Maybe you’ll have noticed – there’s just been an old-school “watercooler moment”: people talking about that scene in the second series of Sky Atlantic’s The White Lotus, when Jennifer Coolidge’s socialite, Tanya, chances upon Quentin (Tom Hollander) having sex with his supposed “nephew”, Jack (Leo Woodall). Nor is it “tastefully suggestive”. It’s stark naked, full-on, explicit.
This isn’t our old friend, moral panic. Anybody who’s ever watched The White Lotus, created by Mike White, knows it’s that kind of wild show. In the first series, Murray Bartlett’s increasingly crazed hotel manager ends up with his face buried between an employee’s bare buttocks. Nor do viewers seem offended by the scene between Hollander and Woodall. It’s more: “Wow – did that just happen?”
Still, when was the last time a straight sex scene became a talking point? Perhaps the Regency-cunnilingus in Bridgerton, but that was clothed, suggestive, mainly played for laughs. Certainly, Netflix’s lusty film of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, released around the same time as the White Lotus episode, didn’t garner the same level of reaction, despite all the heavy breathing in the bracken. It makes you think: even today, is on-screen gay sex perceived as ruder, dirtier – more taboo? Is it the only kind of televised sex that has any hope of shocking audiences these days?
On-screen gay sex is nothing new. Queer As Folk, for one, was broadcast back in 1999, with Tipping the Velvet appearing a few years later. These days, gay sex scenes are everywhere: It’s a Sin; Hollywood; Euphoria; Feel Good; Dickinson; the recent Harry Styles vehicle, My Policeman, to name but a few.
There could be an element of straight sex fatigue to this. On a serious level, the straight sex scene became problematic, toxified: too many stories of traumatised actors, particularly women, feeling pressured into providing mainstream porn jollies. If ever something needed to get less explicit, it was the straight sex scene. All of which equally applies to any actors distressed by gay scenes. Away from this, are audiences simply bored with the non-stop deluge of humping heteros? Even if intimacy coordinators are involved these days, it’s a miracle if straight actors stop rutting long enough to gasp out a few lines of dialogue.
However, it seems to go yet further with on-screen gay sex. What’s particularly interesting is how open, how unapologetic, it is. How there’s almost a sense of long overdue correction: exploding past repressions, righting wrongs.
This takes things beyond the important issue of representation in terms of LGBTQ+ characters, which now happily proliferate. It’s about the reality of gay sex. Not “pre-gay sex” (a smouldering look, a fleeting kiss, before the screen fades); nor “post-gay sex” (a satisfied slumping under strategically placed bedsheets). No, it’s rude, real-time gay sex, unfurling on primetime screens. It’s also about the long, difficult journey for on-screen gay people to be allowed to be sexual beings at all.
On-screen gay sex seems inexorably linked not only to LGBTQ+ people on television generally, but also to society’s historic, and homophobic, inability to cope with them. Obviously there was the cultural dearth of out-lesbians, but what about actors such as John Inman (Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served?), or entertainers such as Larry Grayson? While there was nothing wrong with their high-camp style, there’s something horrible about how this was probably the only option. How out-gay artists had to be frothy, non-threatening, pass some unspoken “hetero safety test”. This was sexuality with the sex extracted. Such were the prohibitive times, performers could be gay, even ultra-gay, but God forbid they look or sound as though they might actually have sex.
Those old enough may also recall this enforced screen-neutering continuing with what could only be termed My Best Friend’s Wedding-syndrome. In the 1997 film, Rupert Everett’s wittily quipping gay character squires around Julia Roberts. This isn’t a criticism of Everett, who played the part so beautifully the filmmakers gave him more screentime. Still, that character started something. Suddenly, “gay best friends” littered the screens. Handsome. Stylish. Hilarious. And always available, because they usually had no lives of their own, no visible sex lives anyway. Eventually, they were allowed love lives, so straight characters could prove how fab/progressive they were by throwing rainbow-confetti at their weddings.
Obviously, I’m being facetious. Certainly, it would be reductive for gay characters to always have to lead with sex – especially for nosey straight audiences. That said, it’s painfully apparent how LGBTQ+ people have spent years, decades, lifetimes, waiting for heterosexual audiences to get over the fact they have sex. With this in mind, is it so surprising if Mike White feels like serving up gay sexual transgression in a huge show like The White Lotus? Not just for the sheer hell of it, but also for all the people who couldn’t before him.
A few things seem to be happening here. Compared with straight sex scenes, the gay version is still rarer, so it will logically seem fresher. Moreover, such scenes may be a way of saying to audiences: deal with it; accept gay characters as fully realised/sexual, rather than mere hetero-foils. Finally, tellingly, for all the startlement, viewers seemed a lot more intrigued than censorious. As much as the White Lotus moment tells us something about the progression of the primetime gay sex scene, maybe it also says we’ve finally grown up.
• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
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