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LGBT Britain from BFI Player

With over 40 films and documentaries, this colourful and challenging collection explores screen representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lives over the past century. British cinema boasts a long history of carefully coded queerness, but for much of the 20th century, explicit depictions of gay life in drama or documentary were more or less taboo.

Gay men were subject to vicious state-sanctioned persecution, while lesbians were socially ostracised and the transgender community ignored and misunderstood. Cinematic and small-screen breakthroughs in the 1950s and 60s played their part in the public debate. Finally acting on the recommendations of the Wolfenden Committee a decade earlier, the 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised male homosexuality in England and Wales, between two men over 21, in private.

LGBT Britain | BFI Player
British Film Institute (BFI)