Thinking About Sin

[Foreword: this is not a review and this is a little disjoint not exactly on purpose, but because it's flowing from various takes on the series rather than trying to be coherent whole. sew me. also: Aric here is my husband] 

Olly and Nathaniel as cute as can be

I've been going back and forth with Nathaniel Hall, one of the stars(!) of the new series It's a Sin, about what it was like being gay back in the 80's. Russell Davies' (RTD) perspective struck me as off at first, but then I remembered that he was in London, not the west coast of California like me. I just got done re-watching the episode where Nathaniel was Ritchie's boyfriend set in 1986. If It's a Sin is accurate about what it was like there, it's pretty stunning how ignorant they were in comparison to LA and San Francisco. By that time we knew it was a virus that was spread with anal sex and that all of the hysteria about getting it in the air or by contact, etc was wrong. In 1984 they discovered the actual virus HIV and in 1985 the first tests came out. So to be set in 1986 with that level of ignorance still persisting is really shocking in a huge cosmopolitan city like London. Aric knew all about it when he got to the Castro in 1986 and I certainly knew about it years earlier out in the suburbs of LA. 

Of course hysteria doesn't end just because the right information was available so maybe I'm being a little hard on London here. The thing that was so contradictory at the time is that we all had to know that in the bars there had to be infected people among us -- how else do you get it? -- but it didn't stop people from going out. So why was it when somebody finds a little KS splotch it all changes and they need to be treated as lepers? I mean, it's not like people were fooling around with obviously sick people, so it clearly had an incubation time. It doesn't make any sense in retrospect, but that's how hysteria works I guess.

One of the things that RTD got exactly right is the hassle of condom use. They interrupt the moment, they are hard to get on and often are a bone killer, they're easy to forget in the throes of passion, and nobody actually liked using them. The revisionist history these days that condoms are wonderful and feel great, blah blah blah is bullshit. They were the only thing we had beyond going celibate which wasn't happening. While condoms used properly have a good success rate, they aren't perfect and they most certain aren't used properly all of the time. Condoms basically stopped the tide, but it would be PrEP that finally turned that tide.

Another thing about It's a Sin is it is not The story of what the 80's were like for gay men, because there were many many different stories in many different locations. Maybe they can even do an American version! There was no public internet back in those days so information spread very slowly and extremely unevenly. The small town experience was very different from being in one of the big gayborhoods and took a long time for basic information to get out there. And as I elaborate later, even being close enough to big gayborhoods was a hugely different experience than being in one. We were all affected by it, but the way we were affected by it varied widely.

One of the things that was done in some places was to shut down bathhouses. That turned out to be a big mistake because bathhouses were a community resource for the distribution of safe sex information, testing, and generally getting the word out. There was more than a little homophobia associated with those closures and I've always resented Dianne Feinstein's (then mayor of San Francisco, now California Senator) crypto-homophobia when calling for it. Yes, it had Randy Shilts's fingers all over it too, but she was very glad to oblige. And for all of that all it did was push men having sex underground to sketchy sex clubs and the worst place of all: home. Yes home. Some people were getting infected whoring around at sex clubs and the baths, but most were getting it the old fashioned way: dragging people back home.

I asked Aric if the Pink Palace rang true with the number of friends, etc, in their orbit and he said yes. At the time of Nathaniel's episode in 1986, I was living in Orange County and working long, long hours so I really didn't have all that many gay friends other than maybe bar acquaintances. They were see-at-bar hi-at-bar kinds of friends. But Aric had a large group of friends who all hung out together and drink and smoke dope. Wait that's another huge difference: where's the dope in London? I only saw one joint!  In any case, it makes sense because when I moved to San Francisco in 1994 I made a huge new set of friends, many from bars but unlike the burbs we'd invite them over for parties. Ok, so that lines up too.

