A young person knows that he will die, but he is also determined to live loud for as long as possible. In the glare of some car headlights late one night he strikes a pose. The driver of the car looks on mesmerized and a little delighted. He is the strike-a-poser’s one-time school crush, a straight guy who has just told been told about his friend’s sexual desire now many years later.
Because the exceptional Russell T. Davies, creator of Queer as Folk, has written this scene you hold your breath all the way through it. It is beautiful and tense all at once. How will the straight guy react? What does the gay man want? As with so many of Davies’ scenes it plays against both type and expectation. And then it ends, on a suburban street; the only witnesses to this strange epic are the street-lamps, sidewalk, and silent darkness.
You may have seen the rave reviews coming out of the U.K. for It’s a Sin, a superb five-part drama (premiering on HBO Max from February 18) set between 1981 and 1991, which follows a group of gay men and the piece’s hero Jill (Lydia West) migrating to and living in London in the first decade of AIDS. There is a lot of life, wit, sex, and joy in the tales of Ritchie (Olly Alexander), Roscoe (Omari Douglas), and Colin (Callum Scott Howells).
