OutStories Bristol

© Bristol Pride

With just days to go to the start of Bristol’s 2023 Pride fortnight, two incidents show that homophobia still lurks.

An attacker damaged a billboard advertising Bristol Pride within 24 hours of the poster being displayed. The fire service were called just after midnight 19/6/2023 after reports that the billboard in Station Road, Montpelier, had been deliberately set ablaze. Police investigated the incident as a ‘hate crime’. Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees condemned the attack saying there was ‘no room for senseless vandalism or hate’ in Bristol.

The incident was the second attack on the LGBTQ+ community in less than a week.

© Bristol Post

Susie Day and her partner put a £6 Dunelm ‘Pride’ doormat outside their Bedminster home. The doormat was soon stolen so they went out and bought a new one, this time glueing it down so it couldn’t be taken. Later they found the rainbow-coloured doormat had been blacked out with spray paint.

But this story had a positive ending. When their neighbours learnt what had happened, many responded by going out and buying their own Pride doormats. Now the street is gradually filling with the colourful doormats and the couple say they have been overwhelmed by the support.

Theatre Royal, Bristol
Image: Bristol Post

The Killing of Sister George was the first English play to deal with lesbianism and was written by German Jewish playwright Frank Marcus (1928-1996) who had escaped with his family from Nazi Germany in 1938. Premiered by the Bristol Old Vic at the Theatre Royal on 20 April 1965, the original stage play is more implied whereas the 1968 film version has the lesbian elements darker and more explicit.

“Sister George” is a much loved character, June Buckridge, in a popular radio soap opera (changed to TV in the film). In real life she is a gin guzzling, cigar smoking, slightly sadistic butch lesbian who lives with Alice “Childie” McNaught, a childlike girl obsessed with playing with dolls. June dominates feminine Childie, mentally and physically, and the couple perpetuate the classic butch/femme lesbian couple stereotype. When June discovers her soap character is to be killed off she becomes impossible to live and work with. Matters are made worse by the intervention of a third woman, radio/TV executive, Mrs Mercy Croft, herself a predatory lesbian.

The title character in both the original stage production and the film was played by Beryl Reid, primarily known for her comedy roles beginning on radio in the 1950s. In the original Bristol Old Vic production Childie was played by Eileen Atkins with Lally Bowers as Mrs Croft. The play was directed by Bath born Val May who was artistic director with the company 1961-1975.

From the run at Bristol the play went on tour. It opened in London on 17 June 1965 at the Duke of York’s Theatre, and transferred to the Belasco Theatre, New York, in October 1966, still with the original cast. Beryl Reid won the 1966 Tony Award for Best Performance by a leading actress for the Broadway production. The play caused a sensation in the West End and on Broadway. The actresses were sometimes refused admission to shops because of the plays lesbian content.

The Stage review of 24 June 1965 was headlined ‘A Triumph for All’ and said “A comedy as brilliant in its wit and humour as in serious comment and pathos”. It was the first stage play for Beryl Reid who was hailed as “An actress of enormous talent … previously known for her film and radio comedy roles, her performance was arresting, haunting and memorable”. The review noted Val May directed “with sensitivity and panache”.

Beryl Reid remembered the pre West End tour:

”The tour was a disaster. We were pathfinders. In the British theatre nobody before had spoken about lesbianism, and this really destroyed the people we were playing to. In Bath we were deafened by old chaps in their bathchairs being wheeled out by their nannies, their urine bottles rattling as they went, saying ‘Disgusting, disgusting’…. Hull was the biggest disaster of all. The people of Hull would barely serve us in the shops they were so horrified”. Beryl played the part for two years but found it impossible to use one word to describe it. ”Some people call it a comedy. It has a lot of laughs but to me it isn’t a comedy. It is funny, but it is also very harrowing and sad. It’s ‘life with the lid left off’ … the story of people’s relationships to one another”.

In 2014 Eileen Atkins, the only member of the original cast still alive remembered opening night in Bristol when she heard the banging of seats in the auditorium. She spoke to Beryl Reid about it in the interval who said ”My dear, you haven’t done standup. That was everyone leaving”. Reviews were not good and the play was thought to be a flop until it opened in London where it was a huge success, both critically and commercially, with Eileen Atkins receiving the Evening Standard Best Actress award.

The film version was made in 1968 with only Beryl Reid from the original Bristol production in the title role. Childie was played by Susannah York and Mercy Croft by Coral Browne. The film was promoted as ”a shocking drama” and the lesbian element was made much more explicit; the sex scene between Childie and Mrs Croft not appearing in the original stage play.

Some location filming was done at the Gateway Club in London. ‘The Gate’ was one of the few places in the UK where lesbians could meet openly in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, and club regulars featured as extras in the film.

