Synopsis

Watch Out, There’s a Queer About! is a satirical video that critiques the limits of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. Although the Act decriminalised homosexual sex between consenting adults in private, it continued to criminalise many aspects of queer life through strict privacy requirements, the policing of “cottaging” and cruising, and an unequal age of consent, which was set at 21 for homosexual sex compared with 16 for heterosexual sex. The video’s title borrows from the anti-crime slogan “Watch out, there’s a thief about,” a well-known phrase in the UK throughout the 1970s and 1980s. By appropriating the format of a police-style public information film (with all information taken from police training manuals and reports by the campaign for homosexual equality), the video satirises the language and aesthetics of state propaganda while documenting the logics of oppressive police surveillance and control of queer communities.

The satirical video begins in the domestic sphere, focusing on a young man named Brian who refuses to conform to the “norms” and “customs” of conventional male behaviour in his nuclear family. As a result, he is expelled from his family home. Brian then discovers a queer subculture and is taken in by other young men. The video sarcastically warns against his involvement in “extremist” behaviour and the “flaunting” of deviance, against footage of a Gay Liberation protest which only further exposes the absurdity and prejudice of such moral panic within public discourse of the era.

The video then shifts towards reconstructed scenes of police investigation and harassment of gay men, presented from the point of view of the police. It parodies attempts to identify the “tell-tale signs of the sexual deviant” by monitoring men dressed in particular subcultural styles, policing cruising areas, raves and bars (with a great cameo from Jimmy Somerville) and other public spaces. The film also highlights the propagandistic claim that such policing is intended to “protect the youth,” revealing instead how this rhetoric functions to alienate, discipline, and police young queer people.