[photo: Larry Laszlo/Comedia]
"If you're15 and gay you don't
have to dream you're the blond
girl on 90210," says Harvey (right),
pictured with Scott Neal,
who plays Ste.
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Two Boys
in Love
U.K. playwright Jonathan Harvey offers up his Beautiful Thing.
JONATHAN HARVEY WAS a 23-year -old schoolteacher on holiday when he decided it was time to put his gay identity into the plays he was writing. The result - a play and a movie called Beautiful Thing - ended up taking him to this year's Cannes Film Festival, someplace he'd never expected to go when he was growing up as a working-class lad in Liverpool, England. And now his movie, coming out October 11 from Sony Pictures Classics, is taking audiences places they've never been before either.
The story is simple: Two high school boys, neighbors on a council estate (that's British for housing project), become friends as they struggle with coming-of-age problems - and with Leah, the meddling girl next door who channels Mama Cass. Jamie is the sensitive type, watching musicals, dodging sports, and living with his single mom. Ste, a popular jock, takes shelter at Jamie's to escape beatings from his father and older brother. Is it any surprise the two boys fall in love? Well, maybe it's a surprise that they do it to the songs of The Sound of Music, wafting in from Mom's telly.
Enjoying the sun on a Cannes hotel rooftop, Harvey remembers his reason for writing Beautiful Thing in the first place. "I wanted kids to know that if you're 15 and gay, you don't have to just watch Beverly Hills 90210 and dream that you're the blond girl being taken to the prom by the cute boy." Harvey was even more dismayed by the TV versions of gay youth who didn't fit the upper-crust Brideshead Revisited model: "If it was ever a working-class drama, then the boy coming out would have to get smacked by Dad, be thrown out of the home, and end up becoming a rent boy."
Determined to change all that, Harvey quit his teaching job to write full time. Within two months, the prestigious Shepherd's Bush Theatre chose Beautiful Thing for a fully mounted production. Two more productions followed, then the film.
Everyone assumes coming-out fictions are autobiographical, but Harvey, now age 28, demurs. While he was indeed born on a council estate, his dad studied to be a social worker and moved the family into the middle class. His mom wasn't like Sandra, the brassy broad who figures as Beautiful Thing's real heroine, but Harvey always wished she were. His own coming out was nontraumatic. And while he drew on the working-class kids whom he used to teach, he's more pragmatic than nostalgic. He's particularly pleased that during the play's evolution into film, England's age of consent for gay men was reduced from 21 to 18, and that Beautiful Thing won an age-15-and-older rating for its U.K. release.
Besides being happy that the boys who need it will be able to see the movie, Harvey thinks it has potential as a family film: "Some mum who's just found out her son is gay can pick up some tips." Harvey will soon be picking up some tips himself: He's now plotting a stage musical with the Pet Shop Boys. -B. Ruby Rich
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