Louise O'Neill: 'It's A Sin' will break your heart, but it's unmissable TV

Ep1. L-R Ash and Richie

I have this vivid memory from childhood. I’m lying on the rug in our living room, a knitted wool rug in black and white. The television is on. A man walks onto the screen and takes a seat.

In my memory, he has dark hair in a ponytail and I know he’s the presenter of an RTÉ show about fashion, my mother watches it every week. He’s talking about condoms and AIDS. I don’t really know what condoms are but I know what AIDS is. I turned to my mother and said something along the lines of, “you’re lucky you’re married and you don’t have to worry. I’m going to make my husband get a blood test to be sure I don’t get AIDS either.”

I googled that ad before I wrote this column today. The presenter — Pat O’Mahony, of Head-to-Toe fame — doesn’t have a ponytail but the rest of it is remarkably spot-on. It was released in 1993 so I was eight years of age and already planning to a) only have sex after marriage and b) insisting the lucky man take a blood test before we walked down the aisle. 

I knew AIDS was something to be frightened of but I didn’t have any preconceptions of it as a ‘gay’ disease; I don’t think I even understood what gay meant. Which is… weird, looking back because I knew what a sex worker was after I’d watched Pretty Woman (someone call child services on my parents, please). The word was a playground insult, as was ‘lesbian’, which I instinctively knew wasn’t a compliment. 

As I got older, there were gay people in my periphery — a hairdresser, a ballet teacher, a man I worked with — but no one I knew in school, neither mine nor the boys' community college, was openly out. I honestly can’t imagine how they would have survived in the early 00s if they had been, such was the seething underbelly of homophobia at the time. What a relief it must have been, I always thought, when they left for university. 

I was remembering this as I watched Channel 4’s new mini-series, It’s A Sin, set during the AIDS crisis of the 80s and early 90s. The first episode is intoxicating, as four young men leave their small towns and overbearing parents behind and move to London. It’s a whirl of parties and sex and drink and drugs — oh, the fun they have!

It’s dizzying! — but more importantly, it’s a joyous depiction of that moment in a young person’s life when they make their own 'family', gathering people around them who love and accept them exactly as they are. They find their tribe and it’s a beautiful thing. The creeping awareness of this ‘strange flu’ in New York that only seems to affects gay men approaches slowly, and as a viewer you’re holding your breath, knowing what tragedy is coming. 

The series is a devastating look at the AIDS crisis, the grossly negligent way it was mishandled by governments both here and across the Atlantic, and the hysterical stigma that was woven around it. The vilification of an already marginalised group of people, tabloids calling it a ‘gay plague’ and publishing interviews with a vicar who threatened to shoot his son if he was infected. 

Gay men were sacked from their jobs, bullied, ridiculed. Young men dying in hospital beds, alone, their families refusing to visit, the healthcare staff afraid to touch them, funeral homes reluctant to bury the bodies. 

It’s A Sin captures the desperate, grinding fear, the cruelty of a world happy to see it as a ‘gay problem’, a convenient excuse for their own prejudices, the lack of humanity shown to a community ravaged by an ugly, rapacious death. The photo of Princess Diana (who had an uncanny awareness of the power of imagery) hugging a child with AIDS in 1989 was so important because it defied the myth that HIV could be transmitted from casual touch. 

But it’s 31 years since that iconic photo was taken and the stigma around HIV and AIDS still exists. There are approximately 38 million people across the globe living with HIV/AIDS. Here in Ireland, it’s estimated to be around 10,000 (although there may be more undiagnosed) and while 56% of those are men who have sex with other men, 31% of diagnoses are from heterosexual transmissions. 

Incredible work has been done in this field and the average life expectancy of people living with HIV is now only nine years less than those who are HIV-negative. The management of HIV has become exponentially easier too, usually consisting of two antiretroviral tablets a day — and most importantly, this medication can reduce the viral load in the body to undetectable. If you take nothing else from this column, remember this: an undetectable viral load means HIV is untransmittable. 

Numerous studies have found that the risk of getting HIV from someone with an undetectable viral load is statistically equivalent to zero. People living with HIV who are on effective treatment cannot pass HIV onto their partners. It’s time for us all to get informed and to break the stigma around HIV and AIDS for good.

Louise Says:

Watch: It’s A Sin. This mini-series will break your heart but it’s unmissable, essential television.

Read: Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo. This was a bestseller in its native Korea and illustrates the changing attitudes to gender in a rapidly shifting culture.