If nothing else, this week’s responses to ITV’s new sitcom Vicious – starring Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Frances de la Tour – provide a tidy snapshot of attitudes towards acceptable representations of gay men.¹ Short version of this post: the idea that Vicious represents the offensive stereotyping of gay men only really works if Hollyoaks represents the offensive stereotyping of straight people. Technically true, but you have to want it.

Common to many of the negative reviews was the attempt to adjudicate between ‘lazy retro fun’ and edgy post-watershed entertainment. Discovering that Vicious was incompetent at both proved fairly convenient confirmation of failure for some critics, rather than evidence that Vicious wasn’t even attempting those forms. The single-room set might well recall the sitcoms of the 1970s, but both style of performance and multiple doors on every available wall – as well as a conveniently majestic staircase – more strongly suggests a theatrical tradition of farce, closer to Joe Orton than Leonard Rossiter and with jokes as funny as they are corrosive (McKellen: ‘For God’s sake, Violet, nobody wants to rape you!’ de la Tour: ‘What an awful thing to say!’).².  Given the pedigree of everyone involved, let’s cut to assuming that while such nods to traditions of sitcom and stage might be deliberate, they’re not an effort to simply reproduce those forms.

It helps, I think, to read Vicious in some kind of context (something that sounds like a terrible defence of comedy, but is unavoidable for academics, sorry). In the earliest representations of gay men in the sitcoms of the 1970s, camp queens were figures of fun so far as they were also available as figures of loathing. You were allowed to laugh with them so long as you could laugh at them. Marginal improvements in the 1980s and 1990s found a host of other convenient narrative tropes: the sex offender and/or murderer; the post-AIDS chaste listening friend; the pairing of responsible, straight-acting adult with slutty but wholly reprehensible man-child (Will and Grace, anyone?). The idea of camp men who are not only unembarrassed about their desires (past and present) and – gasp – who are shockingly old to be having sex anyway represents something new, above beyond any claim to significance in a sitcom with gay men as the lead characters.

A larger point – and something that some reviewers seems to have struggled with – is that camp isn’t defined by being nice and that queens certainly don’t have to be kind. The expectation of queenery as a kind of ultimately gentle clowning misses its point. There’s certainly something unpleasant about any assumption that representations of gay men are only capable of being timely if they are scraped clean of overly swish, camp or effeminate renderings of gayness. We’ll take our camp in the form of chat show hosts, thanks, but not if he really means it?

1. Reviews range from modest praise to light damnation. I’d suggest that the claim made by one critic that Vicious is the worst new comedy of living memory suggests he hasn’t watched BBC1′s The Wright Way yet. If one is to be a bitch, one must also strive for accuracy. [↩]
2. That said, Leonard Rossiter’s role as Rigsby grew from his performance of the part in Eric Chappell’s stage play, which was then adapted for television. [↩]