First Gay TV Movie, 1959

This popped up in my YouTube feed the other day:  South, a surprisingly early gay drama shown on British television in 1959 - long before there was any such thing in America.  Newspaper critics were hostile to the display of "perversion" on the small screen, but the fact that it was shown at all proves that the British were ahead of us in that regard.  

The first gay-themed TV movie over here that I recall was That Certain Summer in 1972; Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen played the lovers.  Young people today would not understand the trepidation of watching something so taboo and forbidden.  I watched it with fascination - and no little repugnance.  I was attending college, but still deep in the closet, and terrified of actually encountering any of those wicked ho-mo-sexshuls.  (Oh but I fantasized often . . . then begged God to forgive me . . . over and over again.  An absurd agony that blighted all my teenage years.)

The play was written by Julian Green (1900-1998), born to expatriate American Southerners in Paris.  (The family home in Savannah is now a museum.)  He was a prolific writer, mostly in French, among whose many honors and awards was election to the Olympic heights of the Académie Française in 1971, the first non-French person to be chosen.  Besides which, to judge by the contents of his meticulous lifelong diaries - published in 19 volumes after his death - he was, shall we say, rather energetically gay.  Perhaps, as a Catholic, he had his own struggles with l'absurdité.

The full movie can be seen here (1:19:31).

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