Original sin
Already being hailed as a masterpiece, Russell T Davies’ new Channel 4 drama, It’s A Sin, revisits the health crisis that decimated the gay community. Paul Flynn, who came of age at that time, salutes a story rarely told from the inside
BACK in 1990, hitch-hiking somewhere up the M6, a friend and I were picked up by a cockney lorry driver carrying a wagonload of oranges from Seville. We were two 19-year-old Northern gay boys, knee-deep in the thrills of a new decade. His name was Harry and he had all the patter. I can still picture his craggy, almost archetypal East End face, fuzzy mutton chops and pork pie hat, as if three decades ago were yesterday.
After a couple of hours chatting amiably, Harry offered to buy us breakfast at Lancaster Services. As we sat down over a Little Chef full English, he took off his hat and promptly burst into a flood of unexpected tears. Through the wet face of a thousand sorrys, he explained that only a week earlier he had buried his partner of 25 years. He’d died quickly of pneumonia in the last stages of his Aids battle. More sorrys. The trip to Seville was Harry’s first job since leaving his bedside. More tears.
I had a startling reminder of that trip while watching It’s A Sin, the arresting new Russell T Davies drama that details the lives of a gay flat-share, set against the first decade of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Other personal recollections piled on top of it. The year before Harry, I’d met the first gay couple I ever knew. They had a flatmate dying upstairs each time I visited, a domestic set-up I assumed happened in every gay household right up until I found one that didn’t. A couple of years after Harry, a lovely lad who’d been two years below me at school and who’d ended up working as a teenage rent boy, died in the Aids ward of Monsall Hospital, north Manchester, shortly before his 21st birthday.
In what is already being hailed as his television masterpiece — the drama Davies himself has said he has been waiting a lifetime to write — the brilliant television auteur tackles it all, head on. He hands over the tempestuous lead storyline to Years and Years singer Olly Alexander as Ritchie Tozer, one of five flatmates flung together across class, race and confidence in a cheap London flat in the early Eighties.
Tozer has arrived in the capital to study law, the easiest ruse to get away from his repressed home life on the Isle of Wight and live a full gay life. Each episode shifts forward a couple of years, all the more effective to maximise the accumulative devastation piling up around the big disease with the little name.
For my gay generation and that 10 years either side of it, death and desire made unlikely but unavoidable twins. Davies draws from the pairing a patchwork story drawn from direct personal experience.
The Government Aids leaflets passed through every British letterbox (Silence = death) and the tombstone television ads shown in the commercial break of Coronation Street (Don’t die of ignorance) were as much a feature of my early teenage life as the theme tune to Dallas, or Blockbusters.
It’s A Sin traces the virus from our canny group of friends first hearing of “the gay cancer” through several stages of denial, acceptance, panic and loss. Little vignettes turn into something huge and frequently heart-breaking.
The cast and crew runs at all their material like a charging bull, andrenalised by the urgency of finally unfolding some of the realities involved in coming out between 1983 and 1993.
A quick recap. For most of the Eighties and a considerable portion of the Nineties, gay men were Britain’s enemy within. We were scandalised by the tabloid newspapers, ostracised from the Church, banned from being taught in schools, invisible in competitive sports, vilified on television and frequently targeted by the police.
There is a shared gay epithet I heard often during my first active gay years, a notion passed down through generations in real life and swapped in casual conversation around a dinner table in It’s A Sin; that if Aids were a disease that had primarily happened to straight men it would’ve been sorted out in no time. Aids stories would have been shared with all the solemnity and gravitas of those gleaned from the Second World War.
Yet, It’s A Sin is the first major British episodic drama to tell this human story from the inside, of what Aids did to decimate a generation of gay men. It could not fall into a more pertinent moment. Thirty-seven years and an estimated 33 million deaths worldwide since its identification, there is still no HIV vaccine.
Aids broke our generation only to strengthen, then fortify us. We galvanised ourselves with mercurial community resolve. Sex became as confusingly thrilling as putting your hand directly into the fire, or abseiling down a cliff without a harness. The death toll mounted, taking public scalps of those in and out of a closet medicine did not distinguish between. We lost Middle England’s living room favourites Russell Harty, Kenny Everett and Freddie Mercury; counter-culture titans Leigh Bowery, Derek Jarman and Tony De Vit; international giants of their individual arts, Rock Hudson, Sylvester and then Keith Haring.
The reason we remember Princess Diana holding the hands of Aids patients in the saintly Portobello Aids respite resource, The London Lighthouse, is because nobody else did, turning her prophetically into the exact inverse of Boris Johnson at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis.
What Davies pinpoints is the shame doubled down on anyone with Aids back then. The lies that families told their neighbours, friends, kith and kin to disguise an already stigmatised way to die. The funeral directors who refused to bury our bodies. The hospitals that sent us packing from our loved ones’ wards.
For the generations who lived through Aids as it wreaked most havoc, it’s tempting to think that this generational shame has disappeared. Yet, for every step forward, there are two back. Massive medical advancements are counterbalanced by the doorstepping of the family of Gareth Thomas, informed by a tabloid journalist of his HIV diagnosis before the Welsh rugby hero was able to speak to them on his own terms.
By the end of this weekend, with all five episodes shared on Channel 4’s catch-up portal, It’s A Sin will have entered the pantheon of classic arts that responded to the aids crisis.
Russell T Davies, Olly Alexander and the team in front of and behind the camera will become modern heroes in an ongoing story that has defined our times, the toast of those for whom trauma became a tacit feature of everyday life.
It’s A Sin exists in a place beyond television entertainment. This one is for all the Harrys out there — new and old.