The morality of The History Boys.(Letter to the editor)

SIR: Although I'm a lifelong fan of Alan Bennett, lukewarm (but vague) reviews led me to give The History Boys a miss when it screened at my local arthouse cinema recently. Nell McDonald's essay (July-August 2007) rekindled my interest: was it indeed "one of the best films about teaching" ever made, as he claimed, or was Miranda Devine correct in describing it as "a pederastic fantasy"? The answer to both questions is "yes, sort of".

McDonald makes the very good point that this is one of the very few such films in which the content of what is taught is treated as important. He is right about the power and poignancy of the scene in which Hector (the chubby old student-groping queen) and Posner (the openly gay student) discuss war poetry and the relative merits of Thomas Hardy's "Drummer Hodge" and Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier". He (Hector/Bennett) had me fishing out old school anthologies to refresh fading memory, and to see whether he was right that the Hardy worked better. Oh to have had such an inspirational teacher!

I also agree with McDonald that an M rating is appropriate for The History Boys. Your average fifteen-year-old these days is exposed to much more graphic and outlandish sexual content than an invitation to consensual "sucking off", and let's face it, the education system does at least attempt to arm them against corruption with knowledge and a sense of their own physical integrity.

Nevertheless, McDonald has not satisfactorily answered Miranda Devine's objections. She is right: every one of this supposedly typical group of eight young bright scholars is openly or latently gay. Not one of them gives the slightest sign of struggling with surging adolescent heterosexual desire. Even in an all-boy school this is highly unlikely. It is certainly at odds with my experience: emerging from a Catholic convent school in the 1960s, I made my first good friends among the opposite sex at university with boys of a similar background whose single-sex schooling hadn't made the slightest dent in their robust heterosexual leanings.

The History Boys shows virtually no interest in heterosexual experience. Teachers Hector and Irwin (the other central male character) are both gay, and the only straight male character we meet is the headmaster, who is a buffoon. There are only two female characters. One is the headmaster's secretary, ...