In 1965, the same year The Killing of Sister George was premiered at the Theatre Royal in Bristol, ITV broadcast a documentary about lesbians in the This Week series. On the day of its transmission the Daily Express pleaded with its readers to “stop this filth entering your living room”.

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Today attitudes have greatly changed and The Killing of Sister George in its own way helped to pave the way for more open and tolerant feelings towards lesbianism.

Jonathan Rowe 2021

Holding my first child in my arms in spring 2019 wasn’t as much of a relief as I had thought it would be. I’d always wanted children, even as a transmasculine person – it just felt like the best use of my body. From a young age I’d dreamed of what it would feel like to hold them, but this was most definitely not it.

So begins Jacob Bouyer of OutStories in an article penned for Metro online about his experience as a trans dad of 2-year old Merle and wanting to carry and give birth to a second child.

His fascinating article challenges traditional assumptions about gender expectations of parenthood. A must-read.

Selina Julien of ITN is seeking help for an ITV documentary on HIV/AIDS and the parallels/contrasts with the current Covid pandemic.

She says:
“We’re looking for someone who sadly lost a partner to HIV/AIDS and another one more recently to Covid. It’s a huge ask but we’re hoping a personal story will help to illustrate the parallels as well as the differences between the two pandemics.”

If you can help, contact Selina at Selina.Julien@itn.co.uk.

2 Hughenden Road

Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, the author Mary Renault was educated at Clifton High School for Girls in Bristol from 1919, then in 1925 went to St Hugh’s College, Oxford to study English. From 1926-1932 her family lived at 2 Hughenden Road, Clifton. On leaving Oxford in 1928 Mary joined her parents and sister in Bristol and rented a basement flat in Charlotte Street and spent four years here working in several mundane jobs. In 1931 she contracted rheumatic fever and because of this lived at Hughenden Road for a year.

In 1933 Mary returned to Oxford to train as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary. Here she met another trainee nurse, Julie Mullard, who was to become her lifelong partner. In 1939 she published her first novel Purposes of Love under the pseudonym Mary Renault.  Mary and Julie spent the war years living in Clifton and working as nurses in the Bristol Royal Infirmary and the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) hospital at Winford. From 1948 they lived in South Africa.

Mary went on to write numerous novels, some with veiled gay and lesbian characters. One, The Charioteer is set in a fictionalised Bristol (‘Bridstow’). The following is an extract from an excellent article Mary Renault’s Bristol by local historian Jonathan Rowe.

The story revolves around Laurie Odell, a young soldier who is being treated at an EMS hospital outside ‘Bridstow’ for serious leg injuries after being rescued from the sea after Dunkirk. Here he meets and falls in love with Andrew Raynes, a nineteen year old Quaker and conscientious objector working as a hospital orderly. Here Mary Renault drew on her wartime experiences of the conscientious objectors working at Winford, some of whom were Quakers and the problems that arose with ‘war heroes’ being cared for by ‘conchies’. Like pacifists in wartime, homosexuals were outcasts in ‘straight’ society, struggling to adjust to a sexuality seen as ‘deviant’ – a struggle symbolised by the charioteer in Plato’s Phaedrus: one horse heaven bent, the other plunging to earth, from where Renault took her title. This theme is underlined by Laurie’s feelings for the naïve and innocent Andrew, and Ralph Lanyon who Laurie once hero worshipped and is now a confident and sophisticated naval officer who he meets again after they were at public school together when Ralph was expelled for ‘sexual misconduct’ with another boy. Torn between his feelings for both Andrew and Ralph, by the end of the book Laurie has made his choice.

Renault describes a war torn Bristol – ‘the burgher solidarity of the city was interrupted by large irrelevant open spaces, in some of which bulldozers were flattening the rubble‘. There are ‘the Home Guard trenches‘ and the ‘Cathedral green air raid shelter‘ which is the public underground air raid shelter on College Green where my own parents, before they were married, spent a night after being stopped by an air raid warden after a date at The Whiteladies Cinema. A pub near College Green is described as ‘nastily modernised at large expense, chromium stools, the plastic leather, the sham parquet floor and florescent lighting’. This may well be The Mauretania in Park Street. Originally built in 1871 it was extended in 1936-1938 by Bristol architect W H Watkins. The Mauretania was fitted out with mahogany panelling and other items from the interior of Cunard liner RMS Mauretania, which was decommissioned in 1934.

