The Film Experience

Team Experience is celebrating Gay Pride Week with their favorite moments in gay cinema. Here's David on a 1986 classic introducing a certain 3 time Oscar winner... Happy Gay Pride Week Everyone!

In my experience, it’s always worth waiting for Omar.”

One of my favourite LGBT movies will always be Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette, one of the most important and political British films of the 1980s, but also one that was important to the development of my own sexual identity in the calmer climbs of the mid-2000s. It was the first Film Studies class my school had ever taught, I’d just fallen in love with cinema over the summer, and I was a sixteen-year-old struggling with his ‘different’ sexual feelings – there was basically a lot of late blooming going on. [more]

My Beautiful Laundrette’s strongest quality might be the cheeky, straightforward manner in which it presents every one of its rebellious elements, crossing the thick Thatcherite boundaries related to everything from race to social class to religion. Hanif Kureishi’s typically teasing and provocative script mines the energy and resourcefulness of youth, as it rubs up against the staunch traditions of the older generations.

As an impressionable teenager, though, it was being confronted with images of gay sexuality – for, at least as I remember it, the first time – that really made the film so memorable. Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a young second-generation Pakistani, is given a laundrette to run by his entrepreneur uncle. When he runs into his schoolfriend Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), a neo-Nazi punk, he employs him to fix up the laundrette.

Their reunion immediately suggests a history between the two, as they grin at each other and embrace in full view of both Omar’s family and Johnny’s extremist comrades, either oblivious or careless of any judgment or suspicions. Thereafter, theirs is a relationship lived secretly but not in shame, constantly flirting with the thrill of discovery and exposure, from their first (on-screen) kiss under a dark bridge…

… to their entanglement in a backroom, while Omar's uncle and his mistress are waltzing in the front room.

… to a naughty lick behind the ear.

Has DDL ever been hotter?

For sixteen-year-old me, there was the confrontation of my own sexual desire, but also the affirmation that it was nothing to be ashamed of – if it wasn’t then, in restrictive Thatcherite Britain, it certainly wasn’t now, when civil partnerships were on the horizon. So for twenty-four-year-old me, it’s an insistent classic, a sizzling time capsule, and a formative part of my own identity. My pride began here.