'nighthawks'- a Look at the Reality of Gay Oppression

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ANTI-FASCIST RE by Nighthawks seeks to present the life of a gay spectacle or tear-jerking reality.

The film opens with Jim-a young geography teacher in a comprehensive school-driving through London to the 'Back Streets', a disco club for gay men.

Once there, he successfully selects a partner for the night, and they retire home and to bed.

The next morning, Jim is back at work, continuing his 'normal' life at trying to present the process of urban reconstruction to groups of frustrated school students, showing a new supply teacher round the building.

The film's structure is built up by juxtaposing these two contrasted blocks of Jim's life. But as the film progresses, they are drawn into more open conflict.

Relationship

Oppressed at home, bored and frustrated, the supply. teacher Liz looks for the opportunity of an alternative relationship with Jim.

Unable to respond to her need, he at first reacts violently before being able to talk more openly aböut his life.

After this cathartic explanation, they are able to continue their friendship on a more stable and honest basis.

But, later the same threat erupts in a more sinister form from the school students.

At the beginning of one class, Jim is taunted by a boy with 'Sir, is it true you're bent?' in the most obviousiy powerful scene of the film, he takes up the question, turns it back on the class and challenges their ignorance and inherited pre-conceptions about sexuality.

The argument develops, and the class becomes divided as the girls and boys try to come to terms with the issues.

Threat

The inevitable follows when Jim is summoned to the 'liberal' headmaster, who produces the veiled but definite threat of the sack if Jim so much as mentions his homosexuality in the classroom again.

Afterwards in the pub, the three teachers with whom he has come out, pledge to fight against any victimisation. But Nighthawks does not proceed to any such crisis.

The film ends with Jim and his latest partner returning to the 'Back Streets', and a final disco scene of drinking, dancing and men weighing up the opportunities offered in the club that night.

This absence of high drama is crucial to Nighthawks.

Co-directors Peck and Paul Hallam, leading actor Ken Robertson and everyone else concerned with the production have taken huge pains to create a naturalistic film that makes no concessions to crude stereotypes DAVID WHITFIEI sensational myths gay men.

Robertson plays Jim as a man of average looks ánd ordinary character, an averagely competent teacher in a typical teaching situation, with pattern of sexual behaviour shared by many, many thousands of gay men.

Accurate

The clubs and bars are not glamorised or made sensational in any way. Just as the film renounces melodrama, so it forgoes the indulgence of focussing on intimate sexual practices.

The dialogue is accurate almost to the point of being realistically stilted, while the photography preserves the traditional 'neutrality' of naturalistic film.

At times, the viewers are presented with long land in the end tedious) close-ups of Jim's face, as his eyes flick across the 'Back Streets', observing and assessing the dancers, the cruisers and the new arrivals.

This attempt to involve the audience as themselves being actors in the disco scenes is paralleled in the classroom confrontation.

There the camera eye and the focus .of the audience becomes identified with Jim's position as he is first challenged by the jeering and sniggering hostility of the school students, then becomes a spectator of their internal arguments about his homosexuality.

As a whole, the classroom scenes are all too convincing in their representation of the simmering frustration of the participants.

Authenticity

The disco scenes too have been created with impressive authenticity (although here the use of volunteer non-professional extras does have minor drawbacks).

The net result of all this frequently hovers on the edge of becoming boring, without ever quite crossing over. That effect is of course deliberate and unavoidable.

Peck and Hallam talk about trying to 'open up some discussion about the gay scene, not to ignore it and wish it wasn't there' The film imposes no value judgements on the gay scene, nor does it seriously attempt to contrast Jim's lifestyle with alternative patterns.

At most, his sexual behaviour is presented as real and therefore valid.

But of course this rigorous neutrality is informed by a deeper and partly unconscious vision of social reality.

Jim and the other figures move through a desolate urban wasteland, where individuals are able to make some form of contact on the sole basis of shared alienation.

It is no accident that the geography lessons revolve around shots of the demolition, the closed factories and warehouses in inner London.

