In Frame: The Leather Boys

'I just wanna be a normal, married guy'

Reggie and Dot get hitched barely out of high school, cause what else is there to do?

When you're a teenage girl the prospect of marriage feels like freedom -- freedom from the parental home where you can get your hair done pink down the hairdressers and fuck till the sun comes up. What you don't know is that being a wife is a job, that requires staying at home on your own for most of the day doing all the domestic chores you're fella can't do because he's under a car engine. Dot barely knows who she is! Apart from being someone who wants to stay out late with the new friends she's made on her honeymoon, go shopping down the high street or catch a movie every other day. The last thing on her mind is the unwritten contractual expectations of a working-class marriage. And I don't blame her.

For that matter, neither does Reggie really know what he wants. Apart from getting his bones rattled. But when the rose-tinted glasses come off three days into their honeymoon at Butlins, as Dot stumbles back to their chalet - the reality of living together dawns.

**

On the 4th of September, there was a 60th-anniversary screening of THE LEATHER BOYS in a gorgeous community space in Anfield called Kitty's Laundrette.

It was a pleasure to present this personal highlight of the British New Wave by Canadian director Sidney Furie (The Entity). Particularly for how tenderly the subtext of homosexuality is treated, during a time when the Hayes Code loomed over Hollywood and sodomy laws were harshly enforced in the UK. If there was a queer person portrayed in film during this time, it was likely they were a tragic, self-hating victim of heterosexual society.

In an interview with Daniel Kremer for the AGFA restoration, Dudley Sutton (our vivacious Pete), recalls the British film industry being 'so up its own arse' that it was quite normal for the portrayal of working-class characters to be exaggerated and made the butt of a joke. The British New Wave is significant in bringing in what is known as the 'kitchen sink' drama to be a popular device of national storytelling; heavily featuring depictions of real working-class experiences with a humility that wasn't common in the media of a society so segregated by class.

Sutton mentions in this interview knowing of gay men in the West End being entrapped by the police, and committing suicide in the 60s. It was important for him, even something to be proud of; to be probably the first man in British history to play a homosexual onscreen who wasn't a sufferer, or pure comedic relief. His refusal to do the whole 'limp wrist' thing, is a refusal to play up the perceived effeminacy and therefore victimhood of gay men.  There is nothing on the nose or outrageous about Pete's character apart from he's a man of his own accord; charming and well-travelled from two years in the Merchant navy. Instead what we find ourselves with is an eccentric character at home in his masculinity, a character way more sure of himself than our couple in crisis.

The release of The Leather Boys was inevitably delayed because of British censorship. Though filmed in '62, the film doesn't see the light of day until '64 because of its, though tame, homoerotic subject matter. When it does emerge - the main narrative focus of the story becomes the turbulent marriage of Dot and Reggie, how that is destabilised further by Reggie's growing relationship with the handsome Pete.

In the original novella by a woman called Gillian Freeman (who also adapted the screenplay), the story focuses on the relationship between Reggie and Dick (Pete) that manifests in the style of a pulp fiction, with explicit homosexuality entwined with criminal adventures, all on the periphery of a motorcycle/rockers subculture rather than it being a centrepiece like it is in the film.

Though Furie's rendition may be a little less explicit with its homoeroticism compared with the original text, I think foregrounding the marriage makes it a fantastic Queer critique of the expectations of a working-class household and privileging of the nuclear family unit within capitalism. Reggie's frustrations are exorcised through the freedom he feels on his bike when he and Pete are together. That truly is a space for him to ride away from the enclosing monotony of work and domesticity.

Interestingly, Dot is not a significant part the book, but I think writing her into this main part of the film grounds the intense feelings of youthful discontent with the realities of the unbalanced patriarchal labour required of marriage. With Dot having to isolate herself to the shared domestic space whilst Reggie goes outside to earn his money to pay for a newer, faster car to get further away from the frustration of where he's found himself. Her female perspective is important, as you start to feel sorry for her, sorry that Reggie never comes home, and doesn't desire her anymore. That Reggie is allowed escape but Dot isn’t. Hits home the very gendered roles each are supposed to perform for each other.

Sidney Furie takes the emerging kitchen sink melodrama of the New Wave and creates this really tender, nuanced character study of three people trying to navigate the expectations of compulsory heterosexuality.

"We've been happy enough together havent we?"

"Well, sure we have Pete."

"We had a good time on the bikes and that?"

"I know Pete..."

"Big burn up and all that."

"Yeah sure I know but.."

"You can talk to me. You said yourself you couldn't talk to Dot but you could talk to me."

A recurring motif of the film is watching the young men race down a newly built British motorway. With the increasing accesibility of owning automobiles and motorbikes, one sees greater chances for mobility and a sense of freedom from one's locality.

The adrenaline-infused scenes of bikes speeding down the highway nod to the

the homoerotic implications of working-class men creating clubs in which to partially exclude women, and therefore temporarily escape their lives of heterosexual domesticity. The Leather Boys is one of the only Angry Young Men movies to critique men's dissatisfaction through a perspective of Queer Marxism.

So, The Leather Boys manages with its comedic charm and humanistic moments of improv, a captivating critique of the heterosexual temporality enforced on us: victims of the economic system of capitalism, to feel normal and survive.

The limitations of heterosexual temporality (as opposed to Queer Temporalities) harm us all. The apparent safety net and familiarity with the script of heterosexual monogamy can not satisfy all of us and it's better to reckon with that before it's too late. Pete gives Reggie a sense of companionship, 'looks after him' and proves to be a more satisfying person to share a bed with than his actual wife. But there is a nagging feeling in Reggie, manifesting in frustrated exclamations: "Well I needa woman dun' I!"

The ending, a heartbreaking parting of ways, shows one man laying his heart on the line with nothing to be ashamed of, and another who still chooses an unfortunate, but willful ignorance in the obvious fact of the other's nature.

Maybe next lifetime.