"A panorama of gay life": Nighthawks and British queer cinema in the 1970s

This chapter details the production history and reception of Paul Hallam and Ron Peck’s film Nighthawks (1978), often recognized as a “classic” of British LGBTQ cinema. It centrally engages with Vito Russo’s suggestion that the film offered “a community reaction to itself.” Making the film was a lengthy undertaking: the chapter draws on Peck and Hallam’s archives to reconstruct its creation, and unpacks Peck’s involvement with the Four Corners collective and its influence on the content and form of Nighthawks. The film is situated in relation to key events in British queer history and the landscape of British filmmaking during the decade, as well as in relation to Richard Dyer’s landmark 1977 film season “Images of Homosexuality.” The film’s “sequel,” Strip Jack Naked (1991), is also explored as a partial atonement for Nighthawks’s omissions.