Cultural historians cite Lamont Johnson’s 1972 drama, That Certain Summer, as television’s first foray into gay-themed storytelling. With its high-caliber cast—Hal Holbrook, Martin Sheen, Hope Lange, and young Scott Jacoby—it certainly carried the weight of a landmark moment. And while it does hold the distinction of being the first American production to tackle the subject with such gravity, it was not, in fact, the first time the lens had turned toward such themes. Years before in 1959, Britain’s ITV—as part of its Play-of-the-Week series—presented a television adaptation of Julien Green’s play, Sud (or South, as it came to be known). In the timeline of television history, this is the true pioneer; it was the first drama to quietly, daringly unveil gay-related motifs to a home audience. I stumbled upon a grainy clip of it on YouTube recently, and found myself instantly captured, wanting to know more. Like so many live broadcasts that, in those years, ran once then vanished into the ether, South was considered lost for years. In a wonderful bit of providence, the British Film Institute unearthed and restored it in 2013. Now, it waits available to watch on many media platforms.
The story’s setting drips with atmosphere. Set in the Deep South in those stifling, humid days just before the outbreak of the Civil War. it revolves around the owner of a great plantation, Edward Broderick— a man caught in the crosscurrents of history and his own private nature. His household consists of his daughter, Angelina, his young son, Jimmy, his niece, Regina, a neighbor friend, Mrs. Strong, and a variety of Black plantation help freed by Broderick’s manumission long before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Also on the property is Lieutenant Jan Wicziewsky, a Polish political exile who sought refuge in the United States and is a favorite guest of the Brodericks (Edward is especially fond of Jan as is little Jimmy who adores his presence and keeps close to him during his visits). The plot takes off with the arrival of Confederate soldier, Eric McClure, also a family friend, with whom Jan falls head-over-heels.
The movie takes the Love at First Sight trope to absurd extremes. After a fleeting moment of polite, introductory chatter between Jan and Eric, Jan transforms into something akin to Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction. Peter Wyngarde—who would go on to become a celebrated British icon with hits like Department S and Jason King, not to mention his tenure as a Hammer Horror regular—cuts a wide swath here. He chews the scenery with such flamboyant ardor that his character’s declarations of love cross the line from intense to unintentionally hilarious. Wyngarde’s sexuality was an open secret among his industry peers, though he spent much of his life dancing around it before later identifying as bisexual. He famously quipped, “I’m 50% vegetarian, 100% bisexual.” Given the era, his closeted status was a matter of professional survival; being openly gay was essentially career suicide. Looking back, we can now appreciate his participation in South as an act of quiet courage, placing him in the company of contemporaries like Dirk Bogarde in Victim or Montgomery Clift in Suddenly, Last Summer.
South is dated; what was, sadly, acceptable in 1959 is cringeworthy in 2026. The play is rife with social pathologies of the era: racist, sexist and homophobic slurs abound; the “n word” is used liberally. A dialogue between a Black housemaid and a Black farmhand exhibits a condescending attitude on his part towards his female co-worker with her retorting “Shut your mouth, you jammie!” Some of the females in the play are portrayed as dumb flutterheads. characters make desultory remarks about men who are “different.” Regina is clearly overprotective of Jimmy, of whom she advises her fellow housemates “Don’t let that boy be alone with Jan,” and tries to stop her uncle from allowing Jan to whip Jimmy’s naked bottom as punishment for disrespecting a Black foreman. The irony is that Jimmy, more than any other character, possesses perhaps a burgeoning gay sensibility himself, displaying a visible empathy with Jan from the start.
The kindest assessment of South is that, for good or for bad, it is “of its time”. In 1959, when no one but no one in the entertainment industry dared touch upon themes of homosexuality and “the love that dare not speak its name”, it took on these motifs with milestone boldness. Wyngardes’s performance, too, becomes a wonder. The very same over-the-top acting that sinks his performance at the play’s beginning redeems that performance and the story’s dynamics at the play’s denouement in which Jan’s heartbreak at having his love unrequited tears at his very soul. His wavering almost bleating basso, his mournful eyes reveal the depths of his pain, the hopelessness of his longing. He morphs into a creature no longer human, a translucent holograph of grief, of unspeakable suffering, his interior conflict a metaphor for the seething tensions of a country on the brink of war.
Tragically, like all media of the time portraying gay people, this story ends with the to-be-expected death (usually by suicide) of the tormented soul, in part as a moral warning to anyone engaging in same-sex relations, in part to appease a judgmental audience, as happens with Peter McEnery as “Boy” Barrett in Victim, Shirley MacLaine’s Martha Dobie in The Children’s Hour. The attitudes of the time can only be described as unfortunate. But time has a way of turning what was written in the margins into the main story. The silence that Green’s play elicited from viewers and critics did not endure. The decades that followed became a slow-in-coming yet heroic dismantling of what seemed to our community permanent barricades. We moved from the quiet of the alleyway, the shadows of the Men’s Room to the explosive heat of Stonewall, transforming that “doomed morally bankrupt archetype into a brilliant blinding radicalism. Movements like Gay Liberation and ACT UP, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, movies like La Cage Aux Folles, Philadelphia, last year’s Heated Rivalry would never have happened without the brave baby steps taken by a project like South. Now, as we bask in the kinder light of the 21st century, the legal victories—the marriage licenses, the protected rights—we have made ourselves a visible reality, something we knew we were all long. Gay lifestyles, gay passion, once confined to the flickering shadows of a 1959 broadcast, have been brought into the full glare of mainstream existence. We are no longer mere subplots; we are ourselves the chroniclers, the vibrant, rainbow bright standard bearers of a new age.
Let’s then look at South today, not as a time capsule artifact, rather, a fearless risk-taking design for what would become a boundless future.