Current controversies about LGBTQ+ representations in the media are traced back to their twentieth-century roots in a season of free public screenings at the Cinema Museum in London. On 17 September, we revisit 1977, the year when Mary Whitehouse brought a private prosecution for blasphemous libel against Gay News. The screening includes Blasphemy at the Old Bailey, a dramatisation of the trial not screened since its original broadcast almost half a century ago. Journalists from Gay News, leading figures in the lesbian and gay Christian movement and barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who defended Gay News in court, will reassess this celebrated showdown between the forces of gay liberation and moral conservatism. He said: “This season illustrates why LGBTQ+ issues created any number of dilemmas for the BBC from the 1950s onwards.

Source: The Guardian September 05, 2022 15:37 UTC