Maggie Dearest :: Meryl Streep faces the hardest sell of her career

For those of us old enough to remember (or have seen the film or musical "Billy Eliot" recently), the mantra "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Out, out, out!" brings to mind a rallying call many British citizens shouted in street actions against Margaret Thatcher, the UK's first woman prime minister.

Set aside Pinochet, the Falkland Islands, privatization of nationalized industries, battles with trade unions and The Smiths for the moment. Even if any of the above never presented themselves during the span of Thatcher's robust and (to many) dictatorial political career, queers would still have every right to loathe her for Section 28.

This was an anti-gay initiative that wound up on the books after the prime minister got it rolling when one of her lackey's complained about Susanne Bosche's children's book about gay parenting, "Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin," by asking if that tome had any place school library shelves.

Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988 insures local authorities "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality." It also bans teaching it while containing the antiquated but virulent hate speech which classifies all queer homes as "pretended family relationship."

About Section 28

Section 28 sparked Sir Ian McKellan to come out in a BBC interview and Boy George to record "No Clause 28" in protest. Lesbian activists chained themselves to the desks of BBC television reporters on the night before it became law. Section 28 was the big bang that formed the queer political action group Outrage! British pop singer Morrissey's home was sacked by police after he released the track "Margaret on the Guillotine" with its oft-repeated chorus, "When will you die?"

Thatcher was fully behind the legislation. Before Section 28 was passed, Thatcher told a Conservative conference: "Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay."

Times, though, changed - Thatcher was sacked, finally, by her own party and Section 28 was repealed, first in Scotland in 2000, then in the rest of the UK in 2003. In 2005, the Conservative Party leader Michael Howard told the gay magazine Attitude: "I thought, rightly or wrongly, that there was a problem in those days. That problem simply doesn't exist now. Nobody's fussed about those issues any more. It's not a problem, so the law shouldn't be hanging around on the statute book."

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Girl power

Why, then, would Meryl Streep decide to play a figure as divisive as Thatcher in her new film "The Iron Lady," a performance that won her the Golden Globe and has made her a front-runner to win her second Best Actress Oscar?

It seems for Streep, girl power trumps gay rights. "I'm in awe of all the things that were arrayed against her succeeding to get to the top of her party and then to lead the country," Streep says of Thatcher, "and to be the longest serving prime minister in the twentieth century. The obstacles that stood before her in England at that time were enormous. She did a service for our team by getting there."

Our team? Her out director Phyllida Lloyd, who last capitalized on Streep's cultish devotion to the musical "Mamma Mia!" and parlayed it into the biggest grossing musical of all time, doesn't even flinch. Streep is at least able to toss a peanut to the elephant in the room, a conference hall in the cushy Waldorf-Astoria. She does a half-stand to adjust her maroon coatdress, then sits down again and gets down to business.

"You might not agree with the politics," Streep says, "but just the fact of her determination, her stamina and her courage to take it on, I think anybody that stands up and is willing to be a leader, who is as prepared as she was and as smart as she was, it's admirable on a certain level because you really sacrifice a great deal. All of our public figures do."

A shout out to "Streeptease"

For the record, "The Iron Lady" never mentions Section 28, the AIDS epidemic or any other gay-related issues that cropped up during her tenure. Nor does it open with Thatcher as a public figure at all. Rather we see Thatcher (Streep with prosthetics) as a stooped old woman who can't get to her local bodega and back without a senior moment where she's addressing her dead husband (something she does, ad nauseum, throughout the movie). The device is meant to elicit tears, but if you have even one iota of sympathy for her during this film, turn in your gay card immediately.

Interestingly despite the lack of gay content and Thatcher's regressive views, a young, queer journalist asks Streep if she considers Thatcher a gay icon.

"Wait," Streep cries, "Wait!" To her credit, she does manage to milk a laugh out of the question's preface, a kind of get ready for the gay question, Meryl.

She removes her half-glasses, last seen crowd surfing their way to the stage as she accepted a Golden Globe for this performance, does a few shoulder rolls and tilts her head from side to side.

"Okay," the 62-year-old jokes, "Now I'm ready." Her answer, though, is perhaps not worthy of the wind up. All she can come up with as rationale for Thatcher's proposed status as gay icon is "the hats." And that's only after prompting by Lloyd, who, unbelievably, feeds Streep the reference.

