The film celebrating 40 years of queer resistance

The opening seconds of Bronski Beat’s Why? are haunting. Lead singer Jimmy Sommerville’s trademark falsetto erupts from silence, achingly begging the listener to ‘tell me why?’ before launching into the unmistakable disco pop stylings of the band. Dedicated to the gay playwright Drew Griffiths, a friend of the band who was hounded out of the country by his boyfriend's irate and violent parents and eventually murdered, the song is the opening track and lead single of the timeless and iconic Age of Consent which turns 40 this year.

The record was released against the backdrop of rising homophobia in Thatcher’s Britain, just 17 years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The name of the album refers to the disparity between ages of consent for heterosexual and homosexual sexual acts. The original release included a list of countries that, at the time, had differing standards alongside those ages.

Bronski Beat were formed in the early 1980s and were known for being unapologetic in their tackling of social issues, discrimination, LGBTQ+ rights and more, all set to dance floor packing beats. A band with politics at their core, the video for lead single Why? never sat right with Sommerville who felt it was frivolous and sidestepped the passion and anger behind the song.

To celebrate the momentous anniversary of the album, the band have re-issued it. Alongside this they enlisted the help of critically acclaimed filmmaker and activist Matt Lambert to create a new video for Why? What resulted was a visceral, beautiful and powerful account of the cycles of struggle, resistance, power and progress of the LGBTQ+ community across the decades in a stunning call to arms to learn the lessons of the past.

We sat down with Lambert to talk through the process of creating the video, working with Sommerville, the current climate of transphobia and more.

Huck: How did you start tackling such expansive subject matter?

Matt Lambert: That was the biggest challenge! Initially the early conversations I was having with Jimmy [Sommerville] were looking specifically at the moment when Age of Consent was released in 1984 and also this moment currently and trying to take in the 40 years in between.

One of the most eye opening and devastating things about the process of creating the film was realising that there were 10 million more things that could go into it. There were 1,000 different iterations of this same film that could exist and still say the same thing so at some point we just had to go with our gut.

Huck: How did you make the decisions on what to include?

Matt: We worked with this amazing archive producer and researcher named Nella in London. So the first month of the project was digging deep into Bishopsgate Institute archives into a lot of historical stuff. We then put open calls on Instagram for my friends to send footage in and we had an overwhelming response so then we just had to start making intuitive decisions because you can't tell the whole history. 

What you can do though, is look at the cyclical nature of these things. The cause and effect of what things are said in almost like a colloquial way. How someone in power can use language in passing and how that goes a step forward to dehumanise someone and how that dehumanisation results in aggression and then how that dehumanisation results in mass murder.

Huck: The Bishopsgate Institute is an incredible space with so much history in it, can you talk through the experience of working with your archival producer and how you approached the wealth of the stories there?

Matt: We built a huge list of the kinds of things we wanted to explore so started in the 80s in London and New York and then shifted to more contemporary material. A lot of it was also just kind of discovering things and allowing ourselves to receive those with open eyes too.

There was this film called Framed Youth: The Revenge of Teenage Perverts, which was a Goldsmiths [University] project around 1983 which Jimmy was actually a co-director of. It had a ton of co-directors on it and had a very socialist filmmaking approach so we got access to that whole film. A lot of the material we had access to were full feature films so we were watching all these films and trying to carve the moments out.

In some ways you're looking for certain things, but you also don't want to get so rigid that you are just plugging in paint by numbers.

Huck: Watching the film, I recognise lots of the fights and struggles on the streets of London, but it really is global isn’t it? Some of the footage is from Turkey and the US. I think it really shows how far reaching these battles are, and how analogous they are right?

Yeah, there's some stuff from Istanbul from a VICE documentary where they were using water cannons on people on the streets. But yes you’re right, in the end it starts to become just the same systems over and over. For me specifically as a Jew in Berlin now going on an anti genocide demonstrations, you're demonstrating against something horrific that's happening, but you're also fighting against these systems that have been in place that are the reason for everything that we're fighting against.

