In November 1990 Ian and his Richard III company played Paris, at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, which was for Richard Eyre, its director, the realisation of an adolescent dream: ‘My favourite auditorium in the world’. When it was reported Thatcher had resigned, they were jubilant and cheered. A day later Eyre was woken by a phone call from Ian.
‘Can you come to my room?’
Ian lay on his bed, looking anxious but elated. ‘I’ve been offered a knighthood,’ he said. ‘Do you think I should take it?’ Eyre told him he should and saw he was relieved, but ‘being Ian wouldn’t show his elation’. At this juncture Ian also phoned Sean Mathias and Michael Cashman.
It was a characteristic irony for Ian that Thatcher, before she resigned, should have awarded him his knighthood (indicating how politicised actors had become), and that on the same list the ‘homophobic’ Manchester police chief was also awarded a knighthood.
Surprisingly, and in spite of various polls that strongly disapproved of a gay man receiving a knighthood, in the New Years’ Honours list of 1991, with John Major now as replacement Prime Minister, Ian was knighted. There was an immediate debate, loud in the media outlets, between street-level activists and those in the corridors of power. Film-maker Derek Jarman was up in arms, outraged at his acceptance, finding it impossible to react with anything but dismay to an acceptance from a government ‘which … is poised by means of Clause 28 of the Local Government Bill to take important steps towards recriminalising homosexuality…’ He vented his anger in the Guardian: ‘Why did you accept this award, Ian? It has diminished you.’
Straight away, eighteen well-known theatrical people, led by Antony Sher, called Ian’s recognition, from a government he had accused of homophobia, a significant landmark in the history of the British gay rights movement. Wishing to ‘respectfully distance ourselves’ from Derek Jarman’s letter, were Simon Callow, Michael Cashman, Nancy Diuguid, Simon Fanshawe, Stephen Fry, Philip Hedley, David Lan, Bryony Lavery, Michael Leonard, Tim Luscombe, Alec McCowen, Cameron Mackintosh, Pam St Clement, John Schlesinger, Antony Sher, Martin Sherman, Ned Sherrin and Nicholas Wright. Others argued acceptance was a step towards the demarginalisation of homosexuality.
Jarman replied that ‘the McKellen 18 seem, sad to say, to see no further than the end of the artistic arena’. What, he wondered, ‘of gay footballers or cricketers, lesbian tennis players and athletes, gay miners or lesbian diplomats, gay building labourers or lesbian doctors?’ Did the supporters of the McKellen knighthood ‘seriously say to these people, “Come out! Sir Ian has shown that you’re safe. It won’t damage your career.” Of course not.’ If there was any suspicion that an element of pique or small-mindedness lay at the root of Jarman’s reaction, bringing in Derek Jacobi – a bitter cry of ‘What about Sir Derek?’ – his clear-sighted and passionate concentration on what he believed to be the very real and harmful issues at stake allayed it.
Sir Derek was a question in point. He wanted to have nothing to do with each side of the divide. I mentioned to Ian that he had once had a slight falling-out over Derek’s not coming out as a gay. Ian quickly interrupted: ‘It’s all in his imagination. Entirely. I never fall out with anybody over that, I just feel sorry for them. Did I fall out? No, I don’t think I ever had a conversation about it. Does he remember a conversation?’
‘Only vaguely,’ I answered. Antony Sher, arguably as great a stage actor as McKellen, was spurred on further by Ian, simply tired of flannelling in interviews, or having to disguise ‘my true pride in shows like Torch Song … I was impressed and humbled by what other gay actors, like Ian McKellen and Simon Callow, were doing for the cause.’ But perhaps, most important, he was about to publish the book of his paintings and drawings called Characters, and ‘I refused to lie about the relationships and interests portrayed on those pages. It was one thing to be dishonest as an actor – that job fools around with the truth all the time – but somehow quite unacceptable as an artist.’
When Sher did come out in 1989, via an interview about the book in The Times, there was no fuss. ‘Ian had stolen all the thunder … In fact, rather disappointingly after all the time I’d spent agonising, it made no impact whatsoever. If I’d been a movie or TV star it might’ve been different. That Sunday the phone rang in our Stratford house and a voice said, “Hello, Ian McKellen here, we don’t really know one another – hope you don’t mind, I got your number from the stage door – but I just wanted to say one thing. “Thank you”.’
