrasts, of artistic freedom but familial repression.  

The clip focuses particularly on Gwen’s move to London (to study at the Slade School of Art), and the space, privacy and freedom it gave her, and her unorthodox journey to France in 1903 with Dorelia McNeill. Despite consternation from her disapproving brother at the “unrespectability” of her actions, John travelled with McNeill to Bordeaux, and walked along the River Garonne, with the aim of reaching Rome. They would “sleep in the fields, they would eat bread and grapes, and they would make money by doing people’s portraits.” Being women, and unaccompanied women at that, this was an extraordinary thing to be doing at this time. 

The programme is a shy in referencing Gwen John’s established bisexuality, though the full nature of her relationship with McNeill remains contested.

Similarly, in a clip from Wales at Six (ITV Cymru Wales, 1987), the artist Nina Hamnet is described as a ‘bohemian’ character, and while many of her trysts with famous male artists are named, her sexuality is not referred to. Bohemian is perhaps here used as an implication beyond her wild, partying behaviours among other artists, a shorthand used to leave explicit reference to her sexuality unsaid and unrepresented.

Such shorthand appears elsewhere too. In Capturing Celebrity: The Photographs of Angus McBean (BBC Cymru Wales, 2007), the career of McBean, a “bohemian artist in the making,” is celebrated. Known for his portrait photographs, immortalising the stars of the era, he was also known for his surrealist works, with an “eye for beauty, and a love of the theatrical.” He became “one of the most important and influential photographers of the 20th Century,” and stars including Vivien Leigh, Audrey Hepburn, Lawrence Olivier and Shirley Bassey “clamoured” to have their photograph taken by him.

Despite his celebrated successes, McBean’s life – specifically as a gay man - was not always an easy one. In 1942, he was arrested in Bath for “acts of homosexuality,” an offence that was only partially decriminalized in 1967 in England and Wales. After serving 2.5 years, of a 4-year sentence, in prison, McBean successfully resumed his prolific and creative photographic career that would continue for the rest of his life.

A key figure in that LGBTQ+ legislative history was Leo Abse, a member of Parliament for almost 30 years, and particularly known for his role in promoting a private member’s bill that would lead to the first acts to decriminalise homosexuality.

In Leo Abse: The Member For Happiness (BBC Cymru Wales, 2008), Abse is described as “one man assault on prejudice and intolerance; flamboyant, fierce and utterly determined.” In the clip, which shows the last interview he ever gave at the age of 90, Abse goes some way to explain his determination. “I wanted, from the beginning to legislate for happiness.”

The step from a “deeply conservative” Britain in 1958, to the part-decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, was unquestionably significant in progressing gay rights in the UK, even if it did not bring about immediate and wide-reaching liberation. Abse’s dedication to the cause – and his attitude on public service as a politician- is neatly summarised by him in the clip: “Life is not easily lived by anybody. It’s a tragic journey by necessity. When you’re born, you are fated and doomed to die. It’s a tragedy, not a comedy life. But if, as I tried, if you can relieve that tragic journey, a little, the burden which attends everybody’s life, if you can relieve it, that is what a politician should be doing.”

Equally as topical to this day are the words of musician and poet Labi Siffre, in a clip from Slate (BBC Cymru Wales, 1993). Siffre – perhaps best known for his songs It Must Be Love, (Something Inside) So Strong, I Got The… and, more recently, Bless the Telephone - lived in Wales for almost 30 years with his partners Peter Lloyd and Rudolf van Baardwijk. In this interview-performance for Slate, which was presented by Eddie Ladd, Siffre reflects on the interconnectedness of his work and his identity as a Black, gay man.

As well as singing an excerpt from his song School Days, from the album Man of Reason (1991), he reflects on his perspective as an artist: “We live in a time of incredible social injustice. We live in a time of greed. We live in a time of violence. We live in a time of all of these things. And although I don't think it's necessary to spend your time writing about those individual things, the taste of the world we live in should be evident in your work.”

