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“It’s a Sin” isn’t a show about the current Covid-19 pandemic. It’s about the last great pandemic to engulf Britain and America: the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. It’s the creation of Russell T. Davies, the showrunner behind the 2005 revival of “Dr Who” and 1999’s “Queer as Folk.” Now he’s retelling the history of how HIV/AIDS first cut through London’s gay scene. A recent hit on British terrestrial TV, it premieres to US audiences on HBO Max this week. Despite its status as historical storytelling, one of things that makes “It’s a Sin” extraordinary — and there will be few more extraordinary pieces of television this year — is its resonance in the time of Covid-19.
This is a show about what pandemics do to our friendships; to our capacity for physical intimacy; to our fear of other people’s bodies.
In one of the show’s most memorable sequences, he dances through a montage of nightclub scenes, reciting to camera his list of reasons why practicing safe sex would constitute giving into scaremongering: “it’s a racket, it’s a money-making scheme for drugs companies … they wanna scare us and stop us having sex and make us really boring, basically because they can’t get laid … they say it arrived from outer space on a comet. And they say that God created it to strike us dead. They say it was created in a laboratory to kill us. They say it’s the Russians. They say we got it from the jungle … How did I know it’s not true? Because I’m not stupid.”
Like many characters in the show, Ritchie has escaped from a repressive home and, exploring the gay party scene as a student in London, feels he’s only just begun to live. That the party is poisoned, the site of liberation also a trap, seems too bitter an irony for him to believe. It’s brilliantly done.
Make the odd tweak, and this sequence could be a homemade anti-vaxxer video or conspiracy theory about Covid-19. This is why “It’s a Sin” feels so important at this moment: it’s a show which humanizes characters who make mistakes in the face of a pandemic.
Shame comes with a death toll
With a touch of didacticism, showrunner Davies positions us to realize that we make some of our greatest mistakes when we read moral prejudices into science. In the universe of the show, these mistakes can stem from homophobic cruelty — several characters are abandoned in hospital wards by nurses who won’t go near them. They can stem from a refusal to change behaviors we see as central to our identity — Ritchie’s refusal to learn about safe sex. They can stem from blind panic — in one scene that feels straight out of 2020, a dying man’s sister sees another caregiver wearing rubber gloves. Like a character from a recent “Saturday Night Live” sketch, the sister spends the rest of the scene frantically repeating a question about whether she should be wearing rubber gloves also.
As a character detail, it is there to indicate her extreme selfishness. But in the age of Covid-19, it also feels human. Who hasn’t panicked this year about how to protect themselves?
The moral impulse which Davies condemns most is the inclination to shame and to be shamed. In the first episode, Ritchie’s father gives him advice about practicing safe sex with women. He and his friends get no such guidance about safe sex with other men, because they come from homes where the very concept of such desire is shameful. (We watch Ritchie throw away his paternally-provided pack of condoms — wryly smiling at his father’s fear that he’ll otherwise “get a girl into trouble.”)
One character doesn’t reveal his AIDS diagnosis even to his other gay friends, for fear of being labeled promiscuous. Like many of these characters, he returns to his unloving family home to die: back in London, “going home” becomes a euphemism in gay-friendly circles for death by AIDS.
In the final episode, Jill, with the clarion moral certainty of the showrunner’s voice, confronts a homophobic mother whose son has just died, explaining that her son was killed by shame. “He kept the shame going by having sex with men and infecting them and then running away. ‘Cause that’s what shame does. It makes him think he deserves it.” No wonder Davies took his title from a 1987 Pet Shop Boys track, the lyrics of which begin: “When I look back upon my life / it’s always with a sense of shame.” Shame is what prevents honest conversations about the science of HIV transmission; understanding that science saves lives.
‘Either angelic or monstrous’
It is therefore frustrating that Davies is determined to fix so much of the culpability for all this shame specifically on women. In “It’s A Sin,” women are either angelic or monstrous. Jill is the only female lead character — and fair enough, this is a show which specifically sets out to tell the story of the impact of the pandemic on gay men — but she’s also the least complex. For all her anxious scrubbing, she spends the whole time selflessly caring for her dying friends. Great — but how about letting Jill have a personal life too? Or even a strain of complexity?
In “It’s a Sin,” two central characters die of AIDS. We meet both their mothers. One mother reacts with unflinching moral perfection as her son dies; one is the monster confronted by Jill. By the finale, she has become caricature who owes more to homophobic fantasies of the over-attached mother than to queer-positive literature. Like the ‘overbearing’ mothers of gay sons imagined in too many reactionary novels, she asserts total control of her son’s life and bans his friends from his deathbed.
By contrast, we meet two fathers in the first episode who appear irredeemably homophobic (and in one case, racist.) Both ask for and are offered redemption. Davies clearly aims to make feminist TV: the very first words uttered in “It’s A Sin” come from a young man expressing his horror at historic restrictions on women. (If only to assert, in heavy-handed fashion, his character’s distance from his heteronormative family.) Yet in the show Davies has created, character growth and moral complexity are for men only.
The ‘unwitting lesson to the Covid-19 generation’
Perhaps they will. Davies’ unwitting lesson to the Covid-19 generation is that human behavior in the face of a pandemic does affect health outcomes — precisely because moral prejudice gets in the way of public education. Meanwhile, there’s as much to learn here about the 1980s as about the 2020s: The 1980s soundscape alone is a perfectly curated paean to the decade’s leitmotif of desire and ambition. To the show’s target audience, the music may be as much of a discovery as is the history: this is a series aimed squarely at younger millennials and Generation Z, too young to have lived through the peak of the HIV crisis, more queer-friendly than any previous generation, but often woefully ignorant about this history.
What does emerge from these sex-saturated, go-get-’em, Blondie-scored scenes is the confluence of 1980s and 2020s values: Ritchie and his friends are as determined to live their lives for themselves as any Thatcherite. The looming culture war that surrounds them seems to be about who gets to fulfill their desires to the max, and who gets to be marginalized and hated. The boundaries of political identities are fiercely policed. This could be Trump’s America.
All of this is a disjunction from more conventional AIDS narratives of noble victimhood. This is AIDS history for a generation who believe gay life is something to be celebrated and that celebration always means a party. They are the first generation who can’t remember anything of the shadows of the 1980s and 1990s: the recent success of both “It’s A Sin” and “The Inheritance” is a corrective to the era of “Will and Grace” or “Queer as Folk,” when gay-led stories in pop culture were notable for avoiding references to the trauma memory of AIDS in gay communities.
But this generation of viewers will grow up with a youth scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic. Like the first AIDS victims, they know the cost when a government grotesquely mismanages a public health crisis. As history refresher and as lived experience, “It’s a Sin” will resonate.