Every relationship presented mentioned in the füm is fleetMarch against the court ruling ing, fracturec or frustrated and frustrating.

As the material fabric of London is being ripped apart, so the city-dwellers are thrown together and torn apart in a totally irrational flux which is uncontrolled by any human activity.

This vision has probably been intensified by the purely economic problems of producing Nighthawks. Peck and Hallam were forced to work with limited financial resources since the film offered such an uncertain commercial venture for investors.

One result of these problems is the almost claustrophobic emphasis on interiors, Jim and all the other characters seem to spend every moment of their lives freely shut in by an endless succession of inpenetrable walls and closed doors.

Scenes are filmed in cars and in small rooms-at their most expansive in clubs or the rooms and corridors of the school.

Life takes place in these tightly sealed cells which have little relation with each other, and apparently none at all with any wider reality.

Closet image

When the same treatment is applied to the heterosexual supply-teacher, it becomes obvious that the film makers are not seeking to extend the image of the closet to cover every moment of Jim's life.

On the contrary, these cramped and stultifying conditions of existence are presented as the alienated reality which our society imposes, in different ways, on all of us.

Beyond this solid strength, the limitations of the film are obvious, and nobody involved in its making would be likely to deny them. There is nothing polemical about Nighthhawks.

But one central insight does emerge with growing clarity: there can be nothing private or 'personal' about sexuality that is firmly against Gay News. suppressed or brutally by a hostile society.

The norms of bourgeois society and family life create homosexuality as political activity and a political issue, whatever the feelings or positions of individual gays.

Nighthawks does not begin to explore the implications for socialists which lie behind the surface of the film. But two obvious directions do appear even within its limited perspective.

Most obviously, the film points to the central importance of the gay scene. The gay liberation movement itself sprang from the 1969 Stonewal! Riot against police harrassment of the gay bars in New York.

But since then, there has been a strong tendency for the 'political' wing of the gay movement to become divorced and isolated from the gay scene.

Such a move can only hinder the political development of the mass of gays, and obstruct their mobilisation in the fight against the sexual oppression enforced by capitalism.

Nighthawks reveals the crucial importance of working within the existing social structures that bring gays together. But the film also indicates less directly the equally vital task of fighting for gay rights within the labour movement.

Reality

The threat of sacking which hangs over Jim is not a fantastic image but an example of everyday reality for many gays who come out and declare their sexuality publicly.

Immediately they face the well-practised treachery of the labour bureaucracy-from National Association of Schoolmaster's leader Terry Casey i (who declared in December that gays are "an unacceptable risk in the teaching profession"), right up to the Labour cabinet, which has refused to extend the limited gains of the 1967 law reform to British occupied Ireland.

Meanwhile Callaghan has busied himself with Marge Proops producing reactionary cant on the values of 'family life' Universalised In one sense, what is happening here is that the common experience of many thousands of gays is being universalised into the 'human condition'.

In these conditions, the possibility of solidarity or joint action at any level become reduced to the brief contact of the bodies in a bed, or a few lame words spoken in the corner of a pub at opening time.

But that's not really the issue. The power of Nighthawks is its ability to convey something of the experience Callaghan-campaigning for family GAY shared by huge numbers of gays (especially gay men). That is something which has never been projected on to the screen before.

Partial truths

The struggles to defend gays against victimisations, and ail forms of discrimination and oppression, are an inseparable part of the battle against the sexual oppression which these leaders support or their efforts to salvage capitalism from its own crisis.

Nighthawks does not pose, let alone answer their problem. It remains the task of revolutionary socialists to recognise the partial truths of the statements made by the film, and to develop them within the fight to abolish once and for all the oppression of free human sexuality.

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NDUSTRIAL NOTAŻ Mass picket of BBC in London by Campaign Against Racism ige NEWS RACISTE League NO PLATTORN POR FOR •FASCISTSI WORKING CLASS HIDN RASI

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teacher in London. Not a lurid melodrama, camp

tragedy, but in all its grey, day-to-day, repetitive

naturalistic intention and tech- nique is that Nighthawks

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