A Gay Sweatshop

                                                                               

 Affairs of the heart … Simon Callow (left) with Michael Dickinson in Passing By in 1975

In the 40 years since Gay Sweatshop was founded, the world has changed out of all recognition for British gay women and men. I was among the first actors to take part in the pioneering season at the Almost Free theatre in Rupert Street, and it requires a real effort of imagination to think back to how we were then. It was just eight years after the repeal of the Labouchère amendment had removed the worst of the legal threat (as long as you were over 21). A whole new life had sprung up overnight, it seemed, in the wake of that sudden enfranchisement, with bars, clubs and discos nakedly – in many cases, literally – celebrating and fomenting sex between men. Being gay – gay, not queer, not homo, not poof nor pansy, faggot nor fairy – was now a cause, a crusade; we were a separate and self-sufficient subdivision of human kind, our lives centrally predicated on desire. Let groin speak unto groin was all the law.

So it seemed in the West End of London and in Canal Street in Manchester and in about three other places in the British Isles: a carnival, a Dionysiac rout, a permanent ecstasy. Of course, it was different elsewhere. The metropolitan liberation was scarcely even a rumour out there. And some very liberated gay men, who mostly came from Out There – those very ungay regional and suburban hinterlands – decided that maybe the theatre would be a good way of connecting everyone up. So Gay Sweatshop came into existence, under the umbrella of the American granddaddy of radical theatre, the alternative Diaghilev, Ed Berman, who for a season opened his little venue to plays by, for and about gay men and women.

 When I was asked, by this to me at the time hilariously named Gay Sweatshop, to read for the part of Toby in Martin Sherman’s play Passing By, I was highly sceptical. I was out, all right, to every one in my circle, and joyously romping around in the gay pleasure gardens. I endorsed gay liberation with every fibre of my being, I believed that more and better sex was the solution to everything, but I could not see the point of this sort of ghetto theatre. What next, I thought. Plays by chartered accountants, about chartered accounts, for chartered accountants?

Then I read the play – a very simple, highly romantic piece about two sweet young men who have an affair – and I was stopped in my tracks. I realised I had never read another play in which two men have a romantic affair and never once mention being gay. I immediately said yes. But I had no inkling of what performing that play in front of a gay audience would be like. The sense of their truth being told, of them in their ordinary lives suddenly existing, was overwhelming. I don’t believe I’ve done anything more rewarding or more emotionally overpowering on any stage or in any medium.

But it was just a beginning for Gay Sweatshop. The women and men who ran it were no slouches when it came to personally fostering the sexual revolution, but their work was not indulgent or frivolous: it reached out in many directions – historically, theatrically, politically – in a determination to affirm the place and existence of gay people within society, that we’re here and we’re queer and we’ve been here and been queer for a very long time – since records began. We’ve made astonishing contributions to this civilisation, but more importantly, we’re right at the heart of ordinary life – we’re mothers, we’re brothers, we’re teachers, we’re soldiers, we’re good and we’re bad, but we exist, as we are, with our desires, our dreams, our folly and our majesty. Not enough gay people knew these things of themselves. Once they started to wake up to all of that, then the rest of society did too, and we began to approach the better world (for gays) in which we now live.

And Gay Sweatshop was a tremendous part of that transformation in attitudes, reaching out across the country on tour after tour, as well as being a remarkable theatrical innovator in its own right, nurturing new writers and tapping the talents of the established great ones. Edward Bond, no less, wrote a masterly piece, Stone, for the Sweaties early on; Martin Sherman wrote Bent for them, though they graciously let it out into the wider world. I’m so proud to have been part of it from the beginning. It’s good that Unfinished Histories, a living archive of the fringe groups of the last 50 years, is celebrating it in style. theguardian.com

• Homosexual Acts, an Unfinished Histories benefit and a celebration of Gay Sweatshop, is at the Arcola theatre, London E8, on 15 February. arcolatheatre.com

Every gay pre-millennial in London, New York or San Francisco knows this story as well as they know their way home. We knew we were different and the inlaying that spoke our language and liberty was “groin to groin.” Every time you had sex was a brick in the wall of protection we carved everyday of our existence. Some of us are younger than when the times were so harsh prison was always at the sound of the zipper going down. In my generation one was ridiculed and shamed no better than a jail cell because shame in itself it’s the worse prison one can have in  being ashamed in front of family, friends, coworkers. 

We had no time to weight it’s moral, religious implications just like a soldier doesn’t have time to think morality before shooting another human being. We fought, we got injured, jailed and killed in the name of religion or justice or just the perfect reason to do to another human being what one was not permitted otherwise. 

The intimate relation with another man was what life was all about wether it lasted five minutes or you we lucky for it to last a few hours. It never lasted more than that because we never knew the real name, the real address or the real man because we were also afraid of ourselves. We knew in the ranks were those that will play with us but would turned us in after the night went away with its secrets and the sun came up with it’s sobering realities that we mot lie we most hide, why? There is no time for that either.  Adam Gonzalez