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Anita Anand uncovers the hidden story of the British film magazine that, for 40 years, offered a cloak of authoritative cinematic respectability for gay readers who sought sexual contact when homosexuality was punishable by prison.

Films and Filming was a widely respected magazine that built a serious reputation for its coverage of the burgeoning international art-house cinema of the 1950s and 60s. It sold throughout the English-speaking world, its tens of thousands of readers admiring the calibre of its reportage of new masterpieces by Claude Chabrol, Elia Kazan and Bernardo Bertolucci. But when it launched, from a dingy basement near Victoria Station in London in 1954, few knew that Films and Filming was also a clandestine publication of great interest to men whose sexual preference was for other men.

That same year, when Films and Filming launched with Marlon Brando in his signature role in On the Waterfront on the cover, homosexuality had also been featured for months on the front page of Britain’s tabloids, as the famous peer, Lord Montagu, was put on trial and eventually sentenced to a year in gaol for illegal sex with other men.

Today, when equal marriage is legal and widely accepted in the UK, it’s hard to fully comprehend just how furtive and secretive gay relationships needed to be 70 years ago to escape the attention of the law – gay men lived in constant fear of discovery. So the existence of a respectable magazine that offered both stories about cinematic gay icons and images, often of near-naked male film stars, was a lifeline.

Even more of a lifeline were the magazine’s personal ads where gay film fans could arrange to share their interests, cinematic and otherwise, covertly of course, with impunity.

Anita Anand leafs through historic copies of Films and Filming with one of its regular columnists, David McGillivray. She meets his readers and reveals the hidden story of the magazine’s mysterious publisher, Philip Dosse, whose team of editors, almost exclusively gay, ran a distinguished portfolio of arts magazines on theatre, ballet, books and art, as well as film, from that Victoria basement.

Producers: Sara Parker and Simon Elmes
A Pier production for Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4