Stuff and Moonshine

I have joked for years about my paper gaydar, an improvement on my previous gaydar of a rock, but a viewer should not need even the gaydar of scissors to appreciate the rarity and joy of the happy ending granted its candidly queer couple by the semi-precious shoestring gem of Girl Stroke Boy (1971). It has as little time for coding as for pleas for tolerance when it can have a snow fight instead. Especially in these ever more gender-essentialist days, its cheerful one in the eye for cisheteronormativity feels more than historically affirming.

Queering its social message conventions from jump, the film wastes no time setting the outrageous scene: the straight, white, snowbound middle-class home which a jam in the central heating has rendered a sort of Buñuelian steambath of locked windows, stuck doors, and taps that burn to the touch in which George and Lettice Mason (Michael Hordern and Joan Greenwood) are literally sweating the arrival of their adult son with his girlfriend, a momentous day for a household that has not so covertly worried about his sexuality for years. "Mallinson, you know, woodwork and biology, said that Laurie was the only boy in the class who never giggled during sex instruction." He's never had a girl that his parents know about, much less brought one home to meet them. Anyone expecting a white wedding reset to straight time, however, should clutch their pearls now because while the Masons have braced their suburban sensibilities for the daughter of a West Indian High Commissioner, at the sight of the resplendently femme Jo Delaney (Peter Straker) with her soft midi-Afro and fashionably leopard-lined eyes and several inches on their son even without the go-go heels, their social script drops all its pages on the floor. The appalling scribble shoved by Lettice at her mortified husband says it all: Is it a man? To the credit of the lovers, neither of them has walked into this ordeal unprepared. Fresh out of hospital for some unspecified crack-up which may have boiled down to contact with his family, Laurie (Clive Francis) is fair and fragile and sardonic and devoted to Jo, emphasizing her pronouns with dry unexpected firmness where he remarks ruefully of himself, "Mother really wanted a romantic hero for a son. I must have been a terrible disappointment." Jo kisses him lightly but meaningfully on the cheek; her own introductory act after an altercation with the radiator is a grave, sly fumigation of the parlor with her cologne, sounding out the local density of whiteness with icebreakers of mud huts and Tarzan. They may have an ally in George, the beleaguered secondary modern school head whose air of vague acquiescence to the absurd suggests an openness to new ideas so long as his instinct to please everyone doesn't strand him on the side of the status quo. "Your father's all right. I like him. Well, the bits of him that she's left." The problem is Lettice, the tiny, implacable romance writer who plumes herself on her progressive bona fides while blithely describing the heroine of her latest novel as an "octaroon" and professes confidence in her son with the lethal encouragement, "Darling boy, I hope you'll always do exactly what you think is right, after first having talked it over with me." Her conversation is a textbook in transmisogynoir, starting at microaggressions about spices and hair and spiraling into the ludicrous yet all too real determination to prove the masculinity of her son's girlfriend as if it would be news to him, the virginal innocent deceived. Her eye on the position of the toilet seat would challenge a cat at a mousehole. Her baited hooks on the natures of the sexes are as uncalled-for as they are off-base. At least when she bullies her inarticulately uncomfortable husband into dialing the Delaneys (Rudolph Walker and Elisabeth Welch) at their official address in Belgrave Square, the inappropriateness of her enquiry provokes the clapback it deserves: confused, scandalized, and inevitably, "Is that girl Laurie a boy?"

As a comedy of manners whose joke is not after all on the outré intersections but the straight and exceeding narrow, Girl Stroke Boy is an amazing transmission from 1971. As an experience of cinema, it's a more awkward proposition. Director Bob Kellett was an accomplished farceur and it's a clever reversal to play the cishet older generation for burlesque while allowing the queer young lovers to be the mimetically textured pair, but since most of the scenes are four-handers, the tonal results are uneven and the shedload of transphobia can wear on the viewer even when it is visibly, risibly in the wrong. It would slice the 86-minute runtime in half, but no member of the audience who ever once had to grit their teeth through misgendering, passive-aggression, or just plain familial rudeness would fault Jo and Laurie for lighting out for London in the middle of the night. What saves the film is that it is always on the side of the lovers, especially the self-possessed Jo who meets this nightmare-in-law with the grace and fierceness of someone long past needing to explain herself, if she ever did. "Well, there's at least six couples in my block of flats that don't agree." She is never treated as a trap or a riddle, her femininely tilted presentation as drag or a gag or an effort at heterosexual camouflage. Beyond her portrayal by a cis male actor, the character can be textually confirmed as AMAB and so what? Both she and her boyfriend arrived as flamboyantly as if they had heisted half of Carnaby Street on their way out to Shenley Hill and it just happens that she's minimally accessorized with polished nails and her mod handbag and a silver labrys pendant when she says bluntly across the breakfast table, "Sex isn't what you wear. It's not being face up or face down in bed. Nowadays it's simply a matter of personality . . . Look, who gives a hell whether it's a girl or a boy? We're all a bit of both, aren't we, Mrs Mason? I bet you don't get many absolute heteros in your school." Full Judith Butler ahead, gender as performance does not require conformation to its most stereotypical signifiers. Jo's level-headedness does not invalidate her femininity any more than her light-chested voice, any more than Laurie should be considered less of a man just because his sharp-tongued inclination to put in his oar casts him fairly as the bitchier of the two. Certainly the higher-strung, he channels the audience's own incredulity in the face of a delusion that might nowadays call itself gender-critical feminism: "Mother dear, doesn't it ever occur to you that I might know everything that she is and isn't by now? I know that she's never going to beat you at Scrabble. I know that she's never going to be Home Counties Badminton Champion or President of your Needlewomen's Guild or good at church flower decoration—" The most extensive meditations on sexuality and gender are not loaded onto the queer characters, however, but free-associated by the heat-rumpled George as he botches his way toward acceptance through a waveringly touching mix of conviction and cluelessness, early on throwing down the unprecedented gauntlet of "Laurie says she's a woman, she says she's a woman. With such evidence, I am prepared to take her femininity on trust," and even after his wife has browbeaten him to accept her conclusion of the assembled facts, holding his ground as if somewhat surprised to find himself standing on it:

"Whatever my son's taste in sex, I'm not ashamed of him. If Jo is a man, I don't think I'm disgusted. If they have a taste for one another and it adds to their life, then as far as I'm concerned they can be as loving as they like. We're none of us so normal, so self-dependent that we can turn down all the good sex that comes our way—or the chance of having someone to love us. Don't you agree? I don't give a damn if she's a man. If she is, she's a jolly good chap."

Coming from a father so generally, pricelessly flustered that he fumbled which sexual orientation he was supposed to be championing in the clinch, it's an extraordinary statement. It is not at all clear that he has a real handle on the concepts of sex and gender that he mangles so magnificently together in his last word and it doesn't matter. Jo was right to single him out for a sotto voce appeal for support. Quite a lot of parents in 2025 can't get as far.

( And no one is coming to dinner tonight! )

The title remains unfortunate. Girl/Boy obviously plays on the perceived ambiguity of Jo as well as her pairing with Laurie, but it's naughtier than it needs to be when spelled out; it misserves a film that is relaxingly, radically matter-of-fact about the presentation of its lovers. I cannot speak to the stage source material of David Percival's Girlfriend (1970), but the screenplay by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin steers remarkably clear of sad, hysterical, desexualized queer clichés while its intimacy is sexily, dreamily limned in montages of languorous heat and playful cold by DP Ian Wilson who would later shoot both Edward II (1991) for Derek Jarman and The Crying Game (1992) for Neil Jordan, the latter of which reassured me that I had not been reminded occasionally of Jaye Davidson's Dil by Straker's Jo only through the common ground of transfeminine Blackness. One especially lovely composition offsets her with orchids in the conservatory, a sensuous one intertwines their fingers over the curves of a tiger cowrie and interchanges their profiles like coins, a droller one cages the Masons behind the rungs of a ladder as they attempt to extol the virtues of heterosexuality to an openly hilarious Jo and a Laurie who looks distinctly as though checking himself back into hospital would be less of a strain on his disbelief. "Dad, is this what is called a man-to-man talk?" So soon after decriminalization, so soon after Stonewall, the film shows no self-consciousness or sensationalism over the kisses and embraces of a pair of actors, their stymied efforts at lovemaking. They touch one another with casual affection, sometimes with active desire, sometimes in defiant, assertive display. They are not a perfect couple. On the floor in front of the opened refrigerator on the theory that it should be the one place in the house cool enough to fuck, they briefly fight instead, the mood spiked by the cramp in his calf and her discomfort in the fish-fry heat even before his territorial nerves irritate her into an allusion to some past sexual failure and just a moment ago they were lying so comfortably together even in the horrible wicker of the guest bed, it's a relief to the viewer when they manage to laugh it out and get on with the getting off. "Not so loud! Look, I can't put a notice on the door—coitus don't-interrupt-us." It makes them more real, less like any idea of representation beyond the fact of their love for one another, their individual quirks, and the genuine stress of spending any kind of night in a house containing racist knick-knacks and a TERF. "It's like having it off in the British Museum!" Structurally, the interracial angle is submerged almost at once in the gender trouble, but it does persist in the reality of their relationship and it's pleasant to see just how much of an issue it isn't for Jo and Laurie, an entire other message picture dodged. That said, I had no idea a film had been released ten years before my birth in which a character defends their partner's pronouns to their parents, giving yet another lie to this tsunami of transphobia currently swamping the U.S. and the UK. The arc of the moral universe could tesser any time now.

I had no idea about this film, period, and in its small, contrary way, sometimes well-made and sometimes wobbly and often suggesting that someone forgot to fetch the budget out of the boot of the car—it was shot in two weeks in an actual house credited to "Faggot's End," which looks in real life like Faggotts Close—it may be important beyond its apparent premise of Guess If Pat's Coming to Dinner. I found it in the filmography of Clive Francis and then on MyFlixer, although if you prefer not to wrestle with the necessity of adblock it can be more usually streamed and against all odds exists on a rather handsome Indicator Blu-Ray. I wouldn't hold it against any viewer not to want to spend a weekend melting with the Masons, but my hard sell on romance had no defenses against Laurie and Jo with their in-jokes and frank sex talk and soft gestures of loving, their astringent and forthright complement that I imagine made them treasures of elder queerhood. "We care for each other. We show others we care. Isn't that how it's done?" And let them still be doing it, onscreen and off. This personality brought to you by my absolute backers at Patreon.