What makes Get Real, based on Patrick Wilde’s 1992 play ‘What’s Wrong with Angry?’ so real is the exquisitely crafted screenplay, which joyously jettisons ’90s gay stereotypes and clichés in favour of an honest, upfront, and, at the time, groundbreaking depiction of the teenage gay experience. Limited copies of Get Real are available on DVD and VHS.
Long before sixteen-year-old Simon Spier met the elusive ‘Blue’ through secretive emails in Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015) and even longer before that story made it to the silver screen with Nick Robinson as Simon, a small-budget British film, based on Patrick Wilde’s play ‘What’s Wrong with Angry?’ helped lay the groundwork for both Albertalli’s book and the later movie adaptation of her work. That film, now largely forgotten in the celluloid mists of time, was Get Real (1998), written by Patrick Wilde and directed by Simon Shore.
Like the play it is based on, Get Real was groundbreaking, unique and different. Arriving on stage at the same time as Beautiful Thing and on film several years after Jonathan Harvey’s story, Get Real places its characters in a realistic ’90s landscape of unchecked homophobia, secret liaisons, hyper-masculinity and slow-moving social change. It was a play, and then a movie, every gay kid who came out or hid their light in fear during the ’90s could relate to: an upfront, honest and authentic depiction of the teenage gay experience in small-town Britain.
Unlike many gay coming-of-age movies of the time, Get Real wasn’t about the tragedy of being gay; it was about the strength, fears, hopes and the secret horniness of gay life as a teenager. It was about the shadow cast by HIV and AIDS over a whole new generation of LGBTQIA+ kids brought up under Thatcher’s Section 28 (a law that prohibited the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities, including schools), leading to unchecked and unchallenged homophobia, bullying and violence.
Steven Carter (Ben Silverstone) is a bright sixteen-year-old who is passionate about writing, secretive meetings with men in the local park toilets, and social change. Steven is proudly ‘out’ with his best mate Linda (Charlotte Brittain) but firmly in the closet with everyone else, and who can blame him? His school seems to think gay people don’t exist, and bullies home in on anyone different, free from challenge; even the school newspaper operates under strict censorship controls.
However, Steven’s world is about to change when he hooks up with the most popular guy in school, the heart-throb athlete John Dixon (Brad Gorton), following a random toilet encounter in the local park. Like him, John is firmly in the closet and desperate for the touch of another boy, but unlike Steven, John can’t risk his reputation as the school heart-throb and track star. That poses a problem for Steven because he has had just about enough of hiding; for Steven, it’s time to Get Real!
Get Real would hold its world premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1998, touring global festivals, including Sundance, before a limited cinema release in 1999. However, like many LGBTQIA+ movies of the time, it wasn’t until Get Real arrived on VHS rental and DVD that it gained an audience. Since then, the film has become scarce, with only a few VHS copies and DVDs still available, and no dedicated streaming platform. Yet, Wilde and Shore’s film remains one of the best gay movies of the 1990s and a turning point in gay storytelling in British cinema, just as it was on stage on its premiere at the Lost Theatre, Fulham in 1993.
Silverstone, Gorton, and Brittain are outstanding alongside a fabulous ensemble cast that includes David Lumsden, Jacquetta May, Richard Hawley, Kate McEnery, and Stacy Hart. But what makes Get Real so real is the exquisitely crafted screenplay, which joyously jettisons ’90s gay stereotypes and clichés in favour of an honest, upfront, and, at the time, groundbreaking depiction of the teenage gay experience.
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