“It’s a Sin”: HBOMax present British miniseries about several gay friends during the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s
Today I watched the first two (of five) episodes of “It’s a Sin”, a British series with five episodes, each about 48 minutes, written and created by Russell T. Davies, for the Red Production Company. It is available on HBOMax. Radiotimes describes the cast in detail.
The series traces the lives of several gay friends in London starting in September 1981, as they gradually become aware of and affected by the AIDS crisis worldwide.
The first character presented, Roscoe Babatunde (Omari Douglas), will have to run away from home when his family “finds out”, as his father wants to send him back to Nigeria, where he would surely be hunted down. Since around 2005 or so, the world has gradually become more aware of the aggressively anti-gay culture and legal system in many sub-Saharan countries.
Ritchie Tozer (Olly Alexander), still not out to parents, decides (with his “girl friend” Jill (Lydia West)) to give up law school and become an actor, which does shock his parents. (Does an actor “become” his character?) Colin Morris-Jones (Callum Scott Howells) takes on an apprenticeship as a tailor. In an early scene, his obese boss (Nicholas Bane) scrubs his hands and warns about fibers getting into his bloodstream, and then asks him to disrobe, revealing a hairy body. The characters party, and start hearing the stories of a “gay flu” from the US.. A friend of Colin, Henry Coltrane (Neil Patrick Harris) gets Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Colin has to put on masks and gloves to visit him in a hospital, after which Neil expires in a very barren hospital room.
Another friend of Jill, Gregory (David Carlyle), falls ill and eventually dies, with his family burning all his possessions in an act of absolute annihilation. Colin is invited by his boss to go to New York with him to clothe a rich client. Jill asks Colin to find information on the crisis, as 1984 starts and the discovery of HTLV-3 is about to be announced. Hart visits Colin in his room and wants to put the make on him when he notices copies of Charles Ortleb’s paper “The New York Native” with the speculative articles on AIDS. When Colin returns to Britain, he is fired, oh so very nicely in a very well-written scene.
In Episode 3 (watched 2/22), Colin is working in a print shop and volunteers for AIDS organization, when he suddenly has seizures. He has progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, a quasi-malignancy caused by a virus similar to the wart virus that only becomes active with immunosuppression, as with AIDS. He is isolated by the Public Health Act of 1984 but friends get him out, where he dies with them, going into catatonia first. But Ritchie’s acting career gets going and he tests negative.
Episode 4 (watched 2/23) starts in 1988 with a funeral that gets disrupted, and leads to Ritchie’s diagnosis of AIDS, which quickly leads to lymphoma. He is optimistic and wants the chemotherapy, believing he can recover fully. Ash (Nathaniel Curtis) is ordered to remove materials about homosexuality from a school library, in accordance with a Thatcher-esque law about promotion of it, and then protesters stage a die-in against pharma companies who will profit from AIDS.
Episode 5 (also watched 2/23) jumps to 1991, as Ritchie finally weakens and dies. There is a scene where Jill challenges Ritchie’s mom with the idea “the perfect virus came along to prove your ideas” about natural morality. So now you could say that about COVID? The film ends with a retrospective epilogue about happier days before the pandemic erupted. There is always loss, big time, that is never recovered.
It is easy to compare this series to “The Normal Heart“(2014), the HBO movie based on Larry Kramer’s play, and to “Angels in America” (2003).
It’s also an interesting comparison to the epidemiology model for COViD-19, which, at first, because of extreme airborne contagiousness (as contrasted to HIV which is entirely bloodborne) seems to attack those with large families, and spare those who live alone or very independently. But an epidemic like COVID can shred the normal ways for people to meet so permanently that it drives people back to familial tribalism.
There are disco and party scenes in the first episode (and they get pretty explicit in a couple shots) of abandon, and these are gone from our lives now because of COVID, too, because the mere casual contagiousness is too dangerous. Can they ever come back?
(Posted on Sunday, February 21, 2021 at 3 PN EST)
Posted on February 21, 2021
Categories B-Music-and-Plays, HIV, LGBT, medical issues
TagsHBOMax