No call for art to deal with ethics
By KATE BELGRAVE
I had my annual queers 'n' arts chat with Graham Capill at the weekend. Our dialogue, as you have no doubt guessed, was about Queer as Folk, the television drama that features a group of young, gay, English blokes going about their controversial business in fairly graphic detail.
Mr Capill expressed concern about Queer as Folk to TV4 before it screened. His contention is that the programme suggests a certain lifestyle to impressionable youngsters and allows that lifestyle a certain paedophiliac imperative. (One of the show's main characters is a teenage boy who enjoys, before our watering eyes, intercourse with a man of 29.)
My contention is that this programme is not at all political and aims to promote precisely nothing. Although the protagonist is a teenager (he's 15, apparently), he's hardly an innocent. Quite the reverse. He knows all about sex and is very keen to learn more. He spends his extracurricular time stalking the bloke he fancies. When he's in school, he masturbates chums at play-lunch.
Any time left over he spends accusing his parents of misunderstanding him, and running away from home. To cut a fairly obvious story short, he is like most teenagers. And, like most teenagers, he is neither angel nor fiend. He just IS. That's the point. The show neither judges nor champions him. Surely there is room for art that simply portrays us as we are?
Mr Capill thinks not. He has every right to think not, of course.
He also has every right to write a letter slamming me for suggesting he should think otherwise. What I'd like to do before that happens, though, is pick up on a few of the points that he made during our conversation, because I've heard other Queer as Folk opponents make them too.
"[Art] is used as a Trojan Horse to cover up those activities [paedophilia]," Mr Capill observed, "and yet we're still sending people to prison for them."
He meant, of course, that it is unfair to portray on screen the sorts of acts for which people in real life are chucked in the slammer.
The argument seems to be that convicted rapists have every right to feel cheesed off if they see a fictional character getting away with rape on telly.
My answer to this is that it is simply not art's job to be sensitive to people who have been caught out in a crime. I'm sure every armed robber thinks, "If only," every time he sees the first hour of Bonnie and Clyde and that every serial murderer wishes he'd got as far as Natural Born Killers, but that's too bad. It is not art's job to draw tidy ethical lines.
Mr Capill's second point is that Queer as Folk, by not punishing its protagonists, drew too pretty a picture of homosexual life for the impressionable youngsters who watch TV4.
"Obviously, the things you watch do influence behaviour. If it didn't, then why do people spend millions of dollars on advertising? Why is it that fashions are set by what people are wearing in movies?" he said.
I wondered out loud about that. I don't think that Queer as Folk is about recruiting youngsters to the gay cause. The picture it draws isn't pretty at all. The star turn's friendships suffer, his relationship with his father is decimated, he humiliates himself by chasing a man who couldn't care less, and he offends everyone else he meets because he's a self-centred, obnoxious little sod.
Which leads, in a way, to the last point Mr Capill made - that the danger of this programme was not that it might send a message to youngsters, but that it might send no message at all.
"To deal with [this debate] in a way that is ambiguous is very, very irresponsible."
That argument flies in the face of the first two points, but we will give Mr Capill the benefit of the doubt.
He, at least, has the guts to make his views on gay life public. What are yours?
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