It's a Sin, 9 pm Channel 4, 22nd Jan CONTAINS SPOILERS **titled edited by MNHQ**

[notawittyname1954]

I keep seeing trailers for this. Anyone else looking forward to it?

had no problem with all 4 or itv hub. Yes there are ads.

@CousinKrispy

The discussions, information and what I've learned on here has been incredible. As you say thanks to everyone. I really hope the response to this programme is going to snowball. It's so important. I wonder how it will go down in USA when it airs there.

If you haven’t already ordered on you can still get your free at home HIV test.

freetesting.hiv/

This is one of the best and most informative threads I’ve seen on Mumsnet.

Avoided spoilers/reviews and binge-watched this a few days ago, haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Heartbreaking and unfair. I consider myself to be quite well-informed about LGBTQ activism in the 80s and 90s (born in 1988) but it really hit home the lack of information and support, denial, fear, confusion.

I loved it but don’t think I can bear to watch again, at least not for a long time.

Finished this tonight. OMG I was in bits. Ritchie's mum was a real piece of work 😡

One of the best things I have seen in years, binged watched it Monday afternoon & was in tears. Couldn’t stop thinking about Colin bless him. They were all amazing xx

Thought it was really well done, and ended up binge-watching the whole thing.

I remember the tombstone ads, and being scared of it generally, as a young teen in the 80s.

I wonder whether in part it was just bad luck that meant it became associated with gay men. I don't know much about how it started - who were the first patients and how they contracted it, but possibly it was just random chance that the first ones were gay men, and then that meant the spread was initially primarily in that community. I understand that the type of sex some gay men had was riskier, with increased chance of tearing/bleeding etc., and that will have meant easier transmission once it started. And maybe the gay community was more promiscuous, I'm not sure - certainly the show gave that impression, but it doesn't reflect everyone, I'm sure. My student life was very sheltered, no sex and no friends, so I don't know if the show was typical of student life generally, or gay students particularly, in how many partners they seemed to have, have soon after meeting them etc. - it seemed unusual to me, but that's likely my own sheltered background. The fact that the gay community would have been more hidden away and closed, smaller pool of partners, and fewer consequences of having multiple partners with no worries of pregnancy, I guess would also have increased the spread. But you wonder if the first few cases had been in heterosexuals, just by chance, and then transmission had started there, would it have been dealt with differently. The shame, moral judgement, lack of knowledge etc might not have happened to the same extent, although I guess any sexually transmitted infection might have had some degree of stigma attached to it. But I wonder if it was all some cruel random chance that meant the first cases happened to be in someone gay, and then so many other factors, prejudice, secrecy, etc worked together to make it the crisis that it was.

I hadn't realised that the West End had been so affected, with so many actors affected and so many theatres involved in fundraising, helping, etc - I was reading an article about the number of jobs they provided even to people who weren't really able to work after their diagnosis, just to support them. I wonder if acting really was more affected than other professions, or if it was just an area where gay men were more able to be 'out' than others, so either they gravitated there, or their illnesses were known to be aids where men dying in other professions were confirmed as aids.

@Thimbleberries I think just more easily spread through the type of sex. In a documentary I watched years back a woman discovered she’d been HIV positive for almost a decade, her partner tested negative despite the fact they’d been together for a good few years and she was unaware/not on medication. I think in heterosexual relationships men are at a much lower risk which slows the spread compared to gay men. Lesbians at an extremely tiny risk so that community hardly effected. Biology plays quite a significant part in risks/communities effected.

yes maybe it is just that, if it's enough of a difference that it just took off in the gay community as a result, and then the greater number of partners etc exacerbated it.

These days when there is more porn, which is thought to have resulted in younger people engaging in anal sex more, I wonder if it would have ended up spreading more in all communities, and if that would have changed the response.

@Ginger1982

Finished this tonight. OMG I was in bits. Ritchie's mum was a real piece of work 😡

Richie's mum was born in the 30s. She was losing her son to something she had no conception of or frame of reference for. She clearly loved him. She was trying to protect him whilst her world was falling apart at the seams, never to recover.

I enjoyed the series very much but Russell T Davies does not seem to be able to write women very well. Jill was one dimensional and Mrs Tozer was unsympathetic considering her beloved child was dying.

I think a big factor was in the 80s it was still very much not done to have a baby outside of marriage. I was born in the early 80s and I know only 2 people who's parents weren't married when they were born.

I think that meant that straight couples weren't engaging in as much casual sex / we're using condoms to prevent pregnancy.

Gay couples had no fear of pregnancy so didn't feel the need to practice safe sex.

I was FUMING when Jill laid into Valerie Tozer. Where was the dad? It's always the mum to blame.

@MoodyMarshall

I was FUMING when Jill laid into Valerie Tozer. Where was the dad? It's always the mum to blame.

Yes, the more I think about this, the more I agree with you. The female characters were just stereotypical women, who's lives came second to all the men. Ritchie's dads behaviour, up to them finding out about his diagnosis, was far worse than his mum's. And according to It's A Sin, mothers are expected to be able to tell if they're gay, without them coming out (RTD made a similar point in Queer As Folk with Stuart's parents). Men are absolved of all responsibility around their kids, but mothers should be constantly on the lookout all the time, and if the kids feel they can't come out, that's the mum's fault? Especially as Ritchie is an actor so it's supposed to be doubly obvious? It's bullshit.

RTD has done a brilliant job in representing gay people and destroying some of the stereotypes, but sadly seems unable to do the same with women, who are only seen as carers and nuturers in It's A Sin, always coming in second place to the bright, shining star of the men.

Kaposi's Sarcoma is a '12' on the Bangui definition of AIDS, which is a score patients are given: 12 is the cut off point above which AIDS is identified. It is the only definite symptom not in conjunction with any other symptoms.

@AndreaMarteau

DH brought this up after the first episode. In his view, Jill was a mere 'support' human and was criminally underwritten.

When I brought this up with friends, they just said, 'well, maybe RTD can't write women', which isn't true, because he wrote Rose Tyler.

I do think it's important to remember that this series was originally called 'The Boys'. It was always