gays
Brief encounters
Brokeback Mountain, a play with music, opens in a scruffy bedroom where a snowy-haired tramp finds a lumberjack’s shirt and…
Clown or vicar – who cares?
London has a brand-new theatre – yet again. Last summer, a cabaret venue opened in the Haymarket for the first…
The sound of silence
Look at this line. ‘I’m 80 years old. I find that unforgivable.’ Could an actor get a laugh on ‘unforgivable’?…
You’ll wish you were gay
To promote his new drama series about Aids in the early 1980s, Russell T. Davies insisted in an interview that…
Orbs and triangles
The BBC announces Merchant of Venice as if it were a Hollywood blockbuster. ‘In the melting pot of Venice, trade…
A major missed opportunity: Disobedience reviewed
Disobedience is an adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel about forbidden, lesbian love in orthodox Jewish north London, starring Rachel Weisz…
The Inheritance isn’t theatre — it’s mesmerically boring TV
Stories by Nina Raine is a bun-in-the-oven comedy with a complex back narrative. Anna, in her mid-thirties, had a boyfriend…
Letters: the tyranny of ‘equality of outcome’ in education
Equality of outcome Sir: Rod Liddle exposes some deep flaws in the way children are prepared to play their part…
Home truths
You will be wondering why I haven’t seen Fifty Shades of Grey as this is very much Fifty Shades of…
A sexual counter-revolution
Forget the culture war rhetoric. We straight white males have won
North star
Fortune tellers, pound shops and Orville: it’s easy to take the piss out of Blackpool, but William Cook loves it
Just for laughs
‘What is a panto?’ I asked my companion at the Hackney Empire’s Saturday matinee. ‘It’s basically a really bad play,’…
Fashion victim
At a birthday dinner over the weekend I was introduced to this delightful party girl of a certain age whose…
Pride and prejudice
1984 and all that. Which side were you on? The side of Margaret Thatcher, her hairdo and person standing rigid…
Bent bureaucrats and bakers
Eye of a Needle, by newcomer Chris MacDonald, looks at homosexuality and asylum. Gays from the Third World, who’ve suppressed…
The gay double standard
Why should our marriages demand less than straight ones?
It’s gay men who contribute most to society
A gay friend phones over the New Year break. A lovely chap (let us call him Richard) and long retired,…
The fantasy Francis
Trendy commentators have fallen in love with a pope of their own invention
