Gay in the 1980s : That other Plague
Last night I watched Russell T Davies' new Channel 4 drama 'It's a Sin'. It tells the story of a group of young gay friends living in London in the nineteen-eighties. For those of us who are gay and for whom these were formative years, the series promises to evoke a nostalgia that is both powerful and disturbing as we experience the emotional roller coaster ride that is not only typical of Davies' writing, but which is also a scarily accurate reflection of the hedonism of those times and of the dark spectre of AIDS by which it was permanently overshadowed. Most of my experience of nineteen-eighties gay life took place in the more provincial setting of the East Midlands. The local 'gay scene' consisted of a couple of gay bars and a seedy back street nightclub where the stench of acrid cigarette smoke competed fiercely with the stupifying aroma of 'Kouros'. I will always remember with great affection the colourful characters that peopled that scene...