David Sedaris: William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band

When I first saw this film in about 1980, it terrified me. I thought: is this what my life is going to be? I saw it as a cautionary tale. I thought: “I’m not going to be one of those tragic people who denies that he’s gay. I don’t want that for myself.”

The film came out in 1970, a couple of years after the Mart Crowley play it was based on. It is about seven friends and a guest who are gathering to celebrate a birthday – one of those “put a number of hateful people in a room over the course of an evening” movies.

What scared me about it was the level of self-loathing. There are lines such as, “If only we didn’t hate ourselves so much”, and “You show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse”. It doesn’t even suggest that you could be happy as a gay person, that you could find real love, that you could live an unselfconscious, beautiful life. Even the main character, who you think at the beginning is fairly well adjusted, ends up on his hands and knees crying because he has admitted that more than anything he wants to be straight. I think that’s one way in which things have changed. If you went to a lot of gay people right now with a magic wand and said, “I can make you straight or leave you how you are”, I don’t think many would care to be made straight. I know being straight wouldn’t solve any of my problems. Not one! But it was a different world in 1970.

I can’t think of another movie before The Boys in the Band that was so overtly about gay men. There might have been gay characters, but they always hid it, and they were the laughing stock. This was, boldly, a story about a group of gay men. And they were a lot like the first gay men I met – isolated and sort of at each other’s throats.

During the movie the guests play a game in which they each have to call somebody who they have always loved and tell them they love them. With one exception, they all call straight men. That was so sad to me. As a mature gay man, the idea that you would fall in love with a straight guy is really setting yourself up to be kicked in the chops. When you learn that someone is straight, you should just cross them off your list, not make a big space in your heart for them.

‘They were like the first gay men I met’ … The Boys in the Band. Photograph: Ronald Grant

Another thing you see in the movie is the way all the outside characters – from pedestrians on the street to parking attendants – are horrified by the characters. They can’t hide the disgust on their faces. Again, things have changed so much since the 70s. The gay characters in the film seem isolated to me in a way that gay people no longer are. I mean, you might be if you are living in parts of Africa or Yemen – but if you’re living in New York City, you get stared at if you’re not gay.

Mary Portas: Donna Summer’s I Feel Love

It was the summer of 1977 when “I Feel Love” exploded into my life. It had been a very painful time for me. The 1970s was a grey decade anyway, but my mother had just died and I was in a completely black space. I had this little Saturday job in a hair salon and that’s when I first heard the song – the beat blew me away. We played it over and over again. The physicality of it was so exciting. I’ve never taken drugs but it felt almost healing to escape into this beat; it took away all the pain.

At the time I was kissing boys not girls, and it was such a sexual piece of music. I grew up Catholic – my mother was devout – so the sexual freedom it represented was eye-opening.

I think gay people responded to “I Feel Love” because it sounded so good in clubs, where people could really express themselves. To understand the song you have to understand the suppression in the 70s. We’d had the 60s sexual revolution, but that was only for heterosexual people – nobody discussed gay people. We were still waiting for that. Then along came glam rock, with stars such as David Bowie and Marc Bolan expressing androgyny through music and makeup. Donna Summer explored this too but on a larger scale and with a bigger beat – she became a superstar and it became an anthem, especially in gay clubs like Heaven in London.

‘I Feel Love frees everyone’ … Donna Summer. Photograph: Fin Costello/Redferns

Later on, there was an outcry because she allegedly said that homosexuality was a sin. I think her words were: “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”, although she later denied this. She had become a born-again Christian, which was such a disappointment. A lot of her fans smashed up her records at the time. As a Catholic girl I had been pulled into structures and rules that made me feel so suppressed. Despite the tragedy of my mother’s death, I felt there was a freedom too, in that I didn’t have to follow those rules any more. Donna Summer gave me that freedom and then it felt like the church was taking it once more.

Those comments stuck with me but I didn’t fall out of love with the music. My wife and I were one of the first gay couples to get married after the law was changed. We knew that “I Feel Love” would have to be on the wedding disco playlist. Believe you me, when that piece of music goes on, love has no boundaries. Everybody gets on that floor and frees themselves.

Asifa Lahore: Dana International’s Diva

I identified with Dana International from the moment I saw her perform. As a gay teenager from a British Muslim Pakistani background, seeing an out trans woman who was Jewish and proudly representing Israel on the world stage was empowering. That she could win the prestigious Eurovision song contest was a celebratory moment, especially for someone as isolated as I was.

It felt like one of the first moments of LGBT culture being out there in the mainstream. It set the foundation blocks for my coming out – first to my parents, then to my community, and finally publicly, where I could perform as Britain’s first out Muslim drag queen.

‘A Eurobop celebration of femininity’… Israel’s Dana International performs her winning song at the Eurovision Song Contest in Birmingham, 1998.

I was inspired by Dana International’s super femme glamorous appearance, of course, and also her pride in her faith. Those two things are intertwined in my drag routine – I’ll wear the burqa, but also evening gowns with makeup and hair extensions. It doesn’t surprise me that she started out as a drag queen herself in Tel Aviv.

Dana International’s song was called “Diva” and the title says it all – it was a celebration of womanhood and femininity. It was very much Europop but with this grand orchestral sound, too. I remember her entrance – she was smiling with her arms raised to the side. There was a grandeur about her that matched the music.

In recent years we’ve had an increase in trans visibility, and I think this was a defining moment towards that. After her win she gave a lot of interviews, not just around Europe but in the US, too. Looking back now, it seems groundbreaking. But there is still work to be done – very few people would publicly identify themselves as a person of faith and LGBT. If I look at my community and who openly identifies themselves as LGBT Muslim, I can pinpoint a couple of people, if that.

I understand the difficulties. It took me 12 years after watching Dana International win Eurovision to build up the courage to do drag professionally. I had to do a lot of soul searching until I felt ready to follow in her footsteps.

Isaac Julien: Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio

I was 26 and had just graduated from St Martins school of art when I saw Caravaggio. It was a really exciting time for me. With Caravaggio, Derek gave me a language to make my own films: Looking for Langston would not have existed without it.

Caravaggio tells the story of the artist, who was really the best painter of his time – even today there is something extraordinary about seeing one of his works because of the technical mastery and the ways in which the male body is painted and portrayed. Derek’s idea was to queer Caravaggio’s history, then bring that into a cinematic vision. He depicts his sexuality as very fluid and ambiguous, and this was before the emergence of a new queer cinema.

‘My films could not have existed without it’ … Caravaggio with, from left, Sean Bean, Nigel Terry and Tilda Swinton. Photograph: Allstar/BFI

The film is full of historical art references which Derek contemporised for his audience. He was really smart about not trying to emulate the paintings in a naff way but rather to imbue them with life. I’m very interested in the tableaux vivants: you recognise a scene from a Caravaggio painting and it comes alive as a moving image.

Music, costume, decor, performances and the style of editing all form this amazing portrait of Caravaggio which is unusual and quite modern. Homoeroticism is imbued in the film’s creation – not just in the way that Caravaggio is constructed as a gay hero, but in the decor, the mise en scene, the film’s construction. It takes for granted the sexuality of Caravaggio in a way that its audience might do, too.

I’d met Derek a few times before Caravaggio was released. He was very witty and incredibly erudite. He was kind of a father figure but at the same time had a twinkle in his eye and I would see him out in clubs. He was very charismatic – perhaps a little narcissistic – but always incredibly interesting to speak to.

• These are extracts from the Queer Icons series on Radio 4’s Front Row. Listen to more on the archive.