Exploring LGBTQIA+ Unsung Heroes in Award Season: An Interview with Rob Falconer

With the LGBTQIA+ award season in full swing, the obvious candidates are always front runners.

Particularly in this day and age with social content and media hype playing an important part.

Awards are often financially driven as winning is going to put bums
on seats and entice the lucrative sponsors.

It would be good to see some of LGBTQIA’s unsung heroes, who often fly under the radar and are perhaps more deserving of an award, get some attention.

One such deserving contender is gay film director Rob Falconer. His film “Gay Man’s Guide To Safer Sex ‘97 Directors Cut” sold out at the Barbican in April.

Rob used cinema in a new way to bring education about gay sex and how to keep it safe.

Steven Smith asks him ten questions:

1. Rob, how did you get into film making?

I was originally an actor and singer (bands, not musicals). I arrived in London at 18 to train as an actor at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, literally across the street from the Barbican where we screened the 2024 version of Gay Man’s Guide.

The focus was all on serious theatre and the RSC (next door). I’m not sure if they realised they’d actually end up training a sex film director. My guns were trained only on screen acting though.

2. When you came out was it easy for you?

Possibly not for my girlfriends when I was very young! That typically strangled, horrendously painful adolescence for closeted gay teens – a golden time for natural development and exploration you also never get back.

As I say, I arrived in London at 18, still pretty closeted. It was right in the firestorm of the AIDS pandemic and terrifying, but that was that. Instantly I was “hello, boys!” and out. Dates me but that was when button fly 501 jeans were the new thing (and Y2Ks are all wearing them again now!).

My button fly didn’t ever stay buttoned up much after that (as anyone who knows me would probably be only too quick to point out).

3. Do you feel young gay men are still aware of HIV and safe sex?

The stats do go up and down. By 2013 or so there was a worrying spike with under 25s amongst the highest numbers of people acquiring HIV.

Thankfully that settled back, though a little bit of a rise again recently we’re hearing. A lot of young gay guys are savvy and sassy, well able to make their own minds up. The metrosexual boys in between, hmm, I’m not quite so sure.

And if you need to talk there’s an amazing network right out there waiting, the THT Direct helpline, Switchboard, Love Tank and PrEPSTER, LGBTHERO, the super-approachable teams at clinics like Mortimer Market Centre and 56 Dean Street.

4. Are apps ruining LGBTQIA+ dating?

Probably, but not completely, I’d say. This is just who we are, where we are right now, nothing to feel shame about. It’ll change again to something else.

But for sure, hook-up apps can make it very uncomfortable indeed if you don’t feel you maybe conform to people’s expected body or gender identity types. And yes, there’s always the potential to find yourself in situations that can become very risky.

That’s the reason you need to get informed, today, just like when we made the Gay Man’s Guide films. Get accurate, unjudgmental information, from people who fuck just like you do, think about what you’re doing and then you have to make you own choices.

Sexual health information services today have made targeted, relevant messaging more easily available than ever before, and they’re making sure everyone in our community feels seen and appropriately addressed.

We’re incredibly fortunate in the UK to have that, though government still urgently needs to really back-up PrEP way more strongly.

5. What was the first film you ever watched on the big screen?

Sean Connery as Bond in “Diamonds Are Forever”. It changed the course of my life forever…”Plenty O’Toole? Named after your father perhaps?”.

Seriously, that man had a riveting screen presence and talent no one’s ever had in quite the same way since. Cat-like grace too, for such a big guy. Cinema had me at hello and I wanted in.

Bond of course didn’t do boys – though Daniel Craig’s devastatingly good reinvention of 007 kind of prick-teased that he might have done in Skyfall.

6. Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex Directors Cut has a feel of Madonna’s Sex video in places. Who do you take your inspiration from?

Steven, probably only you could come up with that one, and we’re all taking that as the biggest compliment to Gay Man’s Guide! The Lady and Legend herself is always a massive inspiration.

She just takes absolutely no shit from anyone. Ever. I’d like to say that in some of the music I’ve made too, but never shifted in those quantities…

But any artists who, for all sorts of reasons – too often money, had to get very inventive and extremely persuasive, Derek Jarman always (whose collaborators like producer James Mackay and director David Lewis were on the first 1992 GMG film of course), French-Canadian movie star Lothaire Bluteau (unforgettable in the movie of Bent),
the living legend that is Holly Johnson, James Ivory (the loveliest man and incredible director), Barbara Broccoli (“a man’s world”? Yeah. Whatever.), and the one-off human rights dynamo that is Peter Tatchell – working with Peter boots your perspective on the world into realities really quickly.

7. What is your suggestion to people going into film making?

Er…strap yourself in. Except for the only 10-15 per cent of artists and technical craftspeople who ever really make it, (I’m not one) this is not going to be an easy path for you.

But you’re going to do it anyway, aren’t you? Art’s a collaborative process but it’s still your voice. Don’t let other people use it for you.

8. There is still a struggle for many young men to find positive role models. Do you feel someone like Aiden Shaw (aka Aiden Brady) is a good figurehead for the community? 

Hell, yeah! You brought up Madonna and she’s definitely a fan of Aiden’s! He’s worked with her. Aiden off screen probably isn’t who many expect him to be.

Even a little shy I’d say, and doesn’t set out to be anybody’s figurehead. But he is, and what a man! An almost annoyingly multi-talented artist, drop-down beautiful too. It’s his total, unflinching honesty that really tells.

We’ll never get anywhere as LGBTQIA+ people if we don’t put the truth right out there to the rest of the world and say, “Just deal with it. Deal with who we really are.” I shot several gay sex scenes in the buff myself as an actor – I’d never ask anyone to do what I wouldn’t myself.

9. When you are not filming what do you do for fun?

I still occasionally get to ride horses, one of the other loves of my life, (along with boys). My niece’s latest acquisition is a huge Irish thoroughbred event horse named after Parker in Thunderbirds.

I genuinely need a ladder though. He’s very gentle and tolerant with me. I’d love to roll out the stock one of ‘cooking’ but my boyfriend would shut that right down and just cry laughing. I have no talent in the kitchen. None. He might also say, “Don’t date sex film directors.”

10. What is the one thing you would change about London if you were mayor for the day?

Give us an extremely visible LGBTQIA+ landmark like Amsterdam’s Homonument. We are (at last) getting the official London AIDS memorial though, but only thanks to the incredible work of Ash Kotak and the AIDS Memory UK Team.

Quick round:

Chinese or Japanese?

Vietnamese

Pjs or nude? 

What do you think, reading this? Nothing at all!

Ibiza or Paris?

Ibiza, I like heat (but also French boys very much indeed). 

The one thing that would put you off someone?

Cruelty to any animal (including us). 
 

Call THT Direct on 0808 802 1221 for support, advice and information on HIV or email us at info@tht.org.uk