In the closet, but still a brave man
PHILIP HENSHER
Bogarde was a missing
link between the repressive Fifties and the gay
liberation of the Seventies
THE MONDAY REVIEW
The Independent 10 May 1999
LATER GENERATIONS of gay men
were always rather disinclined to
treat Dirk Bogarde with much respect
or admiration. His name, by
the Eighties, was often greeted by
the ordinary gay man with ridicule
and scorn. By the end of his life, he
was widely seen as a very familiar,
though not very admirable figure;
someone who had the money and
leisure to live his life as he chose,
while refusing to make any very public
admission of his homosexuality.
References to his “manager”, it
often seemed, were no substitute for
a willingness to stand as a figurehead
for a nascent movement, a willingness
to improve the lives of
hundreds of thousands of people just
by stating in public what he was.
Bogarde seemed, in short, like yet
another version of the rich gay
man, indulging private pleasures
and shrinking from public responsibilities.
But, however universally
held this view was by the Eighties,
it was incomplete, and to some
extent, false. What, perhaps, it
stemmed from was not Bogarde’s
behaviour, but the uncertainties of
his audience; that tendency among
gay men, expertly diagnosed by Edmund White, to make pious lists
of gay men in history while regarding
living gay men with contempt.
It would be truer to think of Bogarde,
perhaps, as an odd missing
link between the terrifying atmosphere
of the Forties and Fifties,
deep-frozen in sexual repression,
and the creation of a radical gay liberation
movement in the Seventies. He refused to draw the conclusion
that his private life was everyone’s
concern. But his career shows a
man at ease with the general idea
that private lives have a political
aspect. His work was at its most
interesting in the Sixties, between
the Wolfenden Report, which recommended
the relaxation of the
laws on homosexuality, and the enactment
of the Report’s recommendations
in 1967. In many
respects, he was the archetypal
Wolfenden figure, pleading not so
much for the granting of ordinary
human rights, but rather for a measure
of quiet respectability.
The debate long ago moved on,
and Bogarde, still talking about his
partner Anthony Forwood as his
“manager”, long ago started to
look, at best, a curious figure. All the
same, what the radical figures of the
Eighties did not see was that
Wolfenden, inadequate as it came to
seem, was a necessary step on the
road, and Bogarde was, in reality,
something quite different from the
rich and private queens of the prewar
period. In the end, his behaviour
looks something like bravery.
He made his reputation as a
junior heart-throb in the popular
series of Doctor films in the Fifties;
the sort of light-hearted part, lightly
dusted with sexual appeal, whom
the audience is continually expecting
to make an entrance through the
French windows with a tennis racquet.
No one could have predicted
Bogarde’s next step. In Victim, he
took a serious risk in making a
polemical film about homosexuality.
Homosexuality was still illegal, and
not many people in his position
would have felt it worth the candle.
Now, of course, Victim looks
decidedly quaint. It goes along with
the attitude of the Wolfenden Report
that homosexuals are worthy of
pity, but not of the attentions ofthe
law. Like the report, it shrinks from
the obvious proposition that adults
ought to be able to do more or less
what they like with each other so
long as they don’t do it in the street
and frighten the horses; for Victim,
the clinching argument for the
legalisation of homosexuality is that
it would deprive blackmailers of one
of the tools of their trade.
A period piece, but a genuinely
felt one. Bogarde jeopardized his
jeune premier image by appearing
in such a film, and went on to make
more, and better, films exploring the
life of the homosexual. His most
remarkable appearance, perhaps, is
in Visconti’s Death in Venice. Again,
the debate has moved on and some
audiences now find Death in Venice
rather hard to take; paedophilia,
which didn’t seem to trouble the
early-Seventies, has become one of
our major concerns, and we dislike
the confusion in our minds when a
story of sexual awakening also looks
very much like a story about someone
who wants to abuse a child.
Bogarde never really came out.
But what his detractors did not
admit was that there are some
things which are worth a million
interviews in which Dirk and
Anthony welcome us to their lovely
home in the South of France. What
Bogarde did, and did with all the
bravery one can reasonably expect,
was present gay men with versions
of their lives and their desires; not
necessarily realistic versions, but
fantasies through which they could
explore what they actually wanted.
He was, certainly, a bit of a missing
link. But we couldn’t have done
without him.