Tainted Love?
February 11, 2021 5:03 AM   Subscribe

As we’ve seen, though, debates about PWAs being represented with dignity and agency date back to the start of the epidemic, as does the fight to preserve sex-positivity in the face of plague. For Davies not to represent those forces is a narrative choice, an interpretation of history that emphasises powerlessness, pain, isolation, shame and self-hatred over the countervailing forces of solidarity and communal struggle. Moving beyond the shame of the those years will only come after de-programming ourselves from a moralism of pleasure; it was then and is now possible to be a person with HIV and continue to have hot, safe sex.
Brian Mullin discusses his objections to Russell T. Davies' story about AIDS in the UK, It's a Sin.
posted by MartinWisse (9 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm slow to watch new media, and slightly regret having read this before actually getting around to watching It's a Sin, as I'm not sure now that I actually want to watch it. This is a very nuanced essay and one that I hope gets read widely, especially by as many as posisble of the straight/cis people who are lining up to talk on social media about how "devastating" etc. they found Russell T. Davies' narrative choices without any particular critique of any of those choices (or even insight into the fact that they were narrative choices).

Perhaps the simplest yet still most difficult thing to accept about HIV is that, when divested of all moralising and psychologising, the virus is just a virus.

Profoundly well put. I don't want to derail this thread towards COVID, but I can't help but consider the parallels. Particularly the fact that my own deep-seated perfectionism is driving me to aim for "perfect" outcomes in this pandemic, and the very slippery slope that I'm aware of internally from the personal compulsion to make "perfect" choices (aided by tremendous privilege in my case) to the idea that other people's "imperfect" choices or outcomes were in some way a moral failing on their part. I'm aware of it and trying very consciously not to slide into that connection, but it's hard to do against a cultural background where health implies morality and disease or ill health implies immorality.

I've had a resurgence of interest in HIV/AIDS recently, thanks mostly to following @theaidsmemorial on Instagram. I can't think of any other single platform or resource that's doing so much heavy lifting around HIV/AIDS as a topic right now. The account does a fantastic job of illustrating the diversity of people who live with, lived with and died from HIV/AIDS and related complications. I can't think of any other resource that shows just how much we lost in that epidemic. I shiver with grief and regret at the sheer number of people celebrated by families, friends and partners via that account who were described by their loved ones as "creative"; just the sheer amount of creativity alone that was lost to AIDS, let alone literally every other aspect of the humanity of the people who didn't make it through the epidemic, makes me tremendously sad.
posted by terretu at 5:54 AM on February 11, 2021 [9 favorites]


I too have yet to watch It's a Sin, although it's been most heavily recommended to me by a gay man close to me. I'm old enough to have enjoyed Queer as Folk when it was first shown on Channel 4 and he is not, but both of us are of exactly the right age to have been 'protected' by Section 28 and the culture that encouraged it, and so our understanding of LGBTQ life before the 21st century is only filtered through historical pieces without any of our own memories to help inform them. I expect the same is true of most people under, say, 45 and unless we're independently interested in this history, our understanding is inevitably going to be driven by series like this.

I guess that the editorial choices made in It's a Sin are very personal to Russell T. Davies' experiences of the early 80s, his struggles to integrate them, and the narrative he has built for himself. He really does stand apart as a screenwriter and showrunner in the UK by reputation (including as a gay screenwriter), which means that other stories and other voices on LGBTQ themes he has covered are less likely to be given such prestigious slots for their work, or indeed be seen as other than derivative of his work.
posted by plonkee at 6:32 AM on February 11, 2021


As someone who turned eighteen in the UK in 1984 and had to come to terms with being bi during that time, I have thoughts on this, most of which I am not going to share.
In the provincial city I grew up in the local chief constable described gay people as "swimming in a cesspool of their own making" and directed his troops to act accordingly; section 28 made it illegal for schools to even reference homosexuality, so there was no support there; male gay sex was illegal, and that illegality was severely enforced, for under 21's; there was also a lethal virus that was apparently our fault as well.
The idea that there's a secret gay history of the eighties full of solidarity and acceptance is pretty but completely ahistorical. There were pockets of that but mostly everyone was scared, isolated, poor and horny. What I've seen of It's a Sin so far catches that, including the obsessive who-gave-it-to-who conversations that went on all the fucking time.
I'm not really interested in being told I did my adolescent sexuality wrong or that a fairly accurate representation of what it was like then should reflect the politics of a later era.
The show works for me. It's often dramatically clunky (it's RTD? What did you expect?) but it's also honest and true (see previous parenthesis).
I'm sorry we were so bad at being LGBTQ in the eighties. That's not what we feel guilt and shame about though.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:47 AM on February 11, 2021 [36 favorites]


