‘The body is the garden of the soul’
Tony Kushner, Angels in America
Many have pointed to Ian’s enigmatic nature. Throughout the years of the 1980s, perhaps from the very beginning of his match with Sean Mathias, overwhelmed as he was with his passion for the romantic image of this inspiring, flamboyant beauty, he had felt an inner emptiness encroaching on his soul. He had played the great roles, he had demonstrated to himself a mastery of control, conditional, if not absolute, to whom he was. He had also given hints that at heart he was a staid Lancashire man. And he had, in a raw, even ugly, statement, pronounced that he prepared to risk, to the absolute limit, making a fool of himself – ‘cutting myself open and then going out on stage and showing everybody,’ was how he phrased it.
This had fulfilled him. Intense competitiveness and an openness and ability to express and expose himself at every opportunity both in word and image, had brought him to a position where he was the most talked about and written up actor of his time, wholly inhabiting that role. On stage, he could convert himself instantly. Yet off-stage, away from the security of being in a role, he sometimes looked uncomfortable, Sheila Hancock noting one day that ‘he flops about like a sort of over-grown puppy.’
A talking head, voluble, sensible, well supplied with facts and reasons, Ian had for years been a champion for worthy causes (restoration of the salvaged Tudor warship Mary Rose, more state funding for theatre, rights to perform for English actors in the USA). He was a tireless benefactor in his one-man performances of Acting Shakespeare, with over two hundred performances in the US, raising money for the increasing number of AIDS victims, many of whom were artists or performers. Ian Charleson, Ian’s close friend, was a particular case in point. This empowerment became the fuse, but the big barrel of gunpowder was below and hidden, long hidden, ready to explode under the English Establishment.
AIDS, by the end of 1987, was now becoming worse every day, especially in New York where attitudes to the epidemic were being changed from fear and self-distancing by such plays as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and William M. Hoffman’s As Is. The deaths of famous people from AIDS occurred more and more often. Fired by his visits to America, Ian now believed that The Times should state in its obituaries when respected and respectable people died from AIDS. ‘AIDS is a disease of transformation like no other,’ said Christopher Spence, director of London Lighthouse, the AIDS hospice. The epidemic was raging at its height. The whole purpose of Spence’s Lighthouse project was health. ‘You realise,’ said Spence, ‘if you put your attention on dying well, that what you’re talking about is living well. The whole focus of this project is health. Dying is a perfectly healthy thing to do.’ No positive spiritual or belief system could fault this.
Sheila Hancock, even in January 1988, did not see his support of AIDS charities as a coming-out gesture. ‘One of his closest friends had died from AIDS,’ she says. ‘It was a gift from God to be able to do something to combat a disease which has struck many fellow artists.’ (When the much-loved Ian Charleson, who had been performing Hamlet while affected, died, Ian and Richard Eyre flew up to Edinburgh to attend the funeral). London Lighthouse enjoyed McKellen’s support to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Mathias’s departure set the fuse alight. McKellen told John Lahr, who interviewed him many years later in New York in 2007, that he and Sean had been ‘a great couple. We would swagger out together and it was good. I loved his friends. He didn’t much care for mine. He thought they were too stuffy.’ Sean had made McKellen take down all the posters of himself, saying, ‘I’m living with you, not your reputation.’ On the support McKellen gave to Mathias’s career he told Lahr, ‘It was exciting to see him growing in front of my eyes.’ But Mathias wanted to move forward in the relationship and have a life in which McKellen didn’t always put himself first. He said, ‘He was constantly bickering and an irritant to me, not easy to handle. We had dreadful arguments. I don’t like getting angry.’ The tipping point came before he went to New York with Wild Honey in 1986, when Matthias said, ‘If you go to America, I can’t come with you.’
Ian was almost fifty, and his lover had left him, but he never showed any rage or resentment.
Ian’s explosion, if so it may be called, was measured and very English, so much in keeping with the good manners and traditions of his country, and his faultless educated background, that he gained from it a higher proportion of approval than dissent. Importantly, too, his revolution was made on Radio 3, the hallowed cultural outlet of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Forever a self-analyser, searching after fact and reason, Ian further explained how he had been affected by talking with the novelist Armistead Maupin and his then-partner, Terry Anderson, during his visit to San Francisco in September 1987 with Acting Shakespeare. Maupin has it that McKellen was, in the tradition of such expatriate Englishmen as Christopher Isherwood and David Hockney, ‘Californicated’ into a greater sense of individual freedom. The discussion had centred on the ‘closetedness’ of certain Hollywood stars, and whether an openly homosexual actor would be limited in ‘selling his sexuality’. He began to realise ‘the fact that I know that a man is straight doesn’t stop me fancying him. If that was true, why should it stop a woman fancying me even though she knew I wasn’t straight?’
