Gay Life
completed Secondary GL

Gay Life (1980)

13 ep GB London Weekend Television Documentary

Gay Life was a groundbreaking documentary series on London Weekend Television, produced by its London Minorities Unit. Broadcast in 1980, it may have then been the first series devoted to LGBT people and issues on a major television network.

🏳️‍🌈 This groundbreaking London Weekend Television newsmagazine was the UK's first-ever dedicated LGBTQ+ television series. As a non-fiction documentary format, it features highly prominent, dedicated real-world segments explicitly documenting lesbian social spaces, activism, and sapphic lives in the early 1980s where women discussed the lack of venues for them.

Cast

Michael Atwell Michael Atwell Self, presenter

Episodes

Ep 1 Security Vetting and Gays in the Civil Service
Ep 2 Male Gay Lifestyles
Ep 3 Child Custody and Adoption
Ep 4 Police Harassment and Entrapment of Gay Men
Ep 5 Gay Relationships and Gay Weddings
Ep 6 Gay Teachers
Ep 7 Gays in Heterosexual Marriages
Ep 8 Gays and Media Stereotyping
Ep 9 Young Lesbians
Ep 10 Gays in the Armed Forces
Ep 11 Gay Political Organisation
Ep 12 Being Gay in the Thirties
Extras
Summary

Gifford Skinner describes what it was like to be a gay man in the 1930s. Illuminating and nostalgic, Gifford recalls picking up guardsmen in Hyde Park as well as some of the homosexual ‘characters’ he encountered in London’s West End. The gay activist, historian and sociologist Jeffrey Weeks is interviewed about gay law reform.

Ep 13 Male Sexuality
Extras
Summary

From clubbers at Heaven and cruisers on Hampstead Heath to academics and journalists, gay men offer their candid views on sex and relationships. They give a brief history of cruising, rue the dashed hopes of Gay Lib, and, most interestingly, critique the goal of emulating the traditionally masculine ideal of the heterosexual man, a self-loathing trait still prevalent among gay men today.

Related

Visible: Out on TelevisionThe CircusNatureNatural WorldHistory 101Top Gear