Hello and welcome to Queer's Fiction, where we talk about queer historical media.

I'm Jace.

I'm Alice, and I'm Eli.

And today we're talking about the 1961 noir film Victim, directed by Basil Bearden, written by Janet Green and starring Dirk Bogard and Sylvia Sims.

Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge the Banerong-Bunwarang people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional owners of the land on which we record this podcast and pay respects to their

elders past and present. We recognize them as the custodians of an oral history tradition,

far older than this podcast. You may notice that that acknowledgement of country has changed. That's

because we've moved to us. If the audio on this episode is a little different to previously,

that is why, and we apologize. We also have some content warnings for this episode. This episode

will discuss misogyny, intense societal

homophobia, imprisonment, blackmail and suicide. So this episode is going to start off a bit

more historical than is usual for a queer as fiction episode. That's because the production

of this movie came in response to a very specific set of circumstances that are fairly well documented.

So the United Kingdom of the 1950s was one where government persecution of queer people was at,

if not an all-time high, then certainly a significant peak.

A key figure here is David Maxwell Fife, who was the first Earl of Kilmore.

Sorry if I'm getting that pronunciation wrong, but not really that, sorry.

Yeah, if you wanted us to pronounce it, right, you shouldn't have been an Earl.

His appointment as Home Secretary in 1951, after the Conservatives gained power, led to the

following. A year after his arrival at the Home Office, the combined prosecution rate

for actual or attempted sodomy or gross indecency had soared to 5,443. It had been 1,000 276 in 1939.

Bad man? This increased prosecution rate led to a series of high-profile court cases,

...