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“It’s a sin,” or where was Russell T Davies when it happened? 
I’ve finally started watching it and I’ve been struggling. From the get go—from the first seconds in—the highly-saturated and tongue-in-cheek opening sequence edited to “gay” tunes contemporaneous with the narrative bear a vertigo-inducing resemblance with
the style of Queer As Folk, one that worked well at the turn of the century but that does, by now, feel dishearteningly formulaic in that high-specs way that only British TV knows how to do. TV audiences do love the reassuringly recognition of form and narrative, after all.
So It’s a Sin gives us a soap opera of common narrative arcs and stereotypical characterisations which are deployed purely on behalf of bodily responses, a rollercoaster of tears and laughter. What a panacea for the times we live in. For the times we lived then.
What’s most interesting to me (though certainly not surprising) is that It’s a Sin completely falls within the growing trend of LGBTQ+ content delivery for the visual pleasure of a (female) heterosexual gaze,
the kind of compromise some argue had to be made between queer form and gay content delivered under an easily marketable heterosexual form, a soapy mix of melodrama and romcom that knows all too well its audience and how liberal straights, mostly women, love looking at fags.
Looking at fags solves the tension between the to-be-looked-at-ness of men that Richard Dyer saw in late 20th-century moving image whilst neutralising the threat of sexual violence that an otherwise heterosexual object of female straight desire would pose to the het female gaze.
Hence the “fag hag” straight women in It’s a Sin being there as bearers of the caring look of the heterosexual female spectator. Apart from them, there are really no other womxn in the series, and the historical fact of dykes and fags fighting AIDS together thus has to be
brushed under the carpet on behalf of the target spectator. Which bears the question: where was Russell T. Davies when it all happened? Good thing he answered our question in a piece he wrote for the guardian earlier this month:
So what we have to ask is “what does It’s a Sin” do? It reinforces the ego built on the liberal heterosexual gaze, and it offers atonement and cathartic closure not only to heteros but also to the fags and dykes who have been conditioned to looking with eyes that aren’t ours.
It’s a Sin is a product of the 21st-century AIDS closure cultural industries. Like all memorials, it offers catharsis and promises to heal trauma through ritual consumption, and it absolves the guilty and those who collaborated by turning a blind eye.
It tells us it’s time to get closure by laughing and crying whilst listening to Soft Cell or Bronski Beat and let go. It tells us that the crisis is over because, after all, it comes to us from the past.