Mulling this over, McKellen had met a casting director in Los Angeles, where he was up for a part in a movie, and asked her if she thought he could work in Hollywood if it was known he was gay. She answered, ‘Well, why not? The director’s gay, and so is his wife.’ The names of the famous pair were taboo to reveal. ‘The point, if it is true, is that a lesbian and a gay man got married. And not, of course, to fool their friends or themselves, but to fool the world … I went right off Hollywood.’ Such open secrets had been the practice going back many years, as far back as Lord Montagu’s trial in the 1950s and Kenneth Williams’ indiscreet confessions. Elton John, never hiding he was gay (even while for a short time married to a woman), while never completely admitting it either, wore glittering coats, feather boas and purple tights on stage, while in an issue of Playboy David Bowie called him ‘the token queen of rock ‘n’roll’.
On 4 January 1988, when Ian was collecting in a bucket for the London Lighthouse, Carole Woddis, a journalist, stopped him, thrusting a sheaf of papers into his hand about that ‘nasty and brutish’, as he called it, Section 28 of the Local Government Bill of 1988. He phoned her back about 1.30 the next morning. She said that they chatted about how difficult it was for him to come out, because he might lose work. Then he said he had this idea: What about holding a big press conference, and getting heterosexual couples to come with their babies and protest? She took him to a meeting, in the smoky bar of the London Drill Hall, of the Arts Lobby, a mainly gay group, intent on stopping Clause 28 on the basis that it threatened censorship of the arts. The purpose of the Clause was to make it illegal for local authorities to ‘promote homosexuality’ or to give money or assistance to anybody who did. The implications were alarming.
A number of actors, such as Simon Callow, had for some time made no secret that they were gay, but there was a reluctance on the part of journalists and the media to proclaim this publicly, and so these admissions were still kept under wraps or ignored. But this was to be overthrown very dramatically when, because of his high-profile collecting for AIDS charities, BBC Radio 3 invited Ian to take part in a debate on Clause 28 on the programme Third Ear. He would be in conversation with Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, with Robert Hewison presiding.
Worsthorne had stated unequivocally in his leader column the Sunday before, ‘viciously parading his ignorance’, according to Ian, that homosexuals provoked intolerance towards themselves because of their ‘proselytising cult’. It was by no means a new theme or perception in the Establishment or among the elites. Noel Annan, Provost of King’s while both McKellen and I were undergraduates, had said as much in his book, Our Age, in a chapter on ‘The Cult of Homosexuality’.
Radio 3 had invited Ian on before his evening show on 27 January. During the twenty-minute discussion Hewison taxed McKellen that he was overreacting to the Clause, while Worsthorne argued cautiously that its target was education, not the arts. But then Ian, having guarded his cold anger with perfect manners, made the public admission, when asked if he would like to see Clause 28 disappear altogether. Yes, he said, because it was ‘offensive to anyone like myself, who is homosexual, apart from the whole business of what can or what cannot be taught to children’.
The argument grew, then, into one of whether homosexuality was ‘a perfectly normal and desirable condition,’ which Worsthorne believed it wasn’t, and whether it should be promoted as such, to children at an extremely impressionable age. The argument and controversy hinged on the question of what was meant by the word ‘promote’, leading to Worsthorne’s clearest expression of prejudice: ‘I regard homosexuality as being a great misfortune. I see it as something the less frequent it is in any society, the better for that society.’ (This in spite of the fact that he elsewhere admitted to experiencing a degree of gay dalliance – a ‘deflowering’ as reported in the press – with the jazz musician George Melly while at Stowe School.)
Ian didn’t exactly rise to this. ‘The heart of the matter,’ he said, ‘is whether homosexuality can be promoted and taught, and people could be converted to it.’ Here the essential division between the pair lay.
