Jonathan Harvey, playwright
I wrote Beautiful Thing quickly in the summer of 1992. It came from the heart. The age of consent debate was going on – back then, gay men had to be 21 to have sex. The rhetoric used in parliament was so archaic, with words like “buggery” and “sodomy”. I wanted to write a play about two boys falling in love, and give it a happy ending. During the Aids crisis, it was unusual for a gay character to still be alive at the end of a drama. Class was important, too. Gay characters in Merchant Ivory films went punting, but if you were working class on screen, you would end up becoming a rent boy and selling your arse for 20 Woodbine cigarettes. My own experience, however, was that tolerance and acceptance were not just the privilege of the upper and middle classes.
