Now in his seventies, Jeremy Kingston remembers coming to sexual maturity as a gay in his twenties: “Except that what you were called was far more abusive then: queer, faggot or nancy boy. And we lived with the spectre of Oscar Wilde. I knew that I’d be flung inside if I was caught in flagrante with a boyfriend.”
Jeremy, playwright and theatre critic for The Times, met me in an Islington restaurant where we joked about the young men on the streets, advertising their gayness in dress and style without any of the fear that he went through.
“Children of the Gay Pride revolution,” Jeremy observed, a tad wistfully. But nowadays he is happy to discuss openly the picaresque life he has led as a homosexual as well as 22 years of marriage and two adored sons.
He says the “vastly changed” attitudes to homosexuality over the past 35- 40 years enabled him to write his play Making Dickie Happy, in which Noël Coward urges his friend, Lord Mountbatten – who is deeply troubled by his sexual identity – to acknowledge his gay feelings.
He thinks it is the best long play he has written, not least because he now feels comfortable addressing issues of homosexuality honestly. “The first play I put on when I was in my twenties featured a relationship between a young man and a sensitive sailor.
“That had to be cut out and the play changed altogether because, I was told, the Lord Chamberlain wouldn’t have permitted it. Apparently the nation couldn’t take the fact that such effeminate monstrosities existed.”
The result was “a writing block which went on for a long time, and I am sure it was because I was afraid to say what I wanted, what mattered to me”.
Jeremy soon learned where to meet men. “I spent my time in the 1960s falling in and out of love around the Earls Court area – a world within a world.”
He had grown up in a home where sex was “an unacknowledged dirty business”.
His sister became a nun and his gay feelings were aroused by a man who made a pass at him in the cinema. “But I wanted to be heterosexual like my mates.
They all had girlfriends so I tried having one but she terrified me with her open mouth wanting kisses. I felt alarmed she would swallow me up.”
By 1955, when he worked as a clerk in London, he had acknowledged his gay yearnings and was going “up West” to clubs and finding “talented and witty” gay men who seemed so much more entertaining role models than his heterosexual friends.
But he badly wanted children: “I still felt it would be better if I could put my gay phase aside as a protracted adolescence. I could see how much easier life would be if I were straight and I thought maybe I could turn my fancy to something else.”
It was rewarding, therefore, to find himself sexually attracted to an actress “with lovely Cleopatra eye make-up and a purple leather dress”.
They married in 1967 and stayed together for 22 years, but “although I was faithful to her with women, I had my afternoons in London with male lovers. But although my wife accepted that I’d had a gay phase before we married, she didn’t know it went on”.
Although his sons were growing up in times when Jeremy could see it was a great deal easier than it had been for him to “come out”, he says emphatically that there is still enough homophobia and prejudice to make it a difficult choice.
He was determined his sons should not suffer if they had homosexual desires, so when his younger son, aged 14, appeared to be “in a sort of decline”, Jeremy wondered whether he was troubled by his sexuality.
“I found a time to tell him that I had been gay when I was young and that there was nothing wrong with that. The damage came from being ashamed; made to feel wrong. He didn’t say anything but indicated that he appreciated my making an effort to talk” – in fact his son was not gay.
Jeremy told his older son when a book was being published featuring him with the author, an erstwhile lover. He says with a smile: “I was touched because he just said he was glad that I’d decided to get married, otherwise he and his brother wouldn’t have existed.”
The marriage ended, however, when the sons had grown up, although he remains in good contact with both of them. Jeremy says, “I realised that I am 70% gay and my yearnings for men were very real.”
Written by Angela Neustatter
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