I’ve been a fan of Nathan Evans for ages – he’s a bit of a renaissance man whose interests intersect with many of my own, notably queer cabaret and film work. As a producer and performer, he’s worked on projects ranging from the RVT’s pioneering Vauxhallville variety night to making shows with David Hoyle, Fancy Chance, Timberlina and others, and being part of the Double R Club team. I’ve often shown his work as a filmmaker at BURN – roving collaborations with Hoyle in the latter’s home or around Vauxhall, a rousing puppet version of David Bowie’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide, that kind of thing.
Now he’s is prepping his first feature film, The Grey Liberation Front, of whose screenplay I saw a rehearsed reading a little while ago. It’s a smart, funny and moving odd-couple comedy of a kind that hasn’t really been done before: it’s about two older gay men in a retirement home, one (to be played by Simon Callow) a very out veteran queer campaigner and performer, the other a more type. Distinctive as the story is, it fits into a bit of a trend in LGBT filmmaking today, which is more open to stories about older characters than ever before. (I’ve suggested in a Guardian article out this week that this is part of a ‘backward turn’ that also includes period stories and documentaries about queer heritage.)
I put a few questions to Nathan to get a deeper sense of what’s at stake in this intriguing project. The production is currently pursuing funding, including crowdfunding, so check out the Indiegogo page and chip in if you feel so inclined.
Why did you decided to focus on older characters in The Grey Liberation Front?
Because mature gay people have so often been ignored by gay cinema, though I would say this is slowly getting better as audiences, and indeed filmmakers, get older. Still, the focus remains very much on the young and the beautiful and one could sometimes be forgiven for wondering whether gay people over the age of 50 exist at all.
Specifically, I decided to write The Grey Liberation Front in response to stories I had heard about older gay people entering residential care homes and the problems they were encountering. Although society has changed massively in the past few decades, the generation of gay people who are now in their seventies and eighties grew up in very different times: they may well be estranged from families, and have lost many friends to AIDS during the 80s; in their last years, they can therefore find themselves isolated and in need of residential care. On entering a home some choose to go back ‘in the closet’ again rather than confront the ‘heteronormativity’ of the care system. Those who don’t are forced to confront the prejudices of their fellow residents, who may well not have ‘moved on’ in their attitudes to gay people, even though there is now a broad acceptance among younger generations.
Why do you think more films about older LGBT characters are finding their way to the screen these days?
There are more older people around now than there ever have been before and that, of course, includes older gay people. Perhaps filmmakers want to represent this increasingly visible demographic. Perhaps distributors are realising that there is a growing market of older gay people who want to see themselves represented. Personally, I think we have a lot to learn from the older generation – particularly from those who began the fight for equal rights four or more decades back. I think it’s easy for younger generations of gay people to be complacent about their current acceptance and (almost) equal rights – they forget that without those older pioneers these would not exist. Equally, I think it can be difficult for older generations of gay people to accept that things have moved on and that society is no longer a battlefield. In The Grey Liberation Front, I wanted to explore the dramatic (and comedic) possibilities of this through a friendship between an older gay resident and his young gay carer.
Do you have any thoughts about possible directions we might see LGBT filmmaking going in a post-marriage equality context?
I have two thoughts – one negative and one positive. First the negative: I think in the ‘post-marriage equality context’ it is becoming increasingly difficult to be a ‘queer’ voice whose work goes against the grain of homogenisation and assimilation. Our funding system is risk-averse in the extreme and in today’s climate a queer filmmaker such as Derek Jarman, for instance, would struggle to find investment. Capitalism demands our complete compliance. But, on the positive front, these are potentially exciting times when we can stop talking about a ‘crossover’ audience – a ‘straight’ audience who might go see a ‘gay’ film (if you invert that and talk about a ‘gay’ audience who might go see a ‘straight’ film, you can see see how reductive a concept it is). We can just start thinking about a ‘human’ audience who will go see a ‘human’ film in which the characters’ sexualities have no relevance. And I hope The Grey Liberation front will be part of the progress towards that.
