Bronski Beat - It Ain't necessarily so

What this video is

Released November 1984, this video arrives at a moment of intense political tension surrounding LGBT+ rights in the United Kingdom, where the age of consent for homosexual acts remained at 21 — five years higher than the heterosexual equivalent — a disparity that Bronski Beat's parent album *The Age of Consent* explicitly confronted. The song itself is a cover of a Gershwin standard from *Porgy and Bess* (1935),…

Why it matters

This video represents a landmark intersection of synth-pop craft and LGBT+ political visibility at a moment when both were exceptionally rare in mainstream British pop media. As the third single from *The Age of Consent*, it extended Bronski Beat's established identity as openly gay artists using…

The director

Simon Milne is a New Zealand-born film director and painter who grew up in Italy and completed his education in the UK. He began his career as an assistant photographer before transitioning into film editing in the early 1980s, then moved into music video…