The Leather Boys is a 1964 British “kitchen sink” drama film about the working-class motorcycle club culture of the early 1960s. While featuring little explicit sex of any kind, it does provide a glimpse of the leather-clad biker culture of the time in the UK. It was also an early sympathetic treatment of male homosexuality in British film. Amazon
Dot and Reggie are two working-class Cockney teenagers who marry young and soon turn away from each other. Reggie prefers hanging out at the “caff” with the bikers, and strikes up a friendship with Pete, another biker.
Reggie arranges for his recently widowed grandmother to take Pete in as a lodger, and soon starts living there as well, even sleeping in the same bed as Pete. The astute viewer will note that Pete enjoys spending time with Reggie, but has little interest in picking up “birds” with him.
Dot tries to use a feigned pregnancy to draw Reggie back into their marriage, to no avail. On a road trip to Edinburgh and back, Dot admits to him she was never pregnant. She and Reggie do reconnect for a moment, much to the resentment of Pete.
Reggie and Pete’s “bromance” is interrupted by Dot and Reggie’s off-and-on reconnections. At one point, Dot sees the two men working together in a garage and derisively says, “You look like a couple of queers.”
This comment pushes Reggie into a crisis, torn between his closeness with Pete and his ingrained homophobia. He “breaks up” with Pete to go back to Dot, but finds that she has been sleeping with another man. He breaks up with her (rather hypocritically), and re-joins with Pete to follow his idea of traveling to the USA.
Pete goes to get the ship tickets, while Reggie stops at a nearby pub. After other men try to pick him up in his leather jacket, he soon realizes this is a gay pub, and the ship Pete mentioned is actually a charter to Cardiff for homosexual men.
Reggie finally realizes what Pete has carefully left unsaid, and leaves him. The last shot is him walking alone.
Leather jackets are common attire for these bikers, and Reggie and Pete both wear customized black leather jackets. Dot has her own jacket and helmet for riding, marking her as part of this culture. (She also wears a mod black shiny coat.) Reggie wears his jacket with boots and jeans, while Pete wears a leather jacket and pants. (The only time he doesn’t wear the pants is when he’s working at tending a garbage dump.) The man Dot hooks up with wears a brown leather jacket. Leather marks this culture, but it’s on the cusp of its association with masculine gay male identity, contrasting with the effeminate type seen in the pub at the end. Tom of Finland, for example, was already making gay erotica art of biker men in the 1950s, and Kenneth Anger’s short film Scorpio Rising had debuted in 1963.
Dudley Sutton’s performance as Pete is multi-leveled, a cheerful exterior that masks a hard-won sense of personal identity as a gay man and a backstory of family expulsion. Faced with Reggie’s rejections after they had grown so close, Pete’s resigned yet hurt expression speaks volumes.
The screenplay by Gillian Freeman was based on a novel also written by her (as “Eliot George”). Reportedly the novel is much more frank about sex and the criminal enterprises associated with the bikers. Freeman also wrote Rebecca’s stream-of-consciousness narration for The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968).
