Alan Bennett comes out fighting as he recounts the night he was beaten up
Playwright goes public about his sexuality because 'police routinely ignore homophobic attacks'
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A violent attack on Alan Bennett, which left him covered in blood and fearing for his life, has prompted the playwright and author to give his first frank account of his sexuality.
Long known for guarding his private life with care, Bennett says he has chosen to speak about his experience as a gay man because racist and homophobic assaults are routinely ignored by the police. He speaks of his bafflement at the furtive rules of the male dating game, and acknowledges his current partnership with Rupert Thomas, editor of World of Interiors magazine.
The attack, which he recounts in the 25th anniversary edition of the London Review of Books, took place in 1992 in Ladispoli, a small Italian seaside town north of Rome, when he and Mr Thomas were confronted by a group of youths on the promenade. Attempting to get away, he was clubbed on the head with a piece of scaffolding, leaving a wound that needed 12 stitches in an emergency clinic.
Retelling the attack, he writes: "There was no attempt to rob us, which would have been quite easy to do ... As we run, I feel a heavy blow struck on the top of my head, the blow struck with a short length of steel scaffolding ... I must certainly have been stunned and fallen, and so probably received more, the usual procedure nowadays when someone falls to kick them in the head."
Bennett, now 70, says he initially kept quiet for fear of being "enrolled in the ranks of gay martrydom", and out of long-standing reluctance to make his personal affairs public. Famously, when the actor Ian McKellen challenged him to say whether he was heterosexual or homosexual, Bennett replied: "That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern Water." Bennett's revelation in the early 1990s that he had maintained a long relationship with a former housekeeper, Anne Davies, did nothing to clear the issue. His latest interview leaves little doubt, however, with a personal account of the difficulties growing up as homosexual in post-war Britain.
Matthew Parris, the political commentator and one-time Conservative MP, who only acknowledged his homosexuality in the late 1990s, had a similar experience of homophobic violence. In his autobiography, Chance Witness, he says that he had been assaulted 15 years earlier on Clapham Common in London, but decided to keep silent until the plight of others drove him to talk publicly about his identity. Yesterday, he said: "When people are pushed hard and when they're treated in a brutally unjust way, the reaction is sometimes the opposite of what you might expect. Sometimes the worm turns."
Bennett makes it clear that he remains uneasy about discussing his private relationships: "Rupert is 30 years or so younger than I am and might easily be mistaken for my son. This embarrasses me, though not him, who has more reason to be embarrassed."
The episode changed his outlook completely, he says: "To be attacked, beaten up or otherwise abused, and to find the police response one of indifference, is the not infrequent experience of homosexuals, and blacks too ... It has been another untold story, though it is better that it should be told. The police protect the respectable, of which I have always been one."