‘It’s a Sin’ celebrates life and honours the dead
I couldn’t sleep the night after we watched the third episode of “It’s a Sin.” The acclaimed five-part U.K. miniseries is about the early days of AIDS. When it aired in the U.K., the series was a revelation for many, including younger gay men, who had no idea about those heady early days of gay liberation and then the huge toll taken by HIV/AIDS.
In Canada, as well, most people 40 years old and younger have little familiarity with the full impact of those days.
The first two episodes capture the exuberance of young men in the early 1980s, coming to the big city and revelling in a new community of friends, discotheques and readily available sex.
But by the third episode a mysterious illness was taking hold. It thrust me back to those frightening years when so many young men, including my cousin Brian and his (and my) friends, developed horrible illnesses and had their lives cut short.
More than 40 years since it emerged, there are treatments for HIV/AIDS, but there is no vaccine. Politicians and the media ignored or downplayed the threat of AIDS in the early years, and for decades the stigma and prejudice against people with HIV/AIDS has been pervasive.
Parents lied about the causes of their sons’ deaths, attributing them to cancer or pneumonia. At my Brian’s memorial in 1996, my aunt forbade speakers to mention the word AIDS. (She was not obeyed.) The enormous human toll of multiple losses among gay men is still not well recognized.
Asked about parallels between the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the current COVID-19 pandemic, “It’s a Sin” creator Russell T. Davies noted that both disproportionately affect marginalized people.
Costume designer Peter Evans was the first Canadian to go public, to allow himself to be identified, quoted and photographed as a gay man with AIDS. He helped to launch the AIDS Committee of Toronto in the summer of 1983 and died the following year.
It’s possible, now, to find many entries about Peter Evans on the internet, including a testimonial from his mother, Doris Evans, in which she solicits donations for AIDS research. But in the early 2000s, when I showed two slides of Evans to AIDS meetings, no one could identify or name him.
I’m glad that so much more is now readily available online about the history of the early days of AIDS here, but I know that most Canadians still have little idea about what communities of gay men experienced and suffered.
As a journalist and broadcaster, I began writing about AIDS in the late 1980s but my cousin’s death prompted me to keep reporting and, when I was alerted to the legacy of Michael Lynch, to embark on researching and writing a book.
Lynch was an English professor at the
University of Toronto, a father, and a gay activist. After he came out in 1972, at age 28, he pushed for gay rights, wrote for The Body Politic, helped to found the Toronto Gay Academic Union, and revelled in his community of gay friends. Later, he co-founded AIDS Action Now and was the driving force behind Toronto’s AIDS Memorial.
I drew on the 41 volume set of his small black diaries when researching my 2003 book, “AIDS Activist, Michael Lynch and the Politics of Community.” The focus on Lynch allowed me to write about his journey from (as he put it) “elegy to action” and to also tell the stories of many other important gay activists in Canada. Lynch died in 1991, and many of my interviewees have died.
Back in the 1980s, like other journalists, I received regular federal government reports on the numbers of HIV infections and AIDS deaths, no names attached.
What’s refreshing about “It’s a Sin” is that, particularly in the first episodes, it captures gay men in all their lively, playful, quirky uniqueness before the epidemic took hold and deaths came in waves. In this way, the series honours the dead, and helps viewers to imagine just how much was lost when so many died so young.