One thing that struck me even from the trailers was the outright denial. Denial that it was happening at all. That is definitely something that was very different from my experience. There was definitely suspicion of drug companies, but that's different than saying it's some sort of plot to stop gay men from having sex. We knew something fucked was going on although what was going on was rather mysterious. It was probably around 1982 -- maybe 1983 -- when I first saw inklings of what was going on in West Hollywood down in Laguna Beach but there was nothing actionable so we just carried on (and on). By around 1984 and definitely 1985 it was a lot more established that you needed to use condoms. So outright denial seemed really odd to me and Aric didn't remember that either. I asked a group of people many of whom lived through that time too and they confirmed that denial existed, but looking back I realize that most of them were foreign. If you were here in the US close enough to gay ghettos, it was pretty hard to deny what was happening. There were plenty of other ways to look the other way though.

One other interesting detail/difference is that while some people holed up out of embarrassment not everybody did. Aric in particular told stories of seeing people in the Castro who had The Look. While I didn't see it on a daily basis, I too know what he's talking about. I bumped into a friend in Laguna I hadn't see in a while (he had turned into well known porn star since I had met him years before) and I remember him having The Look. Thinking back there was one boy named Kenny who I was sort of dating for while in college back in the late 70's, maybe 1980 who kind of had that sunken look and who told me that he had a close brush that put him in the hospital. I've always wondered looking back whether it might have been HIV but we lost contact. I also remember vividly seeing Rock Hudson on Dynasty going "oh shit he has it!" because of The Look.

Having HIV is often/most of the time much more drawn out than it looked in It's a Sin which is what makes it so insidious. You don't just get KS and die, you get nickled and dimed with shitty diseases as your body fights a long losing war of attrition. Some people certainly got really unlucky and died right away, but in some respects the long drawn out fight might have been worse. While it gave you some hope to make it to the next drug, it was also extremely hard on people as it was one insult to your body after another. Another stint in the hospital, another course of IV drugs and little by little until there was no fight left. Aric was one of those who proved that it could actually be beat, but he was a huge outlier. His T-Cells were really low when I met him but he made it to Protease Inhibitors in 1995 only to become resistant to them too. Aric was very much an outlier in that he had some AIDS defining diseases, he was never in serious danger of dying. I was fortunate to be able to force him to finally stop working at his shitty retail job with all of the weezy-sneeezy tourists. Not everybody was so fortunate. In the process he lost all but one of his friends out of a group of probably a couple of dozen.

Another huge difference between California and the UK is section 28 which was a hugely homophobic law. It was particularly insidious as it muzzled telling kids about safe sex among other things. Kids out of high school are the demographic that HIV loves to prey on because they are emancipated, horny, and stupid. The US was no paragon of enlightenment of course, but we never did have something national like section 28. People certainly tried to "save the children", and many many bible belt school boards forbade teaching anything about homosexuality or safe sex but it wasn't uniform like in the UK. Maybe the UK criminalized being HIV positive too (or more precisely laws that make it illegal to not inform a partner), but I doubt that would have played out the same as in the good old US where trying to penalize The Gayz in reality turned into yet another way to screw black people.

For me the AIDS crisis played out really different than big city gayborhoods. As I said earlier, I knew about it from around the beginning and stayed roughly as informed as you could be at the time, but the urgency seemed way less because I wasn't seeing the outcomes like you would living in a city. That was also part of the experience: not an experience at all, at least up close and personal. It didn't play out like denial in the form of it wasn't really happening, but more in the form of it was far away and easier to ignore. But it was in fact happening in the burbs. By about the early 90's 1500 people had died of AIDS in Orange County, which is a pretty big chunk of the gay population which was probably about 50000 at the time, most of whom probably didn't go out at all. Ceasing to see somebody around and not really noticing was part of the reality too, and I still have questions of old flings and what happened to them.

The "it's far away" was mixed up with fatalism that we all probably had it because of our whoring around, so it caused a really weird brew of ways to cope with the threat. And coping with that threat meant carrying on carrying on which I did dutifully. To put a point on it, one of the first things I did when I moved to San Francisco was to go to Randy Shilts's funeral (And the Band Played On). The train from the Castro was packed to Civic Center and what did we do? We cruised each other, that's what we did. There was a huge flame war on soc.motss (a gay internet forum) about the propriety of cruising people at the AIDS Memorial Quilt. It's hard to describe the contradictions.

