It’s a Sin : AIDS as incipient crisis

In the final moments of its first episode, the early 1980s-era gay-themed television drama It’s a Sin (Channel 4/HBO Max, 2021) cuts back and forth between two scenes. One scene unfolds at a hospital, where nurses meticulously disinfect the bed of Henry Coltrane, a gay male character who dies of AIDS-related illnesses that were, given the period during which the program takes place, still new and therefore unfamiliar to hospital staff. In fact, the staff was so frightened of Coltrane and his symptoms that they segregate him from other patients and force his visitors to shield themselves with protective clothing. The second scene unfolds at a restaurant, where aspiring actor Ritchie Tozer meets with his theatrical agent to sign a contract for a role in a play. When the agent asks Ritchie where he sees himself in 5 years, he tells her: ‘I just want to be happy’. At that point, narration cuts to the closing credits, which are set to the song ‘Smalltown Boy’, a synth-pop song by the British band Bronski Beat that recalls gay male culture and urban space in 1980s-era United Kingdom – the same milieu evoked by the characters, settings, and narratives of It’s a Sin. In the music video for ‘Smalltown Boy’, the gay male main character escapes to the city to find happiness and freedom. The irony of the song’s appearance at the conclusion of the first episode of It’s a Sin is that it portends a vastly different fate for the program’s gay male characters. The juxtaposition of these two scenes foreshadows the events that are about to unfold across the rest of the program’s episodes.

In It’s a Sin, the AIDS Crisis is only just emerging. The five-episode miniseries depicts the virus gaining a foothold in London’s gay male communities during the period before there was widespread awareness of HIV/AIDS – its methods of transmission, opportunities for prevention and techniques for treatment. With the program’s focus on the friendships, romances, families and careers of a group of gay male friends who share an apartment together in London that they dub ‘The Pink Palace’, I see It’s a Sin as being less invested in historical accuracy than it is in constructing a frame for historical thinking. The program brings audiences close to gay male characters who were in the process of encountering HIV/AIDS for the first time and asks them to consider how they might have reacted under a similar set of circumstances. It’s a Sin constructs a somewhat general scene: the orbits of twenty-something gay men as they embark on their professional lives, go out with their friends and look for romance – or sometimes just seek out sex. But the program orchestrates that scene in a highly specific historical moment: early 1980s London, where queer cultures thrived in bars and clubs even as they weathered homophobia from a frequently hostile heteronormative mainstream culture in Thatcher-era UK. The program gives the AIDS Crisis an ‘everydayness’ in which it gradually seeps into people’s rhythms and routines. Over the course of the first episode or two, HIV/AIDS becomes a topic at dinner parties, at bars, among co-workers. It also begins to appear in newspaper reportage and television coverage – often sensationally so. In doing so, It’s a Sin allows viewers to contemplate what it would be like to hear vague rumors of a mysterious, deadly illness without fully understanding it, to imagine what it would be like to have little access to information about it, and to consider what it would be like for that information to feel unreliable, or even prejudicial and/or discriminatory.

In portraying how ordinary people live through historical events, It’s a Sin is an object of cultural memory, a text ‘through which memories are shared, produced, and given meaning’ (Sturken, 1997: 9). Because the program brings audiences into contact with experiences of the AIDS Crisis as it was first surfacing, it features experiences of profound shock and disbelief, as well as considerable confusion. Throughout the series, characters make decisions based on faulty information, engage in regrettable behaviors simply because they do not know they should act any differently, and often live with regrets for actions they may not have taken had they known better. The series’ second episode is particularly illustrative of this mode of historical narration. Ritchie, for one, is particularly hostile toward the possibility of a pandemic that is somehow connected to gay men. He and many of his friends see it as nothing more than another attempt to pathologize gay male sexuality. When activists attempt to distribute literature about HIV/AIDS at the bar he frequents, Ritchie is outright hostile to them. In the sequence that follows, the character launches into a monologue about the many conspiracy theories about HIV/AIDS that circulated in Western culture in the early 1980s: that it spread to humans from comets, or that it was a chemical weapon created by the U.S.S.R. He laughs them off – and uses their ridiculousness as justification for laughing off HIV/AIDS altogether. It’s a cringeworthy moment because while the causes of AIDS are incorrect, audiences know from the viewpoint of the present that the disease, itself, is very much real.

Thus, It’s a Sin’s first episodes are devoted to laying the groundwork for a storyworld that is about to transform dramatically. It depicts HIV/AIDS trickling into the consciousness of characters by dramatizing how it materializes in the everyday interactions they have with both intimates and strangers. From the vantage point of the present, It’s a Sin’s viewers have a distinct advantage over the characters: we know the dangers of HIV/AIDS and are armed with decades of knowledge about its prevention and progression. To that end, it might be easy to watch the program and condescend to it. How could they not have known any better? But I think the program asks viewers to consider the actions of characters with open-mindedness and generosity precisely because their actions are shaped by fear and ignorance. What the program’s representation of the past lacks in historical fidelity it makes up for in affective proximity; by bringing viewers close to the alarm and turmoil experienced by the characters, It’s a Sin enables a particular kind of historical understanding (Landsberg, 2015: 63). The program dramatizes what it was like for uncertainty to become apprehension and then fear.

