Film introduces a gay alphabet, with the aid of images and music, which it is argued is a defense against heterosexual language, and the hidden insults contained within.

Despite the title, Richard Kwietniowski’s Ballad of Reading Gaol focuses not on Oscar Wilde's famous poem (written in exile in 1897), but on quotations from his 1895 trial for gross indecency. Ambitious and playful, the film hurls fragments of testimony at the viewer, emblazoned upon provocative backdrops, from tattoos and sweaty vests to studded jockstraps. The film visits the London haunts where Wilde's 'crimes' took place and the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where the playwright is buried. At the close, Quentin Crisp enunciates Wilde’s famous “love that dare not speak its name” speech. While Wilde’s definition of homosexuality as the love between an older and a younger man is archaic, Kwietniowski cleverly draws parallels with contemporary homophobia, including a reference to Section 28.

2003 film by Richard Kwietniowski

Curmudgeonly author Giles De'Ath, a widower with a marked distaste for modern popular culture, attempts to buy a ticket for a film adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel, but instead finds himself watching a tacky teen sex comedy. Yet when the beautiful Ronnie Bostock appears on the movie screen, Giles finds himself caught in a whirlwind of unanswered questions about both his own sexuality and his place in late 20th-century society.