The same system that silences protesters in the street is the same system that allows police violence is the same system that... In a way it starts to become this conversation about the systems and the cycles, both in terms of the police but also just individuals, that are products of the ways in which politicians speak or the ways in which the media portrays things. I think we're kind of getting to that point by the second half of the edit and that was why we took pieces of dialogue and inserted them just to humanise the film and bring it back to earth.

I wonder if you could touch on the brief from Jimmy Sommerville and the process of working together?

Jimmy was really trusting and quite hands off in the process. We spoke a lot about the bigger themes. In terms of what is going on now, he’s kind of watching from afar and he was talking about seeing the Trans Pride protests this year and understanding that a lot of the people from his generation, quote unquote, a lot of the old white gays, seem to be very comfortable in their lifestyle and had completely forgotten about the struggle that is continuing and ongoing.

They've lost kind of the plot when it comes to intersectional support of the community and the piece of our community that needs it the most - specifically the trans community. I think for Jimmy, it was interesting to look at how in a lot of ways we've not changed.

As a filmmaker who's worked in commercial spaces for years, and like every queer director has done a few pride campaigns, I’ve seen the flaccid and sanitised representations of the struggle. Like yes ‘Queer Joy!’ and someone voguing in a Nike commercial is cute, but it doesn’t really represent the comprehensive struggle of what the community is going through.

Yes, you can be a transwoman and be on a big billboard in Houston or New York, but that doesn't necessarily give you security and safety when you're walking home at night. I think there's also been a trend in fashion and commercial that's really platforming the community but without necessarily always having an awareness of the fact that they're also putting a target on people's back in some way.

So when it came to this film I talked to Jimmy about how we can do something that really cuts down to what needs to be said, that's not sugar coating it in any way. That was my pitch to them - it’s gonna be a doc, it’s gonna mash together 1984 and present and we’re not gonna pull any punches.

You mentioned your experience working in commercial and the way that brands have platformed or maybe used queer people. We’ve seen a backlash to that of late, with brands moving away from platforming queer people because of kick back and pressure. I wondered if you could speak a bit to that from the position of someone who has been inside that industry?

I did this documentary film called Eldorado: Everything that Nazis hate that came out last year and is on Netflix. It looked at queer Berlin from 1926 to 1933. It was the wild explosion of the first institutional recognition of trans identity, and so much of it was where the ideas and identities we know today were born. But, of course, that was perfect fodder for the Nazis to use as a culture war moment to push their agenda.

We see the same thing in America right now where the genitals of young people somehow become 95% of what some politicians talk about. So we have this growth and evolution and people finding new ways to have confidence in expressing their identities which is met with really heavy handed culture war and hate.

I mentioned the billboards because it really shows the growth but at the same time people have been saying ‘where are all these trans people coming from?’ and like, they’ve been here, you were just seeing it for the first time because it's the first time they’ve talked about it on the TV.

This representation is wonderful, but representation without action or representation isn’t good. When I worked on pride with brands, it's like, hey, OK, that's great let's do that and let's donate to a charity as well. Let's not just use it for your portfolio, let's have that work be a call to action.

I wanted to know what you want people watching the film to come away feeling? What should they take from it? 

My very, very first audience is a white gay man, a generation older than me.

I want the film to ask them - what are you doing? What is going on? What point did you lose the plot? See what you were doing in the 1980s, look what's happening now, do you see how it's the same? Do you see that the fight has changed, the bar has moved, the people look different and they dress differently, but they are you?

I wanted to speak to people who have a soft spot in their heart for Why? and remember what it felt like to be listening to that music and to be powerful and to speak and to protest but somehow don't see the value in the next generation doing that.

I think it is also nice for a new generation to see what was going on then. So they can say - oh shit, they were out there too and in some way, if these generations could all kind of come together, they could be so powerful. There's such a division and I think if people were a little more collectively united, we could be a lot stronger.

We're wildly resilient. We're really good at building a community, we could support each other a bit better. What I’m really trying to do is to show people the systems and the cycles and get them to see each other a bit more.

Age of Consent (40th anniversary edition) is out now.

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