The same people who were interested in shaming LGBTQ folks for the existence of HIV in the 80s are now openly spreading deadly viruses in the name of Christ.
posted by benzenedream at 12:50 PM on February 11, 2021 [4 favorites]


First of all, the author of this piece is wondering why the cutting-edge rhetoric of ACT-UP-type activists isn't being used by the characters of a show meant to provide a small window into the lives of a small group of young men coming into their own in the '80s. What percentage of people in the LGBTQ community actually openly participated in organizations like ACT-UP? That's a real question--I don't know. I was under the impression it was "not a lot" because people were afraid of being outed.

Second of all, I didn't really see this in the show: "HIV infection is viewed as part of an economy of pleasure: you have your fun and then you’re expected to pay the price." That erases from the narrative the gay men in the show who don't get HIV. In fact, there are gay men who have quite a lot of sex and stay seronegative. It seems to me that Davies' point was not "have sex and die", it was "this affected people who engaged in a whole spectrum of frequency of sexual activity and who got infected appeared to be at total random".

Third, there's a complaint that this show did not contain non-queer people with AIDS, and it's like, that wasn't the point of it? It was about gay men! Did you watch Queer As Folk and say there aren't enough straight people?

Fourth--there absolutely was a culture of shame around gay sex and HIV/AIDS and it is ridiculous that this author wants Davies to somehow ignore or deny that it existed. Especially when the author himself says that he suffered from the same thing! In the modern era!

I could keep going. It feels like the author wants It's a Sin to be something it wasn't ever trying to be. Davies was telling the story a lot of gay men experienced: finding community, exploring one's identity, and then suddenly everyone arounds you starts dying and it's terrifying and random and heartbreaking. No, it's not an empowering story. But it was a real one. If you want to say "well, I've heard that one already", OK, you've heard it already, move along. But to say "no, that story is wrong", well, where are you getting that from? Because the whole reason organizations like ACT-UP were founded, organizations the author praises, the whole reason organizations like that exist was because people were having those experiences. You don't get to say they're wrong.
posted by Anonymous at 5:28 PM on February 11, 2021


It feels like the author wants It's a Sin to be something it wasn't ever trying to be.

That's the impression I got too; and if it had been that thing, it absolutely would not have been as good a piece of television. Which is fine if you want to watch a documentary. This wasn't a documentary, it was a drama. It was telling the story of a particular cohort in a particular time and place, as they were living the experience at the time, without the benefit of hindsight or foresight or the access to information we have now (one of the things that struck me was how the show demonstrated just how difficult it was to find out anything about AIDS without the internet - Jill has to get Colin to pick up some literature at gay bookstores when he visits the US because there's nothing she can find in London).

I'd also disagree that the series focuses "on only two main characters who contract the virus". Yes, two of the main five characters, but that's disregarding all the other stories that we see for anything from a few minutes to almost a whole episode, like Gloria, whose story was a big part of the overall narrative. Or the Saville Row guy and his partner.
posted by andraste at 8:11 PM on February 11, 2021 [3 favorites]


It's absolutely okay for a guy who wasn't in ACT-UP to make an AIDS story about guys who weren't in ACT-UP and didn't process the world that way.

Actually, it's okay - and I say this as a left-liberal - to make non-leftist art. It really is okay and fine and not unethical or immoral.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 10:59 PM on February 11, 2021 [7 favorites]


Sometimes I read critical pieces and I feel: this would have been a much better conversation between the writer and the artist. Even a private conversation.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:28 AM on February 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


I don't have any personal take to ad but I appreciated this piece and have been mulling it over, it came across to me like a nuanced and fair bit of engagement with the work. Fully agree that I'd love to read a conversation between Davies and Mullin.
posted by Emily's Fist at 12:42 PM on February 12, 2021


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