Gay Republic Daily :: View topic - 'Are You Being Served' actor dies

John Inman, best known for playing one of the most prominent camp characters in British TV history, has died. He was 71.

Mr Inman's portrayal of Mr Humphries in the popular BBC comedy Are You Being Served, made him a household name. He died this morning in St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, West London.

His catchphrase, "I'm free," and his camp mannerisms and double-entendres made his Mr Humphries character one of the most obviously gay voices on television.

Both Inman and the producers of Are You Being Served denied that Mr Humphries compounded a stereotype of gay men. In 1976 he was named BBC TV personality of the year.

[...]

In December 2005 Mr Inman formed a civil partnership with his partner of 33 years, Ron Lynch.

Actress Rula Lenska, who worked with Mr Inman, told the BBC:

"It was suggestive but never in your face or aggressive. It had an innocent quality that you rarely find today."

It pains me to contradict Rula Lenska. However, yesterday she was among the eulogists to the late John Inman, with whom she starred in panto and sitcom. She described his comic style thus: "It had an innocent quality that you rarely find today." Innocent? I think not.

I spent much of yesterday remembering an all-too-typical episode of Are You Being Served? called No Sale, in which Mr Humphries, played by Inman, told the menswear department how he'd spent a naughty-sounding weekend with a stringvestite, a trendy bishop, a roving reporter and a dustman. What is a stringvestite? Trust me, there's no such thing: it's a parody of perversion. It's the mockery by straight men of homosexuality which, in their minds, is intrinsically linked to fetishism.

[...]

Are You Being Served? never had the courage of its own homophobia, but preferred to express it through double entendres, nods and winks.

[...]

It is an ingenious kind of humour, to be sure, but was one filled with fear. The same applies to Mrs Slocombe's pussy, the double entendre that worked by sanctioning the hate-filled, fearful stereotype of a no-win woman who wasn't getting any sex but desperately, abjectly sought it and was laughed at for doing so. The poor love.

Neither Inman nor Mollie Sugden, who played Mr Humphries and Mrs Slocombe respectively, had much perspective on how their characters mobilised homophobia and misogyny. Inman, who died yesterday just over a year after his civil partnership ceremony with Ron Lynch, his partner of 33 years, denied Mr Humphries was homosexual. He was the ultimate in-man, sending Mr Humphries back into the closet after everybody assumed the character, who was forever waving his proverbial tape measure at men's metaphorical inside legs, was gay.

Perhaps - here's a hopeful thought - Inman didn't recognise himself or his sexuality in his sitcom persona. If so, fair enough. Either that or he was complicit in the show's hidden agendas. Are You Being Served? wasn't innocent, nor did Inman's comic style, such as it was, work with much beyond homophobic suggestion. His writers shrouded fears of middle-aged women's desires and gay men's sexuality in fogs of implication - a cunning, if degraded, thing to do.

[...]

This may seem funless musing on the death of a beloved icon, but there were a lot of us who weren't served by Mr Humphries and the rest of Grace Brothers' staff. When he minced into view, he served us, like the fetid Grace Brothers department store, with things that nobody really wanted.

This may seem funless musing on the death of a beloved icon, but there were a lot of us who weren't served by Mr Humphries and the rest of Grace Brothers' staff. When he minced into view, he served us, like the fetid Grace Brothers department store, with things that nobody really wanted.

I spent much of yesterday remembering an all-too-typical episode of Are You Being Served? called No Sale, in which Mr Humphries, played by Inman, told the menswear department how he'd spent a naughty-sounding weekend with a stringvestite, a trendy bishop, a roving reporter and a dustman. What is a stringvestite? Trust me, there's no such thing: it's a parody of perversion. It's the mockery by straight men of homosexuality which, in their minds, is intrinsically linked to fetishism.

Am I the only one who sees that the above was also a sly parody of str8 people expectations of what a gay man was?

There is a beautifully written article on this in today's Times by Matthew Parris:

Quote:

I raise a salute to that lifesaving human compromise, the open secret. I raise a salute to a band of comrades who, each in their different ways, were the keepers through a dark age of an open secret. My salute is to a dying breed: a breed whose ranks thinned again in the small hours of Thursday morning when John Inman passed away.

Hail to them all: the ludicrous old queens; the drag artists; the pantomime homosexuals; the florid epicureans; the indulgent priests; the sensitive young men in tight trousers; and the wan aesthetes. And hail, too, to their quieter cousins: the discreetly confirmed bachelors and "he never married" brigade, the don't-ask-don't-tell soldiers, and the dignified loners who just preferred to stay single and wouldn't say why. Theirs -- all of theirs -- to protect and guard was a precious thing: the open secret.

For gay men in the 20th century the open secret was sometimes literally a lifesaver. It was the narrowest of territories: the half-acre that lies somewhere between absolute denial and outright confession, between dishonesty and disgrace. This was a hard place to be in 1970, a narrow line to walk. If our oh-so-modern, who-gives-a-damn, 21st-century gays, of whom I am one, suppose that these men were not brave, that they were not trail-blazers, not part of the struggle, then we don't know the half of it.

And some of us, it seems, don't. Already I hear the cry -- "living a lie", "set back the cause", "self-oppression", "an insulting stereotype" -- from a gay lobby that has taken about five minutes to forget what a dark age England was for us, what light an Inman, a Kenneth Williams, a Danny La Rue or, from America, a Liberace brought into it, and how outrageous, how valiant, those people were.

About five minutes to forget, too, that the people who wanted these men taken off the stage, screen and wireless, were not the gay-rights campaigners but the bigots and guardians of conservative morality. "Sexual perversion", they said, wasn't entertainment: it was wicked and dangerous -- and bad taste. The BBC, contemplating making a series of Are You Being Served?, tried at first to insist that Mr Humphries was removed.

How fast we forget context. Always a bit of a giggle to their own era, the Inmans, La Rues and Williamses of the last century are now disowned by their newly brave inheritors: the lately and boldly Out.

John Inman's breath had barely left his body before right-on spokesmen for that imaginary thing, the "gay community", were berating the "self-oppression" and "stereotyping" of homosexuals that Inman's Mr Humphries helped to reinforce. His smutty innuendo, his jokes about fairies and handbags, his limp wrist, camp wit and simpering delivery are, they claim, everything we need to shed.

Yes, they are. Of course they are. They are now. But they weren't then. Then they were a light in the dark. Between the words, these men insinuated a wordless language of their own; they made a nonverbal statement, a shyly comical way of saying: "This is who and what I am; this is my tribe -- and, look, I'm famous and life is fun." To anxious boys like me, who didn't even know a tribe existed, the lives and careers of these men showed we were not alone. You may say it was a pity it had to be done by double entrendre. Yes it was a pity; but whether by single, double or triple entendre, it was entendu. You could imply it, at last, and at least you could imply it and nobody would lock you up. This was a huge step forward.