The Brookside Lesbian Kiss was long overdue but it shook the country
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00:00It was 1994 when Section 28 prohibited the promotion of homosexuality in schools
00:06but Channel 4 aired a lesbian kiss on the soap opera Brookside
00:09between characters Margaret and Beth
00:11What do you mean like kissing each other in front of an audience?
00:14This was the first time a kiss between two women aired pre-Watershed
00:18Six million viewers watched and it shook the country
00:21I celebrated it, a lot of my friends celebrated it and lesbian media celebrated it
00:26Mainstream media was kind of shocked by it
00:30Now the question every soap fan's asking is
00:33will our Brookside babes come out of the closet?
00:35Do you not think you're being exploited a little bit in a way?
00:38We're being exploited
00:40No I'm really glad I'm doing the storyline
00:42I think it's about time it was handled really on television
00:45It's like never been handled before has it?
00:47Anna Friel who played Beth was profiled in the Guardian with the headline Lipstick Thespian
00:52and the show was credited with spotlighting lipstick lesbians aka femme lesbians
00:56or lesbians who present in a stereotypically feminine way
00:59a lipstick lesbian, that was the term back then
01:02If you were feminine with long hair and wore makeup you were almost not necessarily believed
01:10Some traditional groups complained
01:12The producer Mal Young recalls receiving a letter from a mother
01:16concerned that Brookside was
01:17trying to teach girls how to be lesbians
01:22But he said this made him confident that he made the right decision
01:25to broadcast the issue and educate viewers
01:27While the character Beth was definitely a lesbian Margaret was portrayed as unsure
01:32It was important to Friel that Beth wasn't into women
01:34as a response to her character's experience of abuse from her father
01:38This has got nothing to do with dad or any of that
01:40It's to do with me and how I feel
01:41And she pushed to keep Beth a lesbian for the rest of the show
01:44Although not queer herself Friel became an LGBTQ pinup
01:48with her fan mail shooting from 20 letters a week to 100
01:53Young had initially been concerned that the queer community would criticize him
01:56for trying to tell a lesbian story as a straight man
01:59There's always that to consider and there was some of that
02:02but I think they actually really had to write to do things quite carefully
02:05There was more of a at last
02:08At last we're being shown on TV and the word lesbian can be used
02:12In the pre-social media days bringing this moment to the living room
02:15of queer teenagers was a huge deal
02:17It was huge so my best friend growing up she was gay as well
02:21So then we would like confide in each other and we were like totally obsessed
02:26And when they edited the kiss out of the omnibus which aired at the weekend
02:30the censorship decision received even more complaints than the original kiss did
02:35Showing how popular the moment was
02:36Friel who was 17 when she did the kiss said that although her family accepted it
02:41they weren't all over the moon about the scene
02:43She says my grandma hated me kissing that girl
02:45She said now I hope you won't be doing that anymore
02:48None of that old nonsense
02:50Meanwhile Nicola Stevenson who is slightly older and played Margaret
02:53said that as a 22 year old often dancing in Manchester's gay clubs
02:57surrounded by gay people at work she lived in a totally free and accepting bubble
03:01Although progress has been made the fight to live in a more inclusive world is still going
03:05Nearly 20 years later Danny Boyle put the footage of this kiss
03:09in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony
03:12Meaning it was aired in 77 countries where homosexuality is still banned
03:20you