In my dictionary, and everyone's dictionary in the 1970s, the word 'queer' did mean strange and unusual. There was no slur to it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
What was interesting was talking to older gay men about what it was like being gay in the Eighties.
My own strong feeling was that the gay liberation movement really got national attraction in the truest sense of the word later in the '70s, in the '80s, and especially in the '90s.
Part of the new morality of the '60s and '70s is a new attitude toward homosexuality. The homosexual men and women have organized to fight for acceptance and respectability.
Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence.
I can't tell you why I keep getting asked to play gay characters, but I never really considered 'gay' as an adjective, as a playable thing. Maybe it's an element of the character, but it just describes a preference.
It would have been convenient to be gay. Just because of the grooming, the narcissism, stuff like that. But I have this kind of roaring heterosexuality. Traditional, uncomplicated heterosexuality, an almost cliched Robin Askwith thing.
You know, funny is this weird word for me. I hear is so many times it has no meaning anymore.
My films might have been queer - because I was - but they were not gay.
These names: gay, queer, homosexual are limiting. I would love to finish with them. We're going to have to decide which terms to use and where we use them. For me to use the word 'queer' is a liberation; it was a word that frightened me, but no longer.