ABSTRACT
When the Guardian previewer blandly noted that the BBC's Portrait of a Marriage might have been better titled Portrait of an Affair, he struck a sore spot in current 'queer' criticism — the heterosexualization of the homosexual romance. Warned of the screen's predisposition to make homosexuality mean marriage, wifehood, infidelity, lost youth, confession, class privilege — anything but itself lesbian and gay critics came to the BBC dramatization of Portrait of a Marriage sadder but wiser. That final sequence furnishes an easy emblem for a reading of this Portrait: to restore his marriage, Harold Nicolson must tear the lesbian couple apart. In their different ways, both the literary and the television Portrait seem to be meditations on this theme. As if in anticipation of Elizabeth Wilson's optical metaphor — that homosexuality functions transparently — the Daily Telegraph reprovingly headlined its preview of this drama 'Marriage Viewed from a Perverse Perspective'.
