ONCE A YEAR ON BLACKPOOL SANDS This moving and often disturbing film is based on the trials and tribulations of two gay coal miners from 1953 to the homophobic cruel AIDS outbreak in the 1990s. For bringing this film to my attention, I thank two Belper Friends who never attend our meetings, but play a full part in the ethos of the group. Our INVISIBLES generously sent me the DVD together with a helpful explanation upon which this review is based. For me, gay themes in books and films have always made for painful reading and viewing. Too many words poke and stab. Due to past experience, I approached ONCE A YEAR ON BLACKPOOL SANDS with trepidation. Homosexuality is too close to home. This surprises people who point out that I’ve written novels which include graphic descriptions of painful homophobia. It’s like, I can write it - but I can’t take it. In the 1980s, I walked out of MAURICE during a distressing scene reflecting an excruciating incident in my murky past. The first 20 minutes of BENT were endured before I fled the auditorium. I nearly threw in the towel after 15 minutes of ONCE A YEAR ON BLACKPOOL SANDS but am pleased to have persevered with it to the final conclusion. It is a powerful drama with a powerful message. This drama is also too close to home in another sense for me. Eddy, Tommy and Narvel lived in the grim shadows of pit hills which featured iconic pit wheels marking a winding engine house above each colliery mine shaft. King Coal had been the life and blood of Heanor. Numerous pit towns and pit villages in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire had been established for over a hundred years. From earliest memories, my world had been imprinted with images of blackened, dowdy cloth-capped workmen making their way to and from coal mines. Snap tins [food] and billycans [drink] hung from strong leather belts. Kneepads strapped to legs and the sound of pit boots clanking along the pavement were familiar to the boys who were expected to join relatives being lowered into the bowels of the earth. I had grown up with the horror of joining countless ghosts haunting the coal face along miles of subterranean passageways. These were muscular, dust encrusted men who suffered and sweated long dark hours under long gone green fields. In this film, Tommy Price and Eddy Corkhill are Yorkshire miners spending their summers in Blackpool during Wakes Week. Both guys are young and good looking, Tommy is fair and Eddy is dark and swarthy. Wakes Week was a two-week total shutdown in Lancashire, an important feature in the calendar for pit villages in the 1950s when most of Tommy and Eddys neighbours went on holiday with them. On the eve of Wakes Week in 1953, Tommy and Eddy are arrested during a police raid on a local cruising area wood. Eddy is badly beaten up by the police. Cuts and bruises on his face are painfully visible whilst in Blackpool. The stark violence of this brutal beating is horrific! It explains the endemic phobia of police officers which still affects many older gay men here in 2024. Suffering several such atrocities, Eddy said – ‘I’m tired of tasting blood in my mouth because a copper does it, knowing he can get away with it.’ Eddy is easily identified by the dreadful scars and injuries on his face during much of the film. I count myself very lucky to have avoided such traumatising violence inflicted by police officers. Having once been arrested for gross indecency by the Detroit Police, I was held in their cells for a period of several hours. During that time, I feared my worst nightmare. In the gay community, we heard that ‘degenerates’ were ‘done over’ to express their abhorrence at regular intervals. That did not happen to me. In that cell, I just wanted to die. In fact, I must have looked absolutely wretched because the warder twice asked me if I was OK! Eddy, in early teens, was also thrashed by an ignorant uncouth father – ‘I’ll knock the queer out of you!’ The film flashes back and forth between 1953 and 1990 which cause some confusion. At the beginning, it is 1990 and Tommy, covered in lesions, is dying of AIDS among a gathering of the nurse and concerned friends. In conclusion, Eddy also died of AIDS a few months later. It is a hard and difficult watch, but there were beautiful tender moments of love making between these guys. Several scenes make perfectly clear genuine love binding an unhappy union. Excellent actors bring it all to life. As you’d expect from working class rough coal miners, they were as butch two bricks! No hint of effeminacy indicated anything short of two heterosexual guys. Particularly difficult for me was the bone of contention between Tommy and Eddy with regard to their future. There is a scene in which Tommy implores Eddy to accept that there is only one realistic solution to end their misery. ‘Face facts, after this holiday, we’ve got to go back to the homes in our street. We’ve got to live with our families, friends and neighbours. There’s no other way! Eddy – you and me – we’ve got to find a lass, get married, have kids and fit in.’ ‘No, Tommy! No, no, no! It won’t work. It can’t work. I can’t live a lie. I won’t.’ ‘What else can we do?’ ‘I’ll tell you. I’ve been thinking it out, planning it. And we do it now, right now. We pack our cases, go to Liverpool and get on a ship to New York. I’ve got some money saved.’ We receive very little information about the 37-year gap between 1953 and 1990. We do know that Tommy and Eddy returned to their small-town homophobic dowdy existence in Lancashire. I did not enjoy this bleak drama - but acknowledge it to be an important social history telling an under told story about real people – people like my husband Terry and myself. I’m glad the film was made and is now in the public domain - educating and informing all who see it. Narvel Annable Once A Year On Blackpool Sands can be purchased on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/3TI8Btuamzn.to/3TI8Btu Comments are closed.
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