I came out into what was perhaps the most sexually conservative moment in gay history. What I recall most about my first visit to a gay bar, just three years after the story arc of Russell T Davies’ It’s a Sin finds its conclusion, is the haunting image of a skeletal figure chain-smoking in a shadowy corner. There was the acrid smell of sweat, sex, and smoke machines as lasers pierced the dark keeping rhythm with the thumping synthetic beat of 90’s dance mixes — but what I remember most was the wry smile and tired eyes of that man who I would come to know as a friend of a friend, too weak to dance, looking thirty years older than his thirty-year-old body. He was there every Saturday night. I remember him saying on a later visit, “Have fun, boys — stay safe, else…” striking a fragile but elegant old Hollywood pose while propping himself up against the bar, letting his body do the talking.
It’s a Sin follows a circle of friends living in London from 1981 to 1989. It tracks their escapes from small towns and/or conservative homes to the liberation of bohemian city life. The band of mostly gay men, and one fiercely loyal and ultimately mothering woman, share a home (dubbed the Pink Palace) as they live out their young adulthoods in the midst of the unfolding AIDS crisis. Superbly crafted and acted, Davies has perfected the art of ensemble storytelling that he began exploring two decades ago in Queer as Folk. Davies, himself, lived through many of the experiences his characters face, and the show reflects an intimate familiarity with the grief and resilience of the community of people there to meet me as I was coming out. Though I got a later version of it, the experience of all those “firsts” in this coming of age narrative resonated — the first time telling someone you’re gay, the first time having sex, the first time finding a place where you belong...and the first time waiting in a clinic with fear and trembling for your test results.
By the time of my edging out of the closet in 1992, we were far enough into the AIDS epidemic that Safer Sex messages were omnipresent. In workshop after workshop I learned how to unroll condoms onto bananas, cucumbers, and once a model of my university’s iconic bell tower. I came out into a community that knew how to fight the spread, but before “the cocktail” emerged as a medical intervention that gave us any sustained hope for living after an HIV diagnosis. I was part of the generation of gay men who had grown up hearing more reported details than any of our predecessors about gay life in the big cities, but only because those stories were about the deaths of whole circles of our would-be queer siblings. In high school, I had a shoebox hidden under my bed full of clippings of articles about gay men — almost all of them about gay men dying.
I joined the ranks of the peer activist/educator crowd, following my friend Larry to the AIDS Service Project to pack our bookbags full of safer sex kits (condoms, lube and a pamphlet packed in a ziploc bag) then heading to the bars to flirt, educate, distribute, and dance the rest of the night for free. I moved in with a social work student who worked nights at the local AIDS care home, and over coffee after his shifts he’d tell me the stories of the slow deaths of the men he cared for, but always insisted on first telling me whatever he knew of the stories of their lives before he knew them. We marched for a cure, we painted slogans on walls, and we held die-ins — tracing our bodies in chalk in the center of campus to represent those lost to AIDS. But the vast majority of the folk I knew who were diagnosed as HIV positive made it to when the cocktail changed everything. I knew one couple that sold all they had and went on a big trip around the world, expecting to be dead within eighteen months. A year later, they were back home and befuddled by the prospect of starting over and building a new life.
A decade later than that, I would teach my first Intro to Queer Studies course at a university less than an hour from the one where I’d spent my late teens and early twenties. So much had changed so quickly. My students were born during the years It’s a Sin depicts. The stories of my early twenties seemed like another world, and the lives of those who had experienced the worst of the plague an incomprehensible distant past. I realized that I, and other queer folk my age, exist on a bridge, not old enough to firmly claim our ranks among the survivors, not young enough to assume the rightness of the mainstreaming of gay subculture into our social media and Netflix streams — one in which HIV seems more a hassle than a looming death sentence.
LGBTQ folk in general, and perhaps particularly gay men, have struggled to normalize cross-generational friendships. Lots of factors go into that — a youth-obsessed culture that dismisses older men as trolls, the experience of many older men wanting and willing to mentor but afraid of being perceived as predatory, and the diminished access to multigenerational institutions like family and church through which other marginalized communities pass on stories and wisdom. I remember the experience of texting with a friend and former student while watching the (not very good) televised production of Rent in 2019, only to be reminded that it debuted the year he was born. That led to a discussion of all the things I realized he had never seen, including Angels in America, which we quickly remedied. We’d worked and studied together for several years at this point — and I realized how little we’d talked about the past that so impacted his present. A year and a half later, on the week before COVID-19 shutdown Broadway, my husband and I took him to New York to see The Inheritance — a play about the world gay men inherited after the immense losses of the generation depicted in It’s a Sin. I just now texted him to make sure he watches It’s a Sin when it’s released in the US.
No doubt, elements of the story of these friends facing a plague seems particularly eerie when viewed, as we did, in a lockdown brought on by a pandemic. From the beginning, I’ve contended that there’s something to be learned from our gay elders about how to get a community to shift its behavior (aren’t masks the new condoms?), and as a result a montage sequence early in the series featuring a character in active denial reads as both foreboding and timely. That sequence, bookended with another brilliant and painful seven-minute sequence in the final episode featuring that character’s mother in the response to learning the predictable outcome of his denial, carry the heart of the show. There are laughs and tears along the way, deep pain and resounding beauty. From the vantage point of fifty-seven, exactly a decade older than me, Davies reflects on the characters derived from his youth with a wisdom, compassion, and pride that is not to be missed. It’s a version of this story we’ve been waiting for, and one that we could not have until now.
It’s a Sin is available on All 4 in the UK, and on HBOMax from February 18th. Click here to watch the trailer.
Brian Ammons is a chaplain and writer from North Carolina.
