Mr Loverman
A moving and funny drama about an exuberant, closeted family man who wants to end his marriage and live with his best friend, with whom he has been having an affair for almost 60 years.
Mr Loverman, Hong Khaou
Mr Loverman (2024), an eight-part adaptation of Booker Prize winning novelist Bernardine Evaresto’s work of the same name, follows 75-year-old Barrington Walker, played by Lennie James, as he steps out of the closet and into a public relationship with Ariyon Bakare’s Morris, his best friend and clandestine lover of over 50 years.
A plot that flips back and forth through the decades shows the arduous journey Barry takes to get to this point, to making this decision, that though agonising, ultimately comes as a relief to long-suffering, though not entirely innocent, wife Carmel (Sharon D. Clarke), loyal and long-standing Morris, prevented from seeing his children once his own wife discovered his adultery, and most importantly to himself, as he finds the courage to finally live his truth.
Referring to himself as, “a Barrysexual”, because the term homosexual and all its associations are seemingly too much for him to proudly adorn, at the beginning, to openly holding Morris’ hand as they walk down a street and off into the sunset at the end, delineates his path to self-acceptance, but the story, adapted for screen by script writer Nathaniel Price, is about so much more than that.
The series is groundbreaking for the images it depicts and the barriers it breaks, a cultural moment. Black Britons with Caribbean lineage may be familiar with the kitsch West Indian front room, the one depicted in the Walker household only a slight variant from that of our grandparents, they will have listened to the dulcet tones of Lovers Rock that accompanied the opening credits of episode one, and had me recollecting languid childhood Sundays where that music was the soundtrack to my mother’s preparation for the week ahead, but we will not have seen the interlocked naked bodies of two Black men occupying a slot on national, prime time television.
“The series is groundbreaking for the images it depicts and the barriers it breaks, a cultural moment.”
Recently there has been a concerted effort to redress the redaction of Black men in British gay history and to recast the role they played in the struggle for the group’s civil rights. Similarly to Revolutionary Acts by Jason Okundaye and podcasts We Were Always Here and Black and Gay, Back in the Day by Marc Thompson, Mr Loverman puts the experiences of gay Black men at the centre of page and stage. Barrington, beaten up and goaded at a cruising spot, and Morris, prohibited, by his wife, from going near their sons should in case he is, “infected with that gay disease” represent any number of Black men who, in the seventies, eighties and nineties, faced ‘isms, ‘ations and ‘bia (s) from all sides, at home and in public, from kin and strangers alike.
Tasked with depicting the past Mr Loverman and the protagonists, who decamped from Antigua to London in the 1960s, also offer the audience something refreshing, original and important. A new entry point to the well-trodden Windrush story, the possibility that not all left the Caribbean for economic reasons and to answer the call of queen and country, a fuller migratory picture with all the nuances the human experience demands.
That the only source of common ground (and consequent point of contention) between Barry and his 17-year-old grandson Daniel (Tahj Miles) is their homophobia; tepid and internalised from Barry, and raging out the lyrics of his drill music for Daniel, demonstrates the endurance and even entrenchment of these attitudes within the Black Caribbean community.
The influential triple C of church, constitution and culture, most notably music, with their zealous preachers, powerful politicians and potty mouthed performers demonising anyone who live and feel outside of their heteronormative confines, ensures the transmission of these beliefs through generations, across oceans and down the diasporic line.
Many justify their beliefs by arguing homosexuality is alien to Black people, exogenous to the region, a perverse Western practice that white men brought to the Caribbean alongside cholera and smallpox, however, history shows it was homophobia, and not homosexuality transported there.
On July 11th 2022, around six decades on from Barry’s literary departure, the government of Antigua repealed laws criminalising sexual relations between same sex adults. These laws against sodomy and ‘buggery’, which are still in effect in six Caribbean countries including Dominica, St Lucia and Jamaica and sanction legal discrimination and violence against the LGBT community, are relics left over from British colonial rule.
Found in passages 76, 77 and 79 in the ‘Unnatural Offences’ section of the 1864 Offences Against the Persons Act, are the impositions of imperialists who believed ‘natives’ too lax with their treatment of ‘perverse’ sexual relations and used the punishment of up to ten years hard labour to further restrict the autonomy of the Black body and exert social control.
As Barrington comes out and back to himself, maybe we as Black Caribbean people can throw off the yoke of colonialism, accept and protect gay relationships and come back to ours.
Release Date: October 14th 2024
Directed by Hong Khaou
Written by Nathaniel Price
Starring Lennie James
Cinematography by Remi Adefarasin
Network BBC ONE
No. of Episodes 8