Ian McKellen says Alec Guinness once pleaded with him not to actively campaign for gay rights, after taking him for an Italian lunch in Pimlico in 1989. McKellen said Guinness had heard about his work to establish Stonewall and thought it was somewhat unseemly for an actor to dabble in public or political affairs.
McKellen said he remembered the lunch while watching Two Halves of Guinness, a solo show that hints at Sir Alec’s latent bisexuality. He said Guinness advised him, and “sort of pleaded” with him, to withdraw from public campaigning, but McKellen did not follow that advice.
The lunch mattered because it brought together two of Britain’s best-known actors at a moment when McKellen had already come out publicly as gay in 1988 and was helping to found Stonewall the following year. Guinness, best known for originating Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, had died in 2000, but his private life kept resurfacing in public through later accounts.
Two biographies published in 2001 said Guinness was privately bisexual, though the marriage he maintained in public lasted from 1938 until his death, to Merula Silvia Salaman. An authorised biography also said Guinness had been charged in 1946 with performing a homosexual act in a public lavatory and that he gave the name Herbert Pocket when he was arrested.
That history leaves McKellen’s lunch story with a sharper edge than a show-business anecdote. Guinness, according to later biographies, kept his sexuality known only to close friends and colleagues, while McKellen chose a public path that helped push gay rights into the open. The clash between the two men’s instincts was not accidental; it was the point. McKellen asked for no retreat, and did not retreat.
