8/12/2023 0 Comments Gay hidden camera![]() ![]() ![]() Housman was gay, and the music here is far from merely incidental. Butterworth was killed by a sniper’s bullet on the Somme in 1916, while Housman’s poem concerns youth and love and loss, and death in the cause of empire. The narration is only interrupted by George Butterworth’s setting of Is My Team Ploughing from AE Housman’s 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad, sung by Bryn Terfel. ![]() St Ermin’s Hotel, London, where the Special Operations Executive was founded. Ungentle maps assignation points and affinities and codes of recognition, and habits of intrigue and dissimulation.įilled with idealism and desire, secrets and self-justifications, indiscretions and unmaskings, Ungentle takes us to the Red House in Cambridge, “a little red-brick Kremlin by the Cam”, and to St Ermin’s Hotel in Mayfair, where the Special Operations Executive was founded, and where Philby and Maclean met their Russian handlers, to 54 Broadway, where the Secret Intelligence Service had its offices, to St James’s Park, where spies would meet and queers would cruise, and to the beach house on the Beaulieu estate in Hampshire, where the young Lord Montagu was arrested following a police raid, before receiving a year-long prison sentence in 1954 for holding a gay party there. Collisions too of class and empire, architecture and heritage, academia and politics. It is a story of collisions and spirals, the worlds of intelligence officers and double agents, and an illegal gay world that hid in plain sight. Is the narrator a fifth, a sixth or even seventh Cambridge Comintern agent, along with the Cambridge Five and their associates, Blunt and Philby, Burgess and Maclean, Cairncross and Liddell? Careless in confession, Lemmey’s narrator leads us from post-first world war youth, fucking with a labourer in a field at harvest-time, to Cambridge, and his membership of the Apostles and his seduction into his secret lives as double-agent and queer. There’s a certain prissiness there, and what we are being told is both heartfelt and self-serving. There are blind windows and ducks on the water, country estates and swanky hotels, buses passing, taxis loitering, men meandering towards covert assignations in the park, cows in the field and buildings in the sun, roses blooming in their beds, a fountain in the courtyard, a summer-house overlooking the Solent.Īll prosaic enough, except for the voice: the narrator is a man whose moral compass wavers and misleads at every turn, in Whishaw’s lulling, evenly cadenced, precisely enunciated voice. Photograph: Steve BrownĪlmost nothing happens in in this formidably rich yet deceptively simple and beautifully shot 16mm film, filmed and edited by artist Onyeka Igwe. 54 Broadway, London, where Secret Intelligence Service had its offices. ![]()
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