Never one to flounder, at least with her half-glasses on, Streep does what any actor worth her salt would. She redirects the question back to herself.

At least she has the wherewithal to shout out an in-the-trenches queen by mentioning Roy Cruz's Los Angeles-based phenomenon "Streeptease," an entertainment billing itself "an evening of Meryl Streep monologues performed by an all-male cast." She may be impersonating the gay-unfriendly Thatcher in movie screens throughout the world, but she's happy that a gaggle of gays are offering Streep impersonations in a small LA theater. It's almost as if Streep is operating under the jingoism, "Offend Globally, Act Locally."

"I just recently found out I'm a gay icon," she says, wide-eyed, "from that show where they do little arias from all my movies, but I haven't gotten up the nerve to go yet."

An absurd notion

She takes a moment and gets a little lost in mulling this absurd idea of Thatcher as gay icon. "I don't know," Streep finally answers, "She stirs very strong feelings, even today, 20 years after leaving power. And she remains divisive. The film will enter a landscape where she continues to cause controversy. I can't answer the question about whether she's a gay icon. That's a difficult one for me."

Questions Streep is happy to address? Those about New Jersey, perhaps? The Summit native uses it as a rationale for taking on the role. "For me to imagine myself in different ways," she says, "comes from my beginnings in the theater. People are more accepting when you go wildly afield from who you are or where you brought up. Otherwise, I would always play people from New Jersey, which limits the career. So yes, I felt like I had freedom to try to step into these very small, tight, big shoes."

And it's not properly Thatcherite were those shoes to not match the bag. And apparently, Streep was given access to rifling through Thatcher's own handbag. How else to explain the actor happening upon Thatcher's day planner? "I have an inkling of the size of the day that she fulfilled," Streep says, "I looked at her daily calendar and I tried to imagine that."

Again, Streep makes it personal. "I'm a mother and I work in spurts throughout my career," she says, "I'd work for four or five months and then not, so I was home a lot. But she was unhappy if there were ten minutes of free time anywhere in her day. That was wasted, wasted time. Trying to be in the lives of your children, to the degree that I try to be in their lives, would have been very difficult."

More nurture than nature?

And perhaps the personal really is political. Streep also sees Thatcher as more nurture than nature. "Margaret Thatcher was forged within her family," she says, "in a family of two girls, in a time when sons were favored, and a man that had no sons had no ambition, really, no place to put his ambition."

"Her father was the mayor of Grantham," Streep continues of Thatcher's tiny hometown north of London in the East Midlands of England. "He was very engaged politically, but also he was a lay-Methodist minister. And he preached. He liked to be up front speaking. And he discovered that of his two daughters, he had one that was uncommonly bright and uncommonly curious, and maybe this could be his boy."

So "The Iron Lady" is not as girl power powered as we'd previously been led to believe? Not on director Phyllida Lloyd's watch. "We thought of the film as something of a King Lear" for girls," Lloyd is quick to point out, "a Shakespearean story, not a political one. And in that sense, we spoke to a number of Margaret Thatcher's close associates who described her story in operatic terms. I'd worked in opera a lot, and to me this did have some of the elements of a tragic opera. So yes, it was rather critical." "In that time it was a disappointment to have a family with two girls," Streep continues of Thatcher's early home life, "and it remains that way in many parts of the world. We can understand this -- it's not that alien of a landscape, although I can't imagine it. I think that she fulfilled a promise, and she was uncommonly curious, had a prodigious appetite for learning and for doing things right."

And where did Thatcher's father figure in that equation? "He infused in her the courage to get up and out I suppose," Streep answers. "Not only is she the first female prime minister, but she's the first chemist to be elected prime minster. She took her degree at Oxford in chemistry, and then took the law boards. She had a lot of promise and she wanted to live up to it."

Perhaps this clawing ambition is the same thing that drives Streep? "I never really decided," she says, "I'm still ambivalent, but being an actor lets me be a million different things. I don't have to decide."

And with that, the journalists present are told to remain calm and seated as Streep is air-lifted out of the room by a phalanx of publicists operating with a militaristic, almost Falklands-like precision.

"The Iron Lady" is currently in theaters.

Watch Meryl Streep win the Golden Globe for "The Iron Lady":