Looking Back at Beautiful Thing

Beautiful Thing is quite possibly the most beloved of all gay-themed movies. Made in the UK by Channel Four Films, and first broadcast back in 1996, there is a certain bizarre logic that the only blu-ray available has to be imported from France. Queer films, especially those from the past, are criminally under-represented on blu-ray, and the situation with Beautiful Thing underlines that.

It’s twenty-seven years since I first saw it, on Channel 4 on June 21st, 1996. I was 22 and still living at home (I moved out a few months later). I was still in the closet, and so I’m guessing my parents were out that night for some reason or other. Viewed now, in 2023, the film retains its power to warm the heart.

Adapted by Jonathan Harvey from his own play, the film tells the simple story of Jamie and Ste, two teenagers living next door to each other on a London housing estate, and who fall for each other both because of, and despite, the rather brutal realities of their lives. Jamie and Ste are played by Glen Barry and Scott Neal. Their performances are surprisingly low-key and natural, and in quiet contrast with the somewhat showier supporting cast of Linda Henry, Ben Daniels, and Tameka Empson as Jamie’s Mum, her boyfriend, and Mama Cass-obsessed neighbour. Despite the rather disparate group of performances, everything and everyone gels together beautifully.

It’s not a particularly dramatic tale, and one could guess from the first ten minutes or so exactly what the few twists and turns in the plot are going to be. So why is it so beloved? Well, in the first instance, you have to travel back to the mid-1990s, with the harsh realities of the LGBTQ community in the UK at the time. The Tory government had done everything it could to try to row back the steps forward towards acceptance that the community had made in the decade or so before HIV reared its ugly head. The hated section 28 legislation was very much in place. Hate crime was high, but few bothered to report it. What was the point? And, just three years after the film was first broadcast, the Admiral Duncan gay pub in London was nail-bombed, killing three people and injuring scores more.

In the middle of all this, came Beautiful Thing. It wasn’t the first British gay film – in fact, there had been several over the previous decade or so from My Beautiful Laundrette through to Maurice, Another Country, and Edward II. But Beautiful Thing was different. It wasn’t based on a centuries-old play, or centred on the rich. Instead, it told the story of a couple of ordinary young lads on a housing estate, and, at the same-time, had something of a fairytale quality about it – which is perhaps most obvious in the final few minutes, as the two boys dance together in the middle of the concrete jungle in which they live. It is a beautiful thing, but it’s also subtly defiant.

For many gay males, especially gay teenagers, this was a hopeful movie. A movie that told them “you can get through this,” and by “this” it meant both coming out and the way that the gay community was being treated by the government. “It’s Getting Better,” the soundtrack tells us and, although perhaps we didn’t know it at the time, it was about to get better – and Beautiful Thing reassured us of that. Scotland knocked Section 28 on the head in 2000, and England and Wales did the same in 2003. The 2000s turned out to be the era in which openly-gay Graham Norton rose to enormous popularity on TV; the openly-gay Brian Dowling won Big Brother in 2001; Will Young won the first series of Pop Idol, and the first civil partnership took place in 2005, after the law was passed in 2004. “It’s getting better,” indeed.

Anyone watching Beautiful Thing now could easily dismiss it as a relatively flimsy piece of entertainment that passes the time nicely. On the face of it, that’s exactly what it is. But we forget at our peril what it meant to young men like myself at the time, and how quietly political the movie really was/is. That message that you could be accepted, and that things would turn out OK eventually, was essential at that time. We really needed that. And I would suggest we need it now, too, in a country where hate crime is rising, there’s a possibility the UK will leave the European Court of Human Rights, and I hear more homophobic slurs outside my city centre flat than I did a decade ago. But we have to remember that final image of the movie of Jamie and Ste dancing outside their block of flats, while a growing crowd of people watch on – some bemused, but some utterly appalled by what they are seeing. That slow dance was basically a two-finger sign at mid-1990s Britain, and a two-finger sign at section 28…and, in 2023, it’s saying the same things to the internet trolls, those committing hate crimes towards us, and the threat that the extreme right-wing presents to us.