Series takes hard look at AIDS, gay life in ’90s

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This article was published 18/03/2021 (1694 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The title of this Amazon Prime series gives viewers a hint to the emotional highs and lows to come.

It’s a Sin shares a name with the 1987 hit by the Pet Shop Boys, which combined dancefloor-ready synth-pop with lyrics that talked about guilt: “When I look back upon my life / it’s always with a sense of shame / I’ve always been the one to blame / For everything I long to do / no matter when or where or who / has one thing in common too / it’s a sin.”

That combination of giddy freedom and self-reproach is at the heart of this five-part British series (originally on the U.K.’s Channel 4) that focuses on how the AIDS epidemic affects a group of friends living in London in the ’80s and early ’90s.

For Ritchie Tozer (Olly Alexander in a beautiful performance), moving to the city from his isolated community on the Isle of Wight is liberating is many ways — he can leave behind the stifling home life he shares with his loving but overbearing mother, disapproving father and sullen sister, and shed the weight of their expectations for his future. He can become an actor and he can also come out, and he throws himself enthusiastically into London’s gay club scene.

Like many young gay people of the era, he creates a new self-made family of friends, sharing a run-down house with fellow actor and den mother Jill (Lydia West); Rosco (Omari Douglas), who’s escaped the strict Nigerian parents who wanted to send him back to Africa; Colin (Callum Scott Howells), a quiet Welsh lad who eschews the party scene; and Ash (Nathaniel Curtis), Ritchie’s first crush.

With his earlier series, Queer as Folk, creator Russell T. Davies was accused of sidestepping the serious issue of AIDS in his portrayal of gay life in Manchester in the ’90s. If It’s a Sin is a means of atoning for that oversight, it succeeds in spades. Here, the disease is indiscriminate and ruthless, decimating the group and their extended social circle before they even really acknowledge its existence. (It’s interesting for North American viewers to see how it was discounted as an “American disease” for far too long in Britain.)

As Ritchie’s agent tells him, half her clients have “gone home for good”; she implores him to avoid their fate.

Viewers who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s will know what’s coming, but Davies still manages to make the encroaching devastation feel suspenseful. Colin’s mentor (Neil Patrick Harris) at the men’s clothing store where he works develops an unusual cancer; another close friend keeps his illness under wraps until his family takes him home under a cloak of silence (a scene where they burn his belongings in a backyard bonfire is a powerful, wordless indictment of the pointlessness of bigotry and fear).

Watching It’s a Sin in the middle of a pandemic gives it added layers of relevance. Before she knows how it’s spread, Jill wears rubber gloves to visit her ailing friend and compulsively scrubs anything he might have touched.

As she learns more, she warns her housemates to curb their more dangerous behaviour; secure in their sense of youthful immortality, they dismiss her as a killjoy.

In other ways, the situation is weirdly reversed: There’s no Facebook or Twitter to spread conspiracy theories, but who needs them when the truth sounds so far-fetched? Ritchie refuses to believe there’s a “gay cancer” targeting homosexuals, and the cause isn’t helped by politicians who refuse to recognize the crisis and physicians who downplay the threat.

Davies also touches on how moral judgments about promiscuity helped fuel the idea that AIDS was a punishment for sin and how that shame only resulted in more toxic secrets.

The series, which spans about a decade, can feel a bit glancing in its characterizations and it’s too heavy on the montages. But, like Davies’ underappreciated Years and Years, which also covers a long time period, it packs an emotional wallop, with some moments that are so revealing, so raw, they hurt to watch.

Several of those feature Keeley Hawes (Line of Duty, Bodyguard) as Ritchie’s mother, Valerie, who adores him but can’t accept that he is gay. Ricocheting from denial to spite to terrifying maternal protectiveness, she could have been a villain, but in Hawes’ hands, she’s a flawed person whose fierce love is misplaced, whose world is too small to accept her son as he is.

It’s worth noting that even now, the World Health Organization does not call AIDS a pandemic, but an epidemic; 770,000 people died of it worldwide in 2018. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2017, approximately one million people in the United States had HIV, with 14 per cent not realizing they were infected.

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @dedaumier