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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8707504" data-attributes="member: 18">The UK having positive or "just normal people" portrayals of gay characters goes back quite a lot longer than that, like you had Victim from 1961, which was about a closeted barrister dealing with blackmailers (he was the good guy, of course).There was also a lot of broadly-portrayed-but-beloved gay characters in British media, like Sandy and Julian from Round the Horne (who spoke Polari, even), which I don't think would have flown in the US of that era (again the 1960s).iNews has a pretty good/in-depth article on it here: <a href="https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/potted-history-lgbt-characters-british-screens-69375" target="_blank">A potted history of LGBT characters on British screens</a>The BBC has a typically self-regarding but in-depth piece on their own output here: <a href="https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/lgbtq/lgbtq-timeline" target="_blank">LGBTQ+ Timeline</a>(I think what's particularly sad with the Beeb is the accidentally illustrate they used to be much better on trans issues in the past, before being taken over by a bunch of 50 and 60-something anti-trans ideologues as they since have been. I suppose this too in time will pass.)Basically positive portrayals of gay characters in British TV/cinema started decades earlier than the US, and reflected considerably more tolerance in UK society of that era, in part I suspect because Britain didn't have much in the way of religious ideological extremists (whereas they're 10-a-penny in the US), and those we did have were on the fringes of society.</blockquote>

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