Prick Up Your Ears

I have recently found in a charity shop and been re-watching, this film of the life of the 1960s playwright Joe Orton. I saw this film years ago when I was a very young lady and am impressed at how much I remember of it (I've read the script and the life and diaries on which it is based since) and how formative it has proved to be to me since then. In some ways it comes across as so dated: I think cottaging, except as a specialised interest, may actually have had its day, for example. The 60s fashions and the whole mode of 1960s gay life seem terribly old fashioned now, because of the rapid changes in technology and lifestyle since then. Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in eis: are there any gay men nowadays who go to Tangier for sex? I suppose one would if one liked that sort of thing: in his diaries Orton commented that the English queens who went there and went cottaging obviously couldn't do it without the smell of stale pee.
Some motifs of the film are timeless gay motifs: older man picks up younger man, initiates him to the joy of gay sex (and how good it is that in the film it is to the backdrop of the Queen's Coronation, at the point at which Zadok the Priest is sung), the younger man then develops into his own life, exceeds the older man in fame and sexual audacity, then the relationship ends, admittedly not normally as violently as this one did. This para-mythological motif runs through the film like the word 'Brighton' through a stick of rock.

The incredible side of gay life (to normal people) is also well and truly present. The effect on the actor of Orton putting his actual dead grandfather's actual false teeth into his hand instead of a prop could not be reproduced on the stage by any amount of acting ability. The friend who commented that reading 'The Swimming Pool Library' was like any conversation with me would be relatively unfazed by this film, but I would like to think that those who think that homosexuals should be very pleased that we can now have civil partnerships and live monogamous lives like heterosexuals, would still be shocked by the kind of lifestyle displayed here. My dears, even apparently 'straight' men have any amount of sex with men when their wives think they are being faithful to them. My conclusion would be that humans are not built to live the monotheistic one-God, one-sexual partner dream.
I am surprised by my reaction to an interview with Orton included on the DVD as an extra. Gary Oldman in his younger days looked like Orton (shame about him now), and because of that i tend to visualise Orton as Oldman. In the interview the real Orton comes across as much less cheeky than I would think he would, less confident, and more shifty. Oldman acted the image and the public face. Perhaps the reality was different.