WHEN the same-sex marriage bill was passed by the Tory-led coalition government in 2014, I had a fleeting feeling that that would be it for exciting gay culture. The shift in gay emphasis from the metropolis to the suburbs didn’t feel like it would survive into art. What songs, plays or prose were left to be written about the move into babies, picket-fences, pensions and the occasional twitch of the net-curtains? If this was the price to pay to be looked after in law, so be it.
Then at the end of last year, two startling pieces of work blindsided me, reminding me that however equal our stories become in the legislature, they are always touched by the strange and fascinating finger of real-life minority status. The first was the brilliantly ambitious BBC drama, London Spy. Starring Ben Whishaw, it squared an untidy circle between the London borough of Vauxhall as home both of a predominant gay night-time underworld and MI6. Stylistically, it veered between the sensational creepy sweep of David Lynch and a cackhanded episode of Doctor Who. Yet even at its least plausible, it was new turf for the gay narrative.