It became a more polarised and personal argument but still conducted in unheated tones, when Worsthorne declared in a patronising but eminently smooth way that he was not saying that gay people living openly, as in San Francisco, was ‘necessarily a bad thing’. He goaded Ian by saying, ‘I know a number of pubs in London, I can give you their addresses, except that they are so well-known, where … they are known as gay pubs and they—’
Ian interrupted here, and couldn’t resist retaliating: ‘You mean the Garrick Club? You must accept that there are very, very few famous homosexuals in this country.’
He went on in an even voice but with passion to hammer home the inequality:
There are no sportsmen who declare that they are gay because they don’t like to because they are frightened of what will happen to them. And this is the area in which schoolchildren, to get back to the Bill, the schoolchildren who, having no role models in society discover – fear – that they are gay, they go to their parents where they get a dusty answer. They go automatically, of course, to the other adults in their lives, they go to their teachers. And their teachers need to be in a position to be able to discuss that sexuality and reassure them that it is not against the law, it is not wrong and they must feel at ease with it, if they have decided at the end of their experimentation with their sexuality that they are one thing or the other. And this Bill will restrict dangerously that perfectly proper activity of the schools.
Worsthorne’s response to this was palliative, declaring that more discretion was needed by homosexuals, and more understanding that the majority of the country did worry about homosexuality. He had lost the debate.
Ian wound it up by stating that ‘the country would be healthier if people in public life who are gay announce that they are gay, and left it at that, that the majority in society would understand that homosexuals are their friends.’
This discussion, conducted in an echt English manner with hardly anyone ever raising their voices or using extreme language, was finally what brought Ian to this new resolution. He would keep quiet no longer. He no longer feared public reaction. Very quietly, very firmly, he had declared his gayness. When he explained it later, to Vanity Fair in June 1992, he said Worsthorne ‘was being very rude about homosexuals, saying why couldn’t they stay in their clubs? And I said, “You mean like the Garrick Club?” – a gentleman’s club of which he is a member which I wouldn’t be seen dead in.’
It was the ‘they’ or ‘them’ that did it for him, Ian claimed in hindsight. ‘It was a good debating point. And having done it, I’ve not stopped doing it.’
Immediately after this admission he was drawn into Terry Wogan’s primetime TV show, on which he declared, ‘I’ve been a homosexual all my life.’ Next morning the press loudly proclaimed, ‘Ian McKellen’s coming out as gay’. It was now public knowledge, and such it was to remain.
The manner of his coming out, the simple unadorned Shakespearean style, was of infinite importance in the way subsequently it was accepted. The avowal of homosexuality had been statesmanlike, a declaration of faith as well as identity. It could have been mawkish or embarrassing, but it was not. But a degree of disguise and ambiguity could also have played their part in his direct action, because the theatrical sense of timing was perfect. This was very hard to determine because he’d enjoyed the flirtatiousness of being in the closet while everyone knew, like Elton John. The whole, dignified way Ian’s avowal of being gay was conducted at the highest level of studious modesty and integrity and, dare we say it, would have won approval from the Nonconformist stepmother, and his deceased father and mother, even if they had disapproved of the principle behind it.
Lifting the shadow or oppression of living with a guilty secret had a profoundly liberating effect. Ian found it unnervingly easy saying more, telling everyone after this public avowal, including his sister and her family, friends and colleagues, encouraging them to do the same as him. When he told Gladys, his stepmother, she said she had known he was gay for years and couldn’t care less. The most dangerous moment, Napoleon declared, comes with victory, yet Ian’s self-outing, relaxed and under control as it was, became a moment of light that expanded and spread everywhere. It then, like a rocket, impelled him into eminence as the cause’s leading figure.
For the rest of 1988 the espousal of the gay rights cause took off. In Manchester in particular it exploded, with participation from the sympathetic town council and its leader Graham Stringer, into a backlash against Clause 28. It drew 20,000 people, both gay and straight, onto the streets to sing with Tom Robinson ‘Glad to Be Gay’, and applaud the speakers including McKellen, who had been drawn into it after his initial contact with Carole Woddis and the gay rights lobby in January. The event was celebrated as a wonderful turning-point. ‘The best show of the year,’ McKellen called it in Capital Gay. ‘I marched with Michael Cashman, Stifyn Parri, Peter Tatchell … wearing my “Out and Proud” T-shirt. At Westminster I met our lawmakers … The Whip in the Commons – [who said] “I’m sorry about Section 28 – it’s just a bit of red meat thrown to our right-wing wolves.” The Whip in the Lords – “I’m sorry about Section 28 – but you appreciate my job is just to get our chaps to vote the right way.’