There were a dozen or so nasty slanging matches following Ian’s knighthood, ranging from complaints that his publicly admitted homosexuality had been honoured rather than his acting talent, to accusations that some gay people were ‘making careers out of their sexual preference, as opposed to intelligent homosexuals who chose to keep quiet’.
An especially bitter exchange took place between Ian and Nicholas de Jongh, who mockingly awarded him the Golden Vanity prize in an article titled ‘Men Are the Real Bitches’. Ian retaliated he never claimed to be, as de Jongh called him, the ‘leader of the gay and lesbian movement in Britain’. He was also assailed on Radio 4 by callers making highly technical claims about the tensile deficiencies of the rectal lining. ‘How dare you presume to know about my sexual practices?’ he replied with soft and measured equanimity.
In July 1991 Ian accompanied John Major to see Eduardo De Filippo’s Napoli Milionaria at the National. Afterwards Richard Eyre, as the NT’s director, hosted a supper party at which Ian sat next to Mary Soames, daughter of Nicholas and chairman of the National Theatre, while on her other side sat Prime Minister John Major. Somewhat cheekily, one might say, Ian bantered over the top of Soames’s presence, offering voice projection tuition to Major as long as he did not make use of it to win the election. He then sprang the challenge to Major: could they talk together about a ‘social matter’?
It seems Major, unworldly as some might say he was (according to Anthony Seldon, his biographer, he loudly remarked over dinner that Archbishop George Carey of Canterbury was ‘a very good chap’, meaning tolerant and broad-minded, which caused a lowering of eyes round the table who had a perception that Carey was anything but), quickly fell in with McKellen’s request.
Ian came to Number 10 at 10.45 on a wet 24 September dressed in a suit and tie and armed with a paperback title The Pink Plaque Guide to London, which had a photo of Number 10 on the jacket. This was a politically provocative gesture. When Major questioned Ian specifically over this, he had prepared his script, claiming that ‘from the available statistics it is likely that 10 per cent of the people currently working here are homosexual. But the celebrity in question is one of your predecessors – William Pitt the Younger. He never declared himself as gay and I wonder if the burden of his secret led him to the alcoholism which rapidly killed him. Maybe his benign ghost will hover over this meeting.’
They took coffee. While the result from this meeting was virtually nil for McKellen, it became part of an inexorable change in rolling back intolerance and prejudice towards the gay community. A young female admirer pointed to one important ingredient when she first met him with this comment, on how the charm always worked: ‘I first saw him at a Guardian party in Soho – I was a student and he was the guest of honour. He asked me for a light and handed back the matches with such courtesy and such a gorgeous smile I remember thinking: “How amazing. He is even nice to the small people.”‘
A wag commented that as one had the more mellifluous speaking voice you might see McKellen as a sort of gay Major: ‘both were supposed to be calm, reasonable, unassuming alternatives to the harsher, shriller voices previously associated with their respective causes.’ Like meets like when one chameleon meets another. In this case the chameleon took on the colouring of his surroundings.
Derek Jarman, who was by now diagnosed with AIDS, from which he was to die, poured scorn on the Major–McKellen meeting, saying Ian should have arrived dressed in a frock.
During these spats Sir Ian (or Serena, as Stephen Fry had jokingly dubbed him) remained at least outwardly serene. As Steven Berkoff, his neighbour, recorded the day after the knighthood was bestowed, ‘These titles become the theatrical profession and endow a certain majesty.’ Berkoff caught the real McKellen as he underlined the shadow side: ‘He is a ceaseless prowler around the body of the English theatre and sometimes reminds me of a stalking wolf, ready to seize his prey and tear it to pieces.’ Later, Berkoff noted in his autobiography, his roles have all been of villains and he was developing a nice rogues’ gallery. ‘There is a quest in his face, a hunger which, like the wolf, will never be satisfied; his eyes reveal nothing to tell you what he will be.’
John Major was arguably one of those small people to whom Ian was nice. But the tolerance, easy to Major, had its limits. There had been a problem gaining cross-party reform ‘under Roy Jenkins’ stewardship of the Home Office’, comments David Owen, former Foreign Secretary, and joint leader of the Social Democratic Party when it split from Labour. Others in the House considered the battle to be won when the Sexual Offences Act had been passed in 1967 and didn’t see the value of handling the repeal of Clause 28. ‘There was,’ says Owen, ‘something of a dilemma in government as to how to handle the welcome change’; Owen as a doctor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital had witnessed ‘at first hand the physical tragedy of elderly closet gays committing suicide because of the law’. He applauded William Whitelaw and the Conservative government’s acceptance that they ‘needed to be seen to be tolerant’.
