Mark Gatiss says we are forgetting our gay history but doesn’t think lecturing helps

Mark Gatiss believes we are forgetting our gay history.

The Sherlock star – who is married to Ian Hallard – is set to present a new BBC documentary on gay artist John Minton on Monday and although Minton is, in some ways, a forgotten gay crusader, Gatiss says that everyone nowadays are forgetting their history.

Speaking exclusively to Attitude, Gatiss said: “Of course we are! But then, everyone’s forgetting their history.

“That’s why we’re in this fucking shit show, isn’t it? [Laughs] Yes, but I don’t think anyone should be lectured to because then you get even more resistant to it.

“It’s nice to discover things, the way I did. I discovered Minton by looking at a picture on a wall and I think that obviously still happens.

“Information is more widely available than it’s ever been. It’s just disappointing if people aren’t bothered.

“But at the same time, they’re living their own life, aren’t they? They’re living a life that people will look back on and say ‘Oh that was then’.

“The Instagram generation one day will become a curio, won’t it? It’ll be replaced by something else.

“I just think it’s nice to have an enquiring mind. “I have a voracious hunger for those sort of stories. Just to talk to people about their own lives.

“I love it when people are interested, I do get a bit depressed when people aren’t, but that goes for everything, doesn’t it? It’s across the board.”

Gatiss also spoke about why Minton is somewhat forgotten and says it was because he “wasn’t a natural crusader”.

He continued: “I think it’s because he wasn’t a natural crusader. There’s something in his personality which is half the time conservative and quite prim, and then completely abandoned which is a very interesting thing.

“I don’t think he would ever have seen himself as a crusader. He did it from a point of view of sheer humanity, I think.

“When he wrote that letter to The Listener, seven years before Wolfenden, 17 years before decriminalization, he effectively outs himself.

“It is remarkable. He actually said to a friend ‘That’s probably ended my career’. It wasn’t, but who knows what people said about him, outside of Soho, after that?

“He was obsessed with becoming an associate academician at The Royal Academy, and he didn’t get it.

“You can imagine the scene in the room where someone pulled a face about him being a poof and that was it, in those days.

“He’s not some sort of proto-Peter Tatchell figure, banging a drum or anything like that.

“He just sort of did it. Almost on a whim. So it might be that, he’s not up there with the pioneers because he sort of stumbled into it.”

Mark Gatiss on John Minton: The Lost Man of British Art is on BBC Four, Monday, August 13 at 9pm and BBC iPlayer.

Interview by Darren Scott