The importance of artistic representation is highlighted in Arwel Gruffydd’s appraisal of Daf James’ Llwyth, first performed in Cardiff in 2010. Llwyth: Y Daith i Taiwan (S4C, 2013) is a documentary that follows the creative team as they take the play to Taipei Arts Festival. Gruffydd – director of the play - reflects on a sense of alienation from Welsh public and cultural life as a gay man, but, of Llwyth, “no other work I have been involved in that has touched me to the quick so much.” Llwyth was author Daf James’ first full-length play, and he has since gone on to be described as one of Wales’ leading writers – most recently earning praise and acclaim for the BBC Cymru Wales series, Lost Boys and Fairies.

In J.G. (Neil White, 1973), John Ivor Golding claims that “theatre people” are the most accepting of “homosexualists”. Golding is a controversial figure, and J.G., an amateur film portrait of the man, a challenging work. In the film Golding speaks to camera, smokes incessantly, and wanders around the streets of Cardiff. The brief clip included demonstrates the film’s somewhat avant-garde style, a creative choice presumably made to better reflect the absurdist style of Golding-as-raconteur, and perhaps, more troublingly, Golding’s then-status as a patient of Whitchurch Psychiatric Hospital.

Cardiff as a city is also celebrated in An American Eye on Butetown (BBC Cymru Wales, 2009), which takes a closer look at the work of Nashville-born director Dee Rees, while filming Colonial Gods in the city.

Rees’ short film Pariah, following a young New York lesbian as she “struggles to come to terms with her own identity,” was the first winner of the Iris Prize in 2007. Founded in 2006, the Iris Prize is an LGBTQ+ prize and film festival, held annually, open to filmmakers from across the world.

Using the prize money, Rees made the short film Colonial Gods after becoming interested in the history of the people from Cardiff’s Butetown. In An American Eye On Butetown, we are given an on-set view of the making of the short film, which is set in Tiger Bay, and explores the relationship between Somali immigrant Abdi, and Nigerian man Izi, as they “battle against the redevelopment of their neighbourhood.”

The film considers the multiple aspects of its characters’ identities, with Rees describing Izi’s outcast experience because “he doesn’t fit in with the ethnic community because of sexuality, he doesn’t fit in with the Welsh community because of his race.” Rees also emphasises her desire in Colonial Gods for the characters’ sexuality to “just be part of who someone is,” rather than the driving force of the narrative.

In a clip taken from Adam Price a Streic y Glowyr (S4C, 2015), the politician outlines his own experience as a young gay man in the valleys and underlines the importance of solidarity to individual and community experiences. He specifically credits the show of solidarity from London Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners, and their presence in his home community, with his own increasing comfort with “imagining that I could be a complete person.”

The unique landscape of Wales is evident in the documentary On Show: Jan Morris at 80 (BBC Cymru Wales, 2006), in which Morris uses different mountains as markers for periods of her extraordinary life. The clip in our compilation sees Morris recount her changing relationship to gender and experience of medical transition at a time when such a process was generally inaccessible, and highlights Moel Bentyrch, just outside Llangybi, which meant a lot to her at the time. 

Morris began her transition in 1964 and was among the earliest well-known people to do so, including gender re-assignment surgery in Casablanca in 1972, with renowned surgeon Georges Burou. With great humour, Morris describes the difficulty, or rather “impossibility” of receiving such a procedure done in Britain, and her rather “romantic” notion of doing so in Casablanca: “...when I think of Casablanca, I no longer think of Bogart […] but I think of the clinic in Casablanca and the nurses who looked after me there while I went through this curious transition.”

In an archive clip from The Story So Far (BBC, 1975), Morris explains, “I was perhaps 3 or 4 years old, when I realised that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl […] …the conviction was unfaltering from the start. I myself believe the conundrum to have some higher origin or meaning, I equate it with the idea of soul or self, and I think of it not just as a sexual enigma, but as a quest for unity.”

The clips in this compilation of course only scratch the surface of the many important LGBTQ+ figures and histories contained within the archive. The compilation will be on-screen in Peniarth until March. Many of the full items the clips are taken from are available to watch on Clip Cymru, with full access available either at the Library or at Clip Corners across Wales.

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