When in June 1998 the age of consent for homosexuals was lowered to sixteen by a majority of 207 in the Commons Ian and campaigners clapped and cheered from the public gallery when the result was announced. Yet intolerance not far from the surface grew on both sides.
Some years before, there had been a young diarist who followed McKellen around with the idea of outing him. The diarist approached him on public occasions when he was with Brodie and would be flattering and friendly. He worked, McKellen found out, for the William Hickey column in the Daily Express. He was making Ian’s life hell with ‘his attitude … which appeared to be very friendly but wasn’t’. Relating this to Marianne Macdonald, Ian’s tone was neutral as he set his coffee cup on the floor. She was shocked by his next words: ‘He was blown up by the IRA.’ He showed a similar short temper when MP Michael Portillo declared he might contest the Conservative leadership election in 1999. ‘Mr Portillo’, whose earlier record on gay rights was ‘appalling and hypocritical’, according to McKellen, had to recant. Were the Tories ready for their first openly bisexual leader?
Ian incurred the wrath of his erstwhile admirer Lynda Lee-Potter when, at an Olivier Awards ceremony in 1991, he announced before the assembly, ‘I’m doing my best not to bump into Jason Donovan in case anyone thinks I’m straight.’ She pointed out this was as unjust as anybody who says Donovan was gay. But his defenders would say it was just a joke. And when Edith Cresson, a rather scatty French Prime Minister who met McKellen at Number 10 the same day, just after he saw Major, commented that 25 per cent of Englishmen were gay, that they did not like to look at women and the female body, and were in some way a little maimed. McKellen countered a day later that if one in four Englishmen was gay, Britain would be a better place.
In November 1994, at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, Ian was on stage alone, performing his touring Shakespeare show in aid of the gay rights group Stonewall, and had just done a highly mocking impersonation of the firebrand Unionist politician Ian Paisley (drawing no doubt on his Northern Irish blood). He picked up a bible set on the table in front of him, and turned to Leviticus, from which he proceeded to read: ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination’ (Chapter 18: xxii). ‘If a man also lieth with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood shall be upon them’ (Chapter 20: xxiii). Ian then ripped out the pages and tore them up, denouncing these passages as ‘dangerous pornography!’. The audience laughed and cheered. He urged the audience to do the same, and to do as he did, whenever staying in a hotel – to rip out these pages from the bedside bible.
He knew what he was doing, of course, and that it would whip up a tempest, which was duly led by the Scottish Tory MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, who accused him of being profane and blasphemous, and said he should be locked up. A Church of England bishop, asked for his reaction, feared to give his name because of reprisals but didn’t mince his words, calling the gesture a ‘product of a twisted mind; defacing any book is sad’. More conciliatory voices were heard, too, one from an Edinburgh minister who in a very soft-voiced reaction pointed out that gay Christians who sympathised with Sir Ian would regard this as dangerous, while a non-committal Church of England spokesman commented, ‘Generally speaking we don’t encourage people to tear pages from the Bible!’ As Tolkien said in one of his letters, ‘You can’t fight the Enemy with his own ring without turning into an Enemy.’
Someone from Stonewall, which was making a fair bit of money from the evening, defended the gesture. It was a piece of theatre and had to be seen as that. The audience clapped and cheered. George Bernard Shaw, in his ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to Man and Superman, called such gestures ‘the heroism of daring to be an enemy of God … From Prometheus to my own Devil’s Disciple such enemies have always been popular.’
Ian subsequently and wisely never responded to the complaints about this display. From then on his demonstrations were more muted, as befitting his gentler side. Time maybe might have mellowed his outspoken atheism.
McKellen’s roller-coaster ride on the gay rights cause had undoubtedly been selfless climbing, with unstinting financial support to AIDS and, later, LGBT charities. He demonstrated that he was successful as an instrument of public change. He was never sloppy and ill-tempered, and he took victory in his stride without stridency and triumphalism. He had felt happily rewarded that Bent was accorded its full National Theatre revival at the Lyttelton Theatre. Peter Tatchell emphasised for me how, this Edinburgh episode apart, Ian and Michael Cashman, as gay rights activists, were wedded to the Stonewall model of working for change from within the system: ‘suffragists’ rather than ‘suffragettes’, demonstrating that ‘it takes many very different styles and teaching to win a campaign.’