When Gregory Finch, a supporting character who is lovingly referred to as ‘Gloria’, first becomes ill with AIDS-related symptoms, he is perhaps more confused than he is afraid. Doctors cannot tell him what he is suffering from, and there are days when he feels fine and days when he is barely able to function. Viewers learn about Gloria’s condition in a scene where he tries to communicate his predicament to his friend Jill. Gloria does not allow her to come near him but can only stumble over his words as he tries to describe his disorienting physical symptoms and the mystifying concerns of the medical staff who treated him. Shot, reverse-shot sequences of the two characters in conversation highlight the confused look on Jill’s face as she wrinkles her brow as she tries to make sense of her friend’s puzzling story. Over the course of the episode, Gloria’s condition waxes and wanes: Jill cooks for him and brings him food when he cannot get out of bed – and there is even a period when he feels well enough to resume seeing friends and leave the house. Crucially, though, Gloria has sworn Jill to secrecy. He does not want her telling their mutual friends for fear that he will be ostracized. Furthermore, the character is closeted at work – news of his illness reaching the wrong person may result in him losing his job.

Over the course of the series’ second episode, Jill seeks out information about AIDS as it becomes a larger and larger phenomenon in London. Viewers witness the mixed-race, presumably heterosexual female character become a source of knowledge about AIDS for her decidedly less-convinced friend group. For that reason, a scene in which Gloria visits Jill and her gay roommates at their flat is particularly jarring. Gloria is feeling well that day and accepts the offer of a drink from one of his friends. After he leaves and Jill is in bed for the night, viewers watch her toss and turn and finally get out of bed to dispose of the cup Gloria used earlier. Because the characters do not yet know how HIV is transmitted, Jill fears that Gloria’s cup will infect the rest of them. Not content to simply throw it out, Jill is so fearful of Gloria’s condition that she smashes the cup with a hammer and buries the shards in the trash. In moments like these, the program asks viewers to consider the experience of characters making decisions about their lives and well-being with limited or even faulty information. Viewed from the present, the actions seem hysterical, maybe even cruel. But considered in light of the character’s historical location, the program seems to request empathy from viewers for a character who did not know any better and was acting out of care and concern for others – even if that care and concern might seem harsh, alienating and counterintuitive by contemporary standards.

I see It’s a Sin as fostering identification with the plights of characters by highlighting the historicity of their circumstances, or ‘how individual lives are circumscribed by the political, economic, and social constraints of a given historical moment’ (Landsberg, 2015: 70). Even so, that It’s a Sin foregrounds Jill’s experiences is a curious representational choice given that the series is so thoroughly enmeshed in gay male cultural life. This focus seems to somewhat subordinate the experiences of the gay male characters in the interest of underlining that of a heterosexual character. On one hand, this scopic regime recalls a frequent criticism of AIDS representations on television during the height of the epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, when scholars pointed out how this tendency makes the illness a ‘scandal’ or ‘problem’ for heterosexuals at the expense of an in-depth examination of how it affects the people who live with it (Juhasz, 1995; Treichler, 1999; Watney, 1987). On the other hand, this focus on the advocacy and activism of a heterosexual woman speaks of other concerns among scholars, many of whom decry a tendency for mainstream representations of AIDS to erase the labor of allies, especially women (Cvetkovich, 2003; Gould, 2009). And, truly, It’s a Sin renders Jill’s experience of AIDS’s early days in harrowing fashion: from her fastidious use of rubber gloves when visiting Gloria’s apartment, to her serious concern when Gloria becomes too ill to talk to her during those visits, to the tense, tearful encounter she has with Gloria’s father and sister when they move him from London to Glasgow when he can no longer live on his own. Jill’s attempts to make sense of AIDS despite a dearth of reliable data and her efforts to navigate a milieu in which it affects more and more people around her are at the heart of It’s a Sin’s representation of the past. For better and worse, Jill is the emotional center of the program (Figure 1). While she rises to the occasion and becomes a fierce advocate for those she loves, the character’s centrality raises questions about narrative focus and the possibility of heterocentrism even in a text that so clearly anticipates an LGBT+ audience.

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Figure 1.

The centrality of Jill’s perspective on the AIDS Crisis raises questions about representational justice. Does the program actually pathologize gay male sexuality, in spite of itself?

