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THREAD > #ItsASin @REDProductionCo In 1991 I moved from a small mining town in Fife to Edinburgh to share a city centre flat on Rose Street with four other gay men. We lived on Rose Street, the same street as the city’s biggest gay club. For a year we had the most amazing time...
It was hedonistic, dramatic, and a huge amount of fun. Every day the most amazing people would walk through the doors of that flat. I made a million amazing friends. The most important was Dougie (aka Hazell). I share his story during World AIDS Day every year...
Cruelly, it was all cut short when Hazell died as a result of HIV/AIDS. I wasn’t allowed to attend his funeral. It pushed me into fighting for and working for my community, which I’ve been doing to some degree ever since...
For a while I worked at Milestone House, the AIDS hospice in Edinburgh where Hazell died. I then got involved as a volunteer with a gay men’s health charity in Edinburgh before moving to Manchester in 1999 to work for Healthy Gay Manchester...
I very often get upset at how quickly the AIDS pandemic has been forgotten - all those beautiful men have been very quickly forgotten. It feels like we live in a time when LGBT history is only measured in Drag Race winners...
I see charities founded to fight for and protect gay men turning their backs on them, not supporting them properly (especially the older community), and not keeping the memories of those men we lost alive...
Even recent World AIDS Day events appear to have erased gay men’s stories and experiences of the AIDS pandemic and denied them a platform. They should be doing more and it makes me angry. Tonight Channel 4 is showing Russell T Davies’ new drama, ‘It’s A Sin’...
Recently Russell very kindly allowed me to see all five episodes of It’s A Sin. I watched it with my partner Dave. It hugely affected both of us. I struggle to think of any mainstream dramas that have told these stories from a British point of view quite so frankly...
And it’s vitally important that this story is told. It’s been a long time coming, and it’s being told beautifully and authentically here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything on TV that represents that time of my life. Please watch it...
It’s a joyous celebration of people we lost, the people who stood up, and a reminder of what my peers and my community lived through. The main character - Ritchie - is Hazell in everything but name. During those five hours we watched It’s A Sin, Hazell was with me again...
At times it’s funny, and at times it’s VERY difficult to watch, but this is not a story about death, it’s a story that celebrates life...
I hope at the very least it provokes some to look a little further into the recent past and start to appreciate what many of us are still struggling to deal with 30 or 40 years later.
“La!”
“La!”
