When we first meet Mr Matthews (Samuel Barnett), he’s a bureaucrat in an insurance firm, working in his office. It’s the picture of middle-class conformity. A perfectly ordinary man, living a lie, hiding his sexuality and suffering silently for it.
When his stylish secretary Deardrie (Tracy-Anne Green) excitedly states she is going dancing “up West” with the girls on the switchboard, you can sense Matthews’ yearning. He is coming to the realisation that there is more to the world than he’s been allowed to see.
Taking the plunge, he heads to a discrete bar in the backstreets of Soho whose only sign to the outside world is a neon pink flamingo. Inside a bustling, colourful world of non-conforming is opening up to him. It’s a world headed up by the wonderful Edna-May (Cyril Nri), a lipstick-strewn, Polari-speaking, flamboyant older gay man, who holds court in this gay haven. “We are all family here” he tells Matthews reassuringly.
Later, emboldened, Matthews sits in a public toilet cubicle with the door ajar. Embarrassed and desperate. Then he meets Jimmy (Simon Lennon), a handsome working class man…