I didn't see it upfront and personal until around when I had moved to San Francisco and in a year's time Protease Inhibitors were starting to make a big dent giving a lot of new hope. Even though I really never saw much, the one that I did see deeply scarred me so I can't imagine seeing that on a nearly weekly basis. That was the real trauma, and that trauma infused everybody because we all knew people who had been through the wars even if we didn't see it first hand. Finally seeing it first hand was traumatic. Howard was one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. Getting casually asked if I'd help deal with an infusion stent made it all very real. It's one thing to know what was happening intellectually, but quite another to see it day to day. Howard told Aric that I wouldn't reject him because I wasn't that type of person. I steeled myself and wasn't that kind of person. In some ways I felt really guilty since I had it so much easier so I felt it was my duty as a gay man. But I was in love too, so that makes up for a lot too.

One peeve I have with Queer as Folk which bleeds into It's a Sin is that while procuring gay sex is easy, it's not that easy. I mean I suppose if everybody was on ecstasy bumping around maybe -- I've never been to a gay rave or circuit party -- but bars and clubs were never as easy he makes it seem. Admittedly I'm rather shy and introverted until I know you, but I didn't see people bouncing around tonsils a-tickled like that. Even Aric who is very extroverted and extremely brazen was definitely an outlier. Ok, yes, tell me to fuck off because it's Hollywood and that's what happens with Hollywood. I know, I know, but even the truth was pretty out there especially if you are straight. Note however I did not find the carrying on at the Pink Palace was unrealistic. That is entirely believable, if not first hand believable. Did I just admit something? La!

A uniquely different aspect of my experience is that I had internet access in 1991 and the internet really changed everything. It was extremely uncommon to have internet access in the early days and it had barely been opened up to entities beyond government and researchers at schools when we got it. I think we had UUCP access before in the late 80's, but I didn't find the gay Usenet group soc.motss until 1991. Having that contact was a hugely consequential thing for me. Usenet's gay group may have had analogs on things like AOL and Compuserve, but probably not to the degree like Usenet. My understanding of the other online services is that they were mostly about hooking up -- sorry apps, you didn't invent dialing for dick -- so the lifeline may have been less. The free flow of information about sex in the time of AIDS would have made a huge difference even if it had just been 5 years earlier. Gen Z people don't understand how hugely consequential the lack of information was.

The Race Against Time

There are a couple of episodes that could have been made. One post Ritchie's death set in like 94-95 with characters in the circle who are poz. There was a race going on at the time because Protease Inhibitors (PI's) were on the horizon. Nobody really knew for certain about the long term efficacy, but for those who were really sick, it was just trying to make it to the next drug to literally live to see another day. As it turns out PI's were part of the cocktail of drugs that finally turned things around for a lot of people. But for some people it was just too late. This played out in real life for me with Aric and Howard, Aric making it across the finish line and Howard just missing it. It was heartbreaking to be so fucking close and yet so fucking far. In Aric's case it turned out to be another live to see another day since he was so resistant and almost 10 long years to finally finish the race.

The other story I wish they had explored is Ritchie having hinted he might have had unprotected sex after he was diagnosed. That would be its own psycho drama and brings up some uneasy questions that are easy to moralize about, but harder when you're caught up in it. I say hinted because I don't believe that he explicitly said he was going bare after diagnosis, and "how many people have I killed" could be referring to all of the people he infected before. But it's perfectly possible he was. There was a lot of Thelma and Louise (or better: The Living End) going on in those days with fatalism and might-as-well-have-fun attitude. Ritchie was no angel, after all. He was a young person in a terribly fucked situation. Maybe Russell couldn't go there because like me he managed by some miracle to stay negative and would be hard to get in his mind.

So does It's a Sin get it right? Aric thinks so and he lived in the closest analog to gay London (ie, in the Castro), perhaps more so because they never exactly say whether the Pink Palace was in a gay ghetto or not. For me it's totally believable despite my quibbles with this and that. The right balance is struck between just being a total downer kind of AIDS film because life did in fact go on for a lot of us. It could have been me, it could have been Russell, it could have been any one of us. Sin was fun. Lots of fucking fun.