The Brookside kiss that brought a lesbian storyline into Britain’s living rooms

The Independent

The Brookside Lesbian Kiss was long overdue but it shook the country

Transcript

00:00It was 1994 when Section 28 prohibited the promotion of homosexuality in schools

00:06but Channel 4 aired a lesbian kiss on the soap opera Brookside

00:09between characters Margaret and Beth

00:11What do you mean like kissing each other in front of an audience?

00:14This was the first time a kiss between two women aired pre-Watershed

00:18Six million viewers watched and it shook the country

00:21I celebrated it, a lot of my friends celebrated it and lesbian media celebrated it

00:26Mainstream media was kind of shocked by it

00:30Now the question every soap fan's asking is

00:33will our Brookside babes come out of the closet?

00:35Do you not think you're being exploited a little bit in a way?

00:38We're being exploited

00:40No I'm really glad I'm doing the storyline

00:42I think it's about time it was handled really on television

00:45It's like never been handled before has it?

00:47Anna Friel who played Beth was profiled in the Guardian with the headline Lipstick Thespian

00:52and the show was credited with spotlighting lipstick lesbians aka femme lesbians

00:56or lesbians who present in a stereotypically feminine way

00:59a lipstick lesbian, that was the term back then

01:02If you were feminine with long hair and wore makeup you were almost not necessarily believed

01:10Some traditional groups complained

01:12The producer Mal Young recalls receiving a letter from a mother

01:16concerned that Brookside was

01:17trying to teach girls how to be lesbians

01:22But he said this made him confident that he made the right decision

01:25to broadcast the issue and educate viewers

01:27While the character Beth was definitely a lesbian Margaret was portrayed as unsure

01:32It was important to Friel that Beth wasn't into women

01:34as a response to her character's experience of abuse from her father

01:38This has got nothing to do with dad or any of that

01:40It's to do with me and how I feel

01:41And she pushed to keep Beth a lesbian for the rest of the show

01:44Although not queer herself Friel became an LGBTQ pinup

01:48with her fan mail shooting from 20 letters a week to 100

01:53Young had initially been concerned that the queer community would criticize him

01:56for trying to tell a lesbian story as a straight man

01:59There's always that to consider and there was some of that

02:02but I think they actually really had to write to do things quite carefully

02:05There was more of a at last

02:08At last we're being shown on TV and the word lesbian can be used

02:12In the pre-social media days bringing this moment to the living room

02:15of queer teenagers was a huge deal

02:17It was huge so my best friend growing up she was gay as well

02:21So then we would like confide in each other and we were like totally obsessed

02:26And when they edited the kiss out of the omnibus which aired at the weekend

02:30the censorship decision received even more complaints than the original kiss did

02:35Showing how popular the moment was

02:36Friel who was 17 when she did the kiss said that although her family accepted it

02:41they weren't all over the moon about the scene

02:43She says my grandma hated me kissing that girl

02:45She said now I hope you won't be doing that anymore

02:48None of that old nonsense

02:50Meanwhile Nicola Stevenson who is slightly older and played Margaret

02:53said that as a 22 year old often dancing in Manchester's gay clubs

02:57surrounded by gay people at work she lived in a totally free and accepting bubble

03:01Although progress has been made the fight to live in a more inclusive world is still going

03:05Nearly 20 years later Danny Boyle put the footage of this kiss

03:09in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony

03:12Meaning it was aired in 77 countries where homosexuality is still banned

03:20you

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