Clapham Junction

Clapham Junction is the second programme in the Channel 4 "gay season". The programme opened slightly depressingly with the usual stereotypes. Like soap powder that can transform your life or deodorants that make you a sexual dynamo so too does gay drama often say "look at us, we're homosexuals and you just want to be like us". We aren't fat, middle aged, dumb, untalented...the list goes on. Instead we are bright, young and sexy. We opened with a Civil Partnership. A packed audience, not only clapping but giving a standing ovation. Even a priest cried a tear in the audience. Rose buds fell from above. Oh god I thought. But, no within a matter of moments one of the newlyweds was asking for a sausage from the waiter and then snorting coke and trying to shag him in the hotel pantry. 'Cos gay men can't get enough sex and drugs don't you know?

Terry (Paul Nicholls, pictured)(better known for his former Eastenders role) is constantly told by his Nan that he should find someone. We see him getting ready for an evening, adjusting his penis in his pants. Well more jiggling it gratuitously close to the camera really (was that a "stunt cock" is the real question methinks?). Again a good few snorts of coke to set him up. Then off we go to the bear pit of a gay club. In fact Terry is a serial queer basher who ultimately contributes to the death of the waiter mentioned above. In one scene, he goes back to a mans home where they end up listening to the Pet Shop Boys before Terry begins assaulting the other guy, forcing him to eat cigarettes and being pissed on by Terry ("you said you wanted to try watersports" Terry taunts) and being called a "filthy cock sucker".



The film revolves around a number of other characters and also takes us into the worlds of cruising and cottaging. It is in a cottage that we see our young waiter once again, entering the public toilet and standing alone at a urinal. This time he is chased by a couple of young guys who have entered the toilet and runs onto Clapham Common. This is not just a waiter. This is a waiter seeking to remind us of the death of Jody Dobrowski. A 24 year old murdered in a homophobic attack back in 2005 on Clapham Common.

A young black school boy who is learning the violin is continually chased by gangs but apart from that appears to serve no real role. If anything that character highlights a major deficiency in "gay culture" and in screen representations of gay men. Namely, where are all the black men? How can homosexuality be squared with "black culture" and the images of young men influenced by American black culture? We need dramas and documentaries that also explore these themes.

Many of the characters meet together at a dinner party. One of the attendees (who incidentally is the mother of a 14 year old engaging in his first sexual encounter with a neighbour while she is at the dinner party) says "We accept you now. Can't you behave like normal people?". Yet the film answers back. We are not the same as you it says. We can not conform to hetronormative values. The very quest for legal equality is in a sense the wrong mission in that context. The aim is not equality. The aim is to for a legal framework for men who have sex with men. We fuck in bushes and toilets not because we must but because we choose to the film suggests. Our values are not your values. It also challenges law itself. The film suggests (perhaps rather obviously) that legal equality is not enough in any case. A shift in social values is even more important and still something the eludes the gay community.

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