I was not around in 1974 to witness the first television outing of Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen. Broadcast only seven years after sex between men was partially decriminalised in England and Wales, this enigmatic film was beamed into the nation’s living rooms with an audacity that remains giddying today.

Some commentators have suggested that the film “seems a world away” from the gritty social commentary of Clarke’s Scum (1977) and The Firm (1989). But Penda’s Fen recognises that unruly desire – manifested within the film in Blakean visions of angels, demons and the pagan King Penda – is political.

Stephen, a classical music-loving, left-wing-despising rector’s son, lives among the green and pleasant Malvern Hills, where he plays at being an impeccably uniformed cadet and struggles to suppress his delirious sexual desire for other boys.

This article is part of a series highlighting brilliant films that should be more widely known and firmly part of the canon of queer cinema .

In his visions, the path of least resistance – that of being the young man everyone wants him to be – is championed by the sinister figures of the Mother and Father of England (modelled on conservative activist Mary Whitehouse and social critic Malcolm Muggeridge). This path would offer him “the right to inherit power”.

But playing the role of the straight, conventional boy weighs heavily on Stephen, and he slips further from the narratives he longs to believe in. Haunted by a series of real and imagined encounters with angels, demons and England’s pagan past, Stephen begins to questions all he knows about himself – his religion, politics and sexuality.

When I finally saw Penda’s Fen after its re-release by the BFI in 2016, it was uncannily familiar. Like Stephen, I grew up as the gay son of a rector in the rural West Midlands, torn between the lures and impossibilities of sexual convention.

The political rhetoric of the LGBT+ community in the 1990s created social impact by speaking in very clear terms about non-straight identities. This rhetoric, for the sake of clarity, often offered narrow definitions of the characteristics and attributes that made someone definitively LGBT+.

But it did lead to progress, featuring in campaigns for the repeal of section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which banned any affirmative presentation of homosexuality by local authorities, including schools. It also was used in campaigns that led to the lowering of the age of consent for gay sex to 16, in line with heterosexual sex.

However, this narrow view left me with an uncomfortable sense that my inconsistencies and contradictions meant that I was never quite, never just, gay. Despite being a valuable term as I came out and claimed a social identity and a community, it failed to capture the complexities of my experience in a single word.

These inconsistencies and complexities shine in queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s not-quite-definition of “queer”: “The open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”

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Sedgwick suggests that queerness is a kind of structural messiness; far from being a neat summing-up of someone’s identity, it is where the desires and behaviours which make up a person’s sexuality don’t quite add up, and so escape full understanding.

Loving your own strangeness

For me, the greatest queer films are not those which seek to confirm the myth of stable identity but, instead, open these meshes of possibility. I know of no film which does this better than Penda’s Fen.

When the film begins, Stephen stamps out all his flickering desires. He clings to clear-cut notions of gender, sex and nation, the three pillars that will secure his power as a man in society.

By the end, he has encountered the ghost of the composer Elgar, fantasised about schoolmates in homoerotic rugby scrums, and discovered that he is adopted and less English than he imagined. In this “Gnostic anarcho-punk anti-pastoral visionary work of English art”, as the writer Gary Budden calls it, all Stephen’s certainties shatter.

As he ultimately stands in the hills’ high places, tempted by the Mother and Father of England to repress confusion and embrace their idea of normality in a folk-horror echo of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, his rejection becomes a radiant queer manifesto:

“I am … nothing pure. My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man. Light with darkness … I am mud and flame!”

Mud and flame is what I was as a teenager living in the shadow of those same hills: the earthy and the fiery, the tangible and the transcendent, the banal and the radical, the secure and the lost. This was – although I didn’t realise it at the time – queerness, a word theorist Lee Edelman writes “can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one”.

No film that I know captures this sense of slipping, sliding, desiring self so well as Penda’s Fen. Everyone who has ever felt the constituent parts of their own sexuality refusing to align should watch the film and fall in love with their own strangeness.

Penda’s Fen, like queerness, resists specific interpretation. It is telling that the visionary commissioning editor David Rose, who oversaw the BBC Birmingham drama department and greenlit Penda’s Fen, confessed that he “didn’t understand it at all, but that’s as it should be”. This attitude is unimaginable in commissioners today.

Clarke’s film is a blend of folk horror motifs, the politics of society and character-driven drama that cracks open meaning just as the church floor fractures when Stephen plays the organ discordantly.

Viewers new to the film should experience its extraordinary final sequence without spoilers, but I will say that the closing images of Stephen – that
“strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant” protagonist – offer me the thrill of queerness’s unsettled, unsettle-able politics.

Benedict Morrison does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.