The “feel good” British comedy that also has working-class characters overcoming their homophobia was, for a time, a popular enough genre that it could’ve had its own section in video stores, which were also plentiful then. I’m thinking of films like Kinky Boots, which is now a Broadway musical and starred a pre-12 Years a Slave Chiwetel Ejiofor as the drag queen designer who saves the factory of the working class town, and The Full Monty, whose lineup of mostly working-class, bored, unemployed guys-turned-strippers by the end included a couple in love. Although I enjoyed The Full Monty (which had an acute enough take on class that it played like a comedic version of Das Kapital–with flashes of skin) by the time Kinky Boots came out, in 2005, I’d had enough of twinkle-eyed, straight characters smiling at their new-found “tolerance.” So I was hesitant to see Pride (which opens Sept. 26) with a plot synopsis (queer people help striking miners in Thatcherite Britain, loosely based on a true story), title, and even a movie poster that easily could have come from the ’90s.
Although director Matthew Warchus isn’t gay, the screenwriter Stephen Beresford is, which, after seeing the film, my gaydar told me even before I looked up his bio. The film starts and ends with the queer characters, not the working-class, (mostly) straight people, as the focus. Mark (Ben Schnetzer, who’s from the US but went to drama school in London) keeps a huge, “Thatcher Out” banner hanging from the windows of his flat and rallies his friends and closeted newbie Joe (George MacKay) to collect money for striking coal miners as Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners–LGSM (because in those days most queer groups didn’t acknowledge the participation of bisexual and trans people). “Mining communities are being bullied just like we are,” Mark explains to the others, and the group ends up befriending one Welsh village’s striking miners and their families.
I lived in London six months before the events in the film start and Pride gets the period exactly right: the music of The Smiths plays at a queer party and Pete Shelley’s “Homosapien” and Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round” play at the queer clubs. Post-punk fashions are popular among the queers (as they were among many young Londoners then) but we see the era’s big earrings, shiny shirts, stonewashed jeans, permed hair, and Bo Derek braids (!) on queer characters too. The miners’ strike was big news: when I was back in the US more than one British import record, popular on college radio, included snippets of speeches from striking miners. And, as I’ve written elsewhere, people from most walks of British life had a fierce, abiding hatred of Margaret Thatcher.
Because the film doesn’t have only one or two queers to focus on, its characters, like Dear White People‘s Black characters, show a range of different personalities and life experiences that we’re not used to seeing in mainstream films. Mark is a funny, committed activist with the gift of gab who looks great in a black leather motorcycle jacket. He asks a crowd, when remarking on how the police have started beating up striking miners instead of harassing patrons of queer clubs, “Do you think they got sick of all that Donna Summer?” Reticent, neatly dressed, 20-year-old Joe is a college student who lives with his parents, so even though he spends much of his time doing work with an openly queer group he is not out to any of his family. We even meet a few queer women: Steph (Faye Marsay) in a mohawk and heavy eyeliner becomes Joe’s best friend and two women who are a couple join the group after they hear a rousing speech in a queer London club from village miner Dai (Paddy Considine in an unflattering period haircut).
We first meet Jonathan (Dominic West who played Jimmy on The Wire) trashed and in full drag, who, after a full day and night celebrating Pride, doesn’t quite succeed, despite persistent, enthusiastic attempts, in blowing the whistle around his neck. In spite of Jonathan being the kind of camp character whom other films (especially those made by straight people) rarely use for anything more than a few good quips and some attitude, he does turn out to have a political conscience. And some of the loveliest moments in the film are glimpses of his tender relationship with his partner: quiet, serious Gethin (out gay actor Andrew Scott whom some may recognize played Moriarty on Sherlock), the owner of the gay bookstore where the group meets. West, playing against type, makes us believe in Jonathan as a whole person, not just a caricature, though in one showy scene he can’t quite stop himself from dancing more like a straight man than a queenie, gay guy.
The film also shows nuanced portraits of the women villagers: Sian (Jessica Gunning) looks like a miner’s wife: short and busty, her pretty face framed by a mullet (in those days not just a hairstyle for older lesbians). But she doesn’t act like the little woman. She, along with Dai are the first villagers to argue that the queer group should be invited to the local hall just as the other groups who have supported the miners have been. “Your gays have arrived,” one of the older women from the village tells the two of them when the group comes to town in a van.
During their visit Jonathan coaches Sian on the legal ins and outs of being stopped and arrested for no reason (until relatively recently, police regularly harassed and arrested white queer people as they now do with Black people and trans women of color). Sian then goes to the jail and gets the police to release the illegally detained miners. We also see Imelda Staunton as Hefina show off her considerable comic abilities, quite a change from her work in movies like Vera Drake. The cast is uniformly excellent: Bill Nighy is also on hand, barely recognizable here as a slick-haired, slouched, shy villager.
Films about activism, especially queer activism, usually skip the part about it being great fun as well as a good way to get laid. We see the joy the group gets out of their work and Joe hooks up with the cute guy who asks him at “Pits and Perverts” (which would have been a better title for the movie) a benefit concert organized by LGSM, “Are you going to take my picture too?”
In many ways Pride is a very conventional film. Its script has the regulation triumph-setback-triumph structure that keeps many mainstream films from having the twists and complications that make documentaries like Stories We Tell and One Cut, One Life great. But the mix of real-life characters and events keeps Pride from becoming saccharine. The miners were striking to return to hard work that meant an early death for many of them (as well as repercussions for the environment), but they knew that work and the union were all they had. When they lost the strike the mining communities became impoverished and, with the eventual closure of the mines, remain so to this day.
Unlike a lot of films and TV shows that take place in the past, Pride‘s portrait of the ’80s isn’t clouded by nostalgia. The film shows that being shunned or kicked out of one’s family for being queer was the norm back then (though in best case scenarios the rift was temporary). A record company receptionist tells the group (when they are looking for bands for the benefit) that they don’t have any queer artists on their label–as we see posters of Elton John (who many forget was briefly married to a woman in the ’80s) and Soft Cell in the hall. And although the screenwriter is a politically aware gay man, he still gets feminism wrong. The script seems to disparage the women who form a separate group the same way the core characters do. But in the 90s I belonged to a queer activist group and gay men talked right over the women, even as we packed up and left to strike out on our own.
In a postscript we find out one of the real-life characters in LGSM died of AIDS two years after the last events of the film–as much of the queer community did in the 80s and 90s. But another real-life character goes back to school and eventually becomes a member of Parliament, continuing to serve there today. Although many will insist on calling the film “feel good” the same way they mischaracterized another film based on a true story, The King’s Speech, the real-life events of both films defy the glibness of any marketing label and in the end prove deeper, more complex and more poignant.
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsFY0wHpR5o”]
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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.