It's A Sin: An Irish perspective on the superb TV drama about gay life in the 1980s
It's A Sin on Channel 4.
Twenty-one years after Queer As Folk erupted on our television screens with unflinchingly honest and exuberantly transgressive depictions of gay male sexuality, author Russell T Davies’ companion piece, It’s A Sin, mines the first decade of the Aids pandemic.
The five-part series, currently airing on Channel 4, follows the adventures of a group of gay men and a female flatmate, as they come of age in early 1980s London. Broadcast during another pandemic, the show’s launch had an ‘eventness’ rarely seen these days. and the box-set has gone on to become C4’s biggest ever. It’s not hard to see why: rock-solid writing with immaculate casting; and a playlist of '80s Brit pop and sad bangers, suffused with a distinct visual style.
Russell T Davies and I are of a similar vintage. He could so easily be describing my youth.
At the start of that decade, Ireland’s nascent LGBT civil rights movement was becoming more visible and vocal. Positive role models in media or pop culture were few and far between. At best, one could be refused service in a bar or denied promotion at work. At worst, any indication of ‘gayness’ was an invitation to a hiding. Or being ‘queer-bashed’ to death.
Lesbian mothers were routinely denied access and custody of their children in cases of separation. The existence of British Victorian legislation criminalising sexual intimacy between men not only sent consenting adults to prison but, in the minds of some, legitimised homophobia and states of exclusion that would endure right up to Marriage Equality in 2015.
And yet, possibility seemed boundless, even in poor, drab 1980s Dublin; a city, like Cork and Belfast, bereft of a commercial gay scene. Deprived of public places to meet and socialise, safe spaces where we could slough off our oppression, we built our own dance floors and shebeens. Places where we could imagine the exhilaration of liberty and know what it is like to touch another person of the same sex without fear of rancour or violence. Places where friendships are formed and communities are born.
It’s A Sin beautifully captures all of this, and the innocence, the rush of longing and hedonism so particular to one’s late teens and twenties. Navigating those first steps to personal freedom becomes increasingly fraught as news ripples across the Atlantic, fear and hysteria take hold (abetted by the ‘red tops’) and the government drags its feet about the new horror in our midst.
We were lucky in Ireland to be served by community leaders who rallied to ensure our survival. A group of gay men in Cork and Dublin set up Gay Health Action in 1985, producing the country’s first information leaflets on HIV/Aids and even fielding queries from worried heterosexuals.
The existence of the anti-gay criminal law was often used as a cop-out by civil society and statutory Ireland. When GHA’s information leaflets were due a reprint in 1986, the Department of Health was advised not to offer any funding for fear it would be seen to condone ‘criminal activity’. Two years later, the printers of Out, Ireland’s first commercial gay magazine, refused to print an edition after having taken exception to a safer sex ad, which - even by the standards of the day - was rather innocuous.
In the face of government obduracy and societal hostility, it fell to the lesbian and gay community and its allies to resource its own survival, not unlike IV drug users from inner-city communities who were also one of the earliest and largest cohort of HIV infection.
If we weren’t watching It’s A Sin during these dystopian times, it would be hard to credit some of the scenes we witnessed during the worst of the Aids pandemic. People being sacked from their jobs as soon as the tell-take signs of KS cancer lesions appeared on their body. Lonely, frightened young people disassociated from their families and being quarantined with all of the panoply of plague containment. The never-ending blame game and social opprobrium. The relentless victimisation, often spilling over into violence.
The lucky among us, showered with so many acts of kindness and compassion, found a better way of dying. We persevered, in spite of all. (Burying our grief and trauma undoubtedly came at a cost but I’ll save that longer conversation for another day.) Patrick Barrett, a 28-year-old Dubliner living with Aids in London, in a 1988 interview with Out magazine, summed it up so well:
“The only option I have is to carry on. All Aids has done is put an undefined time limit on things. You carry on because you’re still alive. You live with the disease rather than worrying about dying of it. So I face each day with a bit of cheer, have a bit of a laugh, enjoy myself, be with my friends.
"Until the moment life stops, you’ve to live it.”
- It’s A Sin airs on Friday nights on Channel 4
- Tonie Walsh, 60, was raised in Clonmel, Co Tipperary. He was founding editor of Gay Community News (Dublin) and has been at the heart of gay rights campaigns in Ireland through the decades
