In the 60s and 70s, he pioneered kitchen-sink drama and made bisexuality mainstream. So why did the director end up making Tory ads? Those who knew him best reveal all

Michael Childers was a 22-year-old Los Angeles student when a friend set him up on a date with John Schlesinger, a visiting British director nearly two decades his senior. The esteemed film-maker was licking his wounds: his most recent picture, Far from the Madding Crowd, which imbued its 19th-century rural characters with an anachronistic King’s Road style and panache, had flopped stateside.

Childers approached the date with mixed feelings. He adored Schlesinger’s previous movie, the jazzy Darling, starring Julie Christie as a model on the make, and had seen it three times.But he had heard the director described as “mercurial”. His solution was to take a friend along with him to the bar at the Beverly Wilshire hotel for backup. “I thought: This guy might be a total shit,” recalls Childers, now 81, on the phone from Palm Springs. “I told my friend, ‘Two kicks under the table means we’re out of here. One kick means you’re out of here.’”

New York City officials raise flag at site of rebellion once again after ‘act of erasure’ by administration

Days after the Trump administration oversaw the removal of a Pride flag from the Stonewall national monument, officials in New York City again raised the flag at the historic site.

A large crowd gathered near the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village to see it return to the space where, in 1969, the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement was ignited. Nearly six decades ago, police raided the popular gay bar, and set off an uprising that, as the Library of Congress notes, would “fundamentally change the discourse surrounding LGBTQ+ activism” in the US.

Drama theatre, Sydney Opera House
The 1985 play’s first run took place off-Broadway in the middle of the Aids crisis. Much has changed – but Dean Bryant’s production speaks to a new era of protest and unrest

The urgency and immediacy that fuels the Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s full-throated, devastating and galvanising play about the first four years of the Aids crisis, is rare in conventional theatre. The form, especially in establishment spaces, can often take too long to hold its fabled mirror up to society and show us who we are. The Normal Heart is all mirror, and it demands you meet its gaze.

When the play made its debut off-Broadway in 1985, the crisis was in full effect. The play’s first set was literally ripped from the headlines: the walls were covered with news stories, quotes and names of people who had died. As the show ran, numbers of the latest total number of cases – prominently displayed – were crossed out and the new number written beneath it. A stage as a living document.

Progressive Christians speak of pain and anger as issue is put in deep freeze after London meeting

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The hopes of progressive Christians in the Church of England have suffered a big blow after years of bitter and divisive debate, with the C of E’s ruling body agreeing to halt work on LGBTQ+ equality.

At a meeting in London on Thursday, the General Synod backed a document from bishops concluding that consensus between conservative and liberal camps within the church could not be reached.

Her comments have been put through Britain’s culture war meat-grinder, but sexuality and gender is as fluid and interesting as we want it to be

Pity Olivia Colman. She didn’t want it to become the headline that she sometimes thinks of herself as a gay man – but clearly forgot how neurotic and demagogic much of the British press becomes if you say anything mildly provocative about sexuality and gender.

Here’s what happened. In an interview last week with the American LGBTQ+ publication Them, when asked about her penchant for taking roles in films featuring LGBTQ+ characters (say, The Favourite or Heartstopper), the actor said that she feels that she has a foot in various camps. “Throughout my whole life, I’ve had arguments with people where I’ve always felt sort of nonbinary … I’ve never felt massively feminine in my being female. I’ve always described myself to my husband as a gay man. And he goes, ‘Yeah, I get that.’”

Jason Okundaye is an assistant Opinion editor at the Guardian

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Two groups, Pride in Protest and Protect Mardi Gras, have very different ideas about what the annual pride festival is all about

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As the annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras protest parade reaches the end of Oxford Street each year and moves into the Entertainment Quarter, it turns into a party. A big name such as Kylie Minogue, Dua Lipa or RuPaul is usually a centrepiece of the extravaganza.

But not this year.

Academic says risk factor is not sexual orientation but society’s treatment of sexual minority people

Life expectancy for people who identify as gay, bisexual or another sexual orientation in England and Wales was approximately a year lower than their heterosexual counterparts, according to the first analysis of its kind by the Office for National Statistics.

The life expectancy from age 20 for men who identified as LGB+ was 1.2 years lower than men who identified as straight, at 59.4 years and 60.7 years respectively.

Gergely Karácsony urged people to take to streets in June in pushback against Orbán government’s attack on rights

Prosecutors in Hungary have filed charges against the progressive mayor of Budapest, seeking to fine him months after hundreds of thousands of people heeded his call to take to the streets in defiance of the government’s ban on Pride.

The June march made headlines around the world after the ruling Fidesz party, led by the rightwing populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, backed legislation that created a legal basis for Pride to be banned, citing a widely criticised need to protect children.

Asafe Ghalib photographs his friends and fellow artists with one aim – to transform them into their ‘rawest, most beautiful and most empowered’ form

A wave of violence has left transgender people afraid to go out, as experts say the global rise of far-right ideology is fuelling transphobia

It was past midnight but Zehrish Khanzadi and Bindiya Rana were still up, drinking tea, when the doorbell rang. Within seconds of Rana unlocking the door remotely from the kitchen, three shots rang out. “The men fled and she narrowly escaped all three bullets,” Khanzadi says of her colleague and housemate.

Both trans women work for the Gender Alliance Interactive (GIA), an organisation that advocates for transgender rights, Rapa as its head and Khanzadi as a rights activist.