It’s A Sin
We’re supposed to be in the present, aren’t we?
And I am, at the moment. I’m generally guilty of living too much in the future, occasionally drifting into obsessive rumination over the past. Right now I am where I am, which is supposed to be good. But where I am is in the middle of a pandemic, which is bad. In the moment, but feeling only the longing to get out of it. Not feeling very much, in general. So few things reach me right now - most of what I usually know to be good or true is getting lost in the fug of worry or fear.
Watching It’s A Sin I was remembering that there were things other than the here and now. There was a thing called history, and it matters. It matters because it speaks to the present, but it also matters in and of itself. And in this thing called history, there was a generation of young, funny, sweet men who thought that there would be a thing called the future, but, for them, there wasn’t. Instead there was death - the kind of lonely, undignified, frightening death that we can only usually half-glance at when it afflicts the old, when we can rationalise it as the tragic coda to a long life, well-lived.
AIDS killed the young as remorselessly as if they’d already received their full measure of life.
How is it that schools had time to teach us the Tudors over and over, but the AIDS pandemic, the Troubles, the British Empire, they seem to escape the curriculum’s notice? There’s an unspoken reasoning that we shouldn’t teach anything to kids that might be considered incendiary, with no thought given to the growing tinder box of the ignorance caused by failing to teach it.
When you find out about the recent history of your country you end up feeling like you’ve just found out your uncle was a serial killer, and no one bothered to tell you.
That’s fucking incendiary.
The generation of men that died of AIDS have been wielded in so many different ways - as a conduit for shame, as a cautionary tale, and perhaps now as a foil to the present pandemic. Russell T Davies just writes about it, without needing it to stand as a metaphor for something. He honours the people who died and the people who nursed them, honours their beauty, not as martyrs or romantic figures, but as the defiant raging of ravaged bodies, young and full of hope and joy and shame all smashed up against one another. Sex is sex in It’s A Sin, it isn’t necessarily a metaphor for love. He depicts so many kinds of sex in the show - nervous, callow sex, sex steeped in shame, tender sex, reckless sex, aborted sex. Most of all, joyous sex. Sex as an expression and fulfilment of desire.
Imagine it. You’ve grown up being told you’re all wrong, that you’re warped and broken, a stunted non-person, a pervert, a failure. You become convinced that if you were to disclose who you are your parents wouldn’t love you any more, not because they’re not loving parents, but because nobody could love someone like you.
Then you take a chance, you move to the big city, you find people like you. And you see that they are happy, that they can live with authenticity (even if they’re not ‘out’ in a sense that we might recognise today). They can have love and defiance and pride in who they are.
And just when you’re starting to believe that you might have a future, just as you start to believe that there might be a place in the world for people like you, those people start to die.
I can’t imagine it. I’ve never been through that. But I guess it would make you feel cursed. Like you should have known you didn’t deserve to be happy. The AIDs pandemic was a medical phenomenon, yes, but it was more than that. The illness itself was metastasised and corrupted and distorted into something even more evil and pernicious by the locked doors and drawn curtains and burnt memories of secrecy and shame, of the hatred of gay people.
It’s A Sin doesn’t try to make that tragedy and injustice okay. It doesn’t offer any glib happy endings. It’s a howl of rage and grief - if the definition of grief is, as Jamie Anderson says - unspent love. Love with no place to go. Love for young, beautiful, hopeful men who wanted to live authentically and wanted each other and wanted, so badly, to live.
I suppose it’s precisely because It’s A Sin left me speechless that I want to write about it. There are some things you see, watch, read that bypass your thinking mind and go straight to your core; you have no real inclination to dissect or analyse them. You just let them quietly become a part of who you are.
During this pandemic I’ve decided I’m just going to write about the things I like and that moved me and put them on here. Not as polished essays - I’m too tired and sad for that. I suppose as an archive, as a way of pushing my thoughts out into the world, and as a way of reminding myself of the importance of art when art is kind of all we have.