Some thoughts on It's A Sin, which I binged in one sitting last night, and Owen's edict...

- It's unsurprising Owen would try to mandate that the women he is so committed to vilifying are 'not allowed' to like, or to be more specific, engage compassionately with it. Because it

blows apart the entire moral framework he is using to underwrite our vilification. We have to be just like homophobes, its the entire structuring analogy of his position on this issue. There really isn't any more or less to it than that. That's as far as he has gone in his

thinking. Which is pathetic. But hey, it's only women, who needs to think any further than ones instinctive identification, based on the thought that being trans is identical to being gay, and throws up only the exact same questions.

- The truth of course, as @BluskyeAllison observed, is that many of us are Jill. Or, in my case, would have been Jill were we half a generation older. By the time I was supporting my gay male friends while they came out, cheering the change of the age of consent, getting

sweaty in Heaven and Trade, the worst of the epidemic was a decade in the past, and we had worked out how to stop men dying. But the rest, the London flats chock to the gills with laughter and dancing and camp and camaraderie, the rest I recognise.

Which is why this has all been so painful.

- Something about Jill, and gender, and Owen and where we are. And this is not intended as a criticism of RTD, who is a genius, and in general, is very good at writing women.

Even though Jill is in the centre of the story, she doesn't

really have her own story. In a story about desire, and exploration, and sex, as well as tragedy and horror, Jill doesn't have her own adventures of this kind. *What she does is care for the men.* She does it willingly, and fiercely, and in an intensely moving way, and had I been

half a generation younger, I likely would have done exactly what she did.

But it needs to be noted. While the boys of her chosen family are off adventuring, or in denial about what is happening, Jill is researching what threatens them, and volunteering on a helpline, and

politically organising, and cooking, and visiting dying men in hospital to hold their hands.

And what also needs to be noted is why Owen cannot possibly conceive that the women who would provide such fierce care for gay men, would, thirty years later, be some of the same women

he is now so obsessed with vilifying. Because as soon as we step out of the role of carers, and assert that we also have a story of our own, and that this time, something is different, because our story is now in conflict with the men's story, we become irredeemable evil witches.

It's also worth noting this. Historically, the women who cared for gay men during the epidemic were largely lesbians. We can't even say this for Jill. Because in a story all about male sexuality the central female character has *no* sexuality at all. https://twitter.com/salltweets/status/1353623837842173953?s=20

What would happen, as is happening now, if female, and specifically lesbian, sexuality came into conflict with male desire? If women had the temerity to assert their own sexual needs and step out of the role of being support humans?

Well, we don't have to wonder, do we.