Here was a new script and a new role of enormous dimension and proportion, of gargantuan breadth to meet his superabundant energy. You might have said he had just been waiting for such a moment. It would fill that inner sense of isolation and loneliness he had felt for fifty years. The down-played manner was in the No Sex Please, We’re British tradition. Many now would be the declarations of people, in all walks of life, which could be directly linked, as Anthony Sher says of his own coming out, to McKellen’s. Callow, who came out in 1984, mischievously claims, ‘I was John the Baptist to his Jesus.’
Would this become the defining moment of his life and career as an actor? Had it all led up to what he now declared? ‘Coming out, coming out, coming out. That’s the only thing I’ve ever done, really. That’s what it can say on the gravestone. That will be the obituary,’ he told Ben Brantley in 1992. Until then he had spent his life as a publicly closeted gay man – though always very comfortably ‘out’ in the theatre community and never given to telling interviewers he was simply ‘waiting for the right girl’. It was something for which he no longer needed to flagellate himself. And clearly, too, there was an element of grief or at least coming to terms with the end of his partnership with Mathias, the younger, volatile and unpredictable yet tantalising figure.
Yet again, well prepared over several months, he had transformed well-digested and painstaking analysis into fresh, almost throwaway, performance. It was steady not impulsive. The preacher, the puritan, the precision artist, were all evident in the following months.
For forty-nine years, as he famously says, Ian had been living a lie. How late he left it to come out was a repeated question put to him, with different reasons each time. ‘Why did you wait so long?’ asked Stephen Sackur on the BBC’s Hardtalk in November 2017. ‘I was the second to be knighted who came out, after Angus Wilson,’ McKellen answered, jovially fielding it, evading the question.
Matthew Parris had earlier also picked this up, commenting in a Times interview: ‘When you do [come out as a gay man] your sense of reproach toward yourself for all that wasted time, all that stupid and unnecessary timidity, is transferred – unconsciously I believe – on to others.’ ‘Transference’, that magic word of explanation in the chemistry of relationships, carries so much relevance to those who ‘but slenderly know themselves’.
With the truth now out in the open, this very complex man had found a new and exciting role to cut in public life (almost like a new marriage), and a new and stronger focus for his life and career.
Two theatre directors who had extraordinary insight into Ian’s inner being might provide clues here. The first was Toby Robertson. He went back to the days of the Marlowe Society and the Prospect touring company. Even four years on from 1988 he said, ‘There’s the funny feeling that Ian – at fifty-three – is still in many ways very much a young man. You don’t feel here’s someone of great maturity: the man is yet to come.’
Hall made a similar prophecy after Ian’s coming out: ‘It now went without saying by now that Ian belongs (like Derek) to the Olivier tradition – a performer of genius who will do anything. He has great daring.’ One could also see, said Hall, as you could with Olivier, the wheels going round.
It is only in the last few years that Ian has started to reveal bits of himself that were private and personal. I can best describe it by saying that to me Ralph Richardson was an actor of genius – someone who seemed to be switched into the most complex of human emotions – whereas Olivier was a performer of genius. Ian has been like Olivier, but I think he is moving into the great-actor class as he shows more and more of himself … I believe now that his public and private honesty is one, we may be going to see his greatest years.
But still physically, as he reached fifty, Ian’s feeling of awkwardness was overridingly apparent. ‘Do I think of myself as a misfit? I mean you know, I think it would be up to someone else to write this…’ Simon Russell Beale once remarked of the gay community, ‘Once you’re over fifty you’re finished.’ Of course this was nonsense but off-stage there was sometimes a very ungainly physical presence. McKellen reminds me of Jonathan Miller, the Body in Question TV doctor and brilliant director (again a two-sided man), or of John Barton. He stammers, and is given, again in that Cambridge manner, to long pauses of reflection. Sometimes focused and sharp, his face can drop any sense of coherence and cohesiveness, and he can, as in the picture of him as the Son in Six Characters, look hopelessly fatigued and befuddled. He still covers his face like a shy boy – even for Ben Brantley, who interviewed him for Vanity Fair; ‘the immense hands seem suddenly like cumbersome props, and he often covers his face with them between sentences.’
But beware. He can convert himself to anything. He is a chameleon actor. Would Hall’s prophesy come true?