Over the past two nights I have watched the new Russell T. Davies show ‘It’s a sin’ on Channel 4. Davies found fame in 1999 with the revolutionary ‘Queer as folk’ TV show which documented the lives of a group of gay men in Manchester. The show was radical in that the characters were not villains or victims – but instead well rounded individuals living unapologetic lives; and engaging in the sex and drugs and rock and roll hedonism of urban, young, gay men. I was in my early twenties and living in Dublin at the time in a flat-share with two other gay guys. Our lives may not have been quite as raucous as the characters on screen, but we had our fun. The show held a mirror up to the lives we were living. Ir was refreshing that the emphasis was not on the message that being gay kills you. The big disease with the little name hadn’t gone away but by the late 1990s, a HIV diagnosis was no longer an automatic death sentence. ‘Queer as folk’ reflected this change in outlook. I loved the programme.

Now twenty years after huge success with ‘Doctor Who’ Davies has revisited the gay life. ‘It’s a sin’ tells the story of a group  of young gay men in a house share in London in the 1980s, just as news is filtering through from the US about a ‘gay cancer’ that is ripping through the male, gay community and killing everyone who gets a diagnosis. There’s Colin – a sweet boy from Wales who works in a tailor’s; Roscoe – estranged from his Nigerian family because of his homosexuality ,and working in a bar; Ash – a school teacher; Colin – an aspiring actor from the Isle of Wight; and Jill – an actress of unspecified sexual orientation.

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