These facts notwithstanding, gay men’s experiences of the incipient AIDS Crisis are still a main concern in It’s a Sin, especially Ritchie’s coming to terms with his HIV diagnosis. At the start of the series, the character is a prototypical ‘party boy’ who cruises bars for sexual conquests with abandon. The program renders these exploits in the form of a montage set to the song ‘Hooked on Classics’, a popular dance track from the early 1980s in which orchestral pieces performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra are set to a disco beat. Over the course of several minutes, Ritchie is depicted as engaging in intercourse with many different men. The sequence is joyful and playful, and it features a palpable sense of abandon. But as the reality of AIDS sets in, Ritchie’s joie-de-vivre begins to recede. In the series’ third episode, after suspecting that his boyfriend has a Karposi Sarcoma spot on his back, Ritchie breaks up with him – suddenly and remorselessly. This cruelty to his boyfriend is but one of a series of actions Ritchie takes to insulate himself from AIDS. When he first gets tested for HIV, Ritchie skips out on receiving the test results, preferring to live in denial than receive confirmation of what he already suspects: that he has contracted the virus. In some ways, the character goes about his life as though the AIDS Crisis is not happening: he continues to work, enjoy nightlife, and pursue romance (Figure 2). In several scenes, Ritchie debates the severity of the AIDS crisis with friends and acquaintances who challenge him on it, even as he attends the funeral of a friend who died as the result of an AIDS-related illness. But Ritchie’s aloofness is only a façade. In one especially bracing sequence in the fourth episode, viewers watch as he samples some of the therapies and alternative medicines that people turned to out of desperation during the height of the AIDS epidemic: eating particular foods, drinking urine, even attempting to ingest battery acid. In one of the program’s many hospital scenes, Ritchie reveals to his friends that he knowingly infected sexual partners by not telling them he is HIV+. Casting the character’s internal struggle with his AIDS diagnosis as precipitating a purposeful spread of the infection to others recalls long-standing cultural anxieties about monstrous queer sexualities, villainous gay men and seems to cast AIDS as an existential threat to culture, writ large (Halperin, 2008; Wald, 2008). The scene is difficult to watch. It also raises troublesome questions about the politics of representation at work in the program.

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Figure 2.

Ritchie Tozer is a difficult character, one who trumpets falsehoods about HIV even as he secretly lives with the disease.

In one read of It’s a Sin, the program’s seeming moralism about Ritchie’s sexual escapades and its whiff of smugness regarding the character’s naivete about the outlandish alternative medicines seem to denigrate him in favor of the other, nicer, more reserved characters. For instance, Colin is cast as a kind, quiet ‘Mama’s Boy’ who meets the other characters by chance when looking to make some gay male friends of his own. He is a loner with a nerdy demeanor who the other friends seem to adopt as a kind of mascot. Furthermore, he lost his only friend in London when Henry Coltrane died of AIDS in a secluded hospital ward. So scenes illustrating Colin’s descent into AIDS-related dementia are unsettling moments for the series. Not only are these the moments when the illness touches the residents of the Pink Palace for the first time, but they are also the moments when It’s a Sin makes clear: no one is ‘safe’ from AIDS. Where the other roommates cruise for sex habitually and display their conquests proudly, Colin is a more reserved, private character. His suffering from AIDS-related illnesses surprises the other characters because it shakes their assumptions about who is at risk. Moreover, Colin’s diagnosis and illness upend simplistic moral determinations that so frequently yoke promiscuity to the transmission of HIV (Crimp, 2004). It’s a Sin takes great pains to emphasize: Colin contracted HIV by chance. So while I see a hint of moralism about Ritchie’s promiscuity at work in It’s a Sin, that conclusion is at least somewhat complicated by the fact that the friend group rallies around the two characters in similar ways. The program underlines how the characters devote themselves to caring for Colin and Ritchie – a labor of love that, for me, somewhat dispels a hermeneutic of suspicion that would cast aspersions on how It’s a Sin portrays Ritchie’s sexual appetites.

In fact, several other scenes undo easy connections between gay male promiscuity and the contraction of HIV/AIDS. So I actually see It’s a Sin’s moral universe working to dismantle cultural hierarchies that assign blame and fault to those who contract the virus. I see that mostly clearly in the scene just before Ritchie dies, when he is visibly slipping into dementia and tells his mother that he loved all of the men he slept with – that he can remember them, wants to cherish them and does not blame them or himself for his AIDS diagnosis. The scene’s pathos results from the fact that it is the moment when Ritchie’s homophobic mother – who, by the end of the series, has gone to great lengths to keep her dying son away from his friends – finally realizes that he has risen above her shame about his sexuality. Because he is dying, she cannot hurt him anymore. In sum: It’s a Sin imagines how the AIDS Crisis unfolded in 1980s-era gay male London, depicting how otherwise unremarkable people absorb the shocks of AIDS’s traumas when these traumas were still new.