Laurie notices ‘shops which looked as if they hadn’t changed hands in centuries’ and ‘the steep streets of flaking Adam houses that leaned over the Wells’ (presumably Hotwells). In one chapter he goes to an all male party in a Clifton flat – ‘a massive late Palladian terrace of Bath stone’. Other Bristol sites described include Durdham Downs and the Avon Gorge – ‘Ralph … took a half turn round the Downs and pulled off the road at the spot where cars stop to admire the Gorge … the steep side of the gorge with it’s sheer faces … wooded slopes and a scoop of quarry. The ebb tide flowed sluggishly at the bottom, a muddy thread between two long slopes of slime’. The Suspension Bridge is also featured as Renault writes ‘The bridge gave gently on it’s chains in the wind that swept along the gorge, there was only the darkling sense of loneliness and height’.

Mary Renault’s ground breaking novel paved the way for today’s more tolerant society and attitudes. Few could have known it was the work of a former Clifton High School girl who spent her formative years in Bristol and whose wartime nursing experiences in the city led her to write such a passionate, haunting and moving book which still resonates with readers today.

Jonathan Rowe, 2015

This is an extract from an article Mary Renault’s Bristol with further details of her life in Bristol and writing.

Did you go to Horseplay club nights?

k Anderson has published another entertaining interview on Lost Spaces in which he chats to Bernie Hodges, a voice artist, actor, and co-host of the What, That Old Queen?! podcast.

Moving to Bristol in the early 90s with a few mates when he was just 21 years old, Bernie quickly built a life for himself but struggled to find his tribe and that sense of belonging that comes with that.

But that all changed when he started to go to Horseplay, a club night that started in 2011 and billed itself as an ‘underground homo disco’. Listen to Bernie talk about pleather harnesses, what it really means to be an A-Gay, and death by dildo …

Listen on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or Anchor (episode 68).

Lost Spaces explores queer experiences as told through now-closed bars and clubs. Every episode singer/songwriter k Anderson interviews a different member of the community to find out about a venue from their past, the memories they created there and the people that they knew.

Kim Renfrew is looking for research participants interested in talking about what they wear and why, or why not! She’s working on a PhD at the University of the West of England (UWE) on creating, negotiating and maintaining lesbian identity through dress practices and the dressed and adorned body.

Her aim is to look at:

• Dress and beauty/grooming practices among participants of all backgrounds over the age of 18, who identify as women, and are primarily attracted to other women.
• What we wear now and what we have worn across our lives
• How we make sense of dress/adornment/beauty/grooming in a culture that views lesbians as not caring about appearance or style
• The impact Covid-era lockdowns have had on the way we dress and express our identity.

Participation will involve some or all the following:

• Taking part in oral history audio or video interviews – including looking at clothes and grooming items
• Keeping a clothing diary
• Reflecting on photographs and sharing wardrobe content

How these will be conducted will of course depend on coronavirus and some activities will take place online, while others may happen further down the line when restrictions are eased and contact with others feel safe.

If you’re interested in getting involved, contact Kim at Kim2.Renfrew@live.uwe.ac.uk  – she’ll be happy to share detailed information about what’s involved.

Were you a regular or part of the team at Club Leo in the 90’s or the Oasis Club in the 80’s?

Jack Lettis continues to work on the Crack Magazine project we previously posted about last year named Everything Is Music. He is tasked with researching Bristol’s gay venues of the past.

Jack is keen to talk to anyone that remembers the Oasis Club (on Park Row at the time) and Club Leo (which was on St Nicholas Street), hoping to collect any pictures and flyers people might have and talk to anyone who remembers the clubs and their memoirs of the aspects that made them great – the atmosphere, the crowds they attracted, the venues themselves and the music that defined their time.

If this is you, please do get in touch with him at jack@jacklettis.com for a short friendly chat and be part of this great project for Bristol.

Photo: CJ / Bristol 24/7

This mural was painted for the duration of October 2020 on a 18m long wall in Jamaica Street, Bristol. The wall is used by the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft community group as a continually changing canvas for street art.

The mural’s intention was to shine a light on the shocking state of healthcare for transgender and non-binary people.

CJ, the person behind the mural said “Everyone who helped to paint the mural has so much love for the National Health Service as an institution but feel that as a community we have been roundly disregarded for many years as the waiting lists have spiralled to the current appalling state”.

“The NHS aims for an 18 week wait for referrals, a sharp contrast the current five year wait for trans and non-binary people. After referral, patients will wait up to three years to begin hormonal treatment and up to five years for gender affirming surgeries. This is an overall wait of up to a decade for some trans people to receive the help they need.”

“These failures of the system are causing very real harm to a vulnerable population,” says CJ. “The letters along the bottom are months represent the five years that trans people have to wait for our first appointment”.

The rest of the piece is an attempt to explain a little about the realities of living as a transgender person in what can feel like a very hostile world.

With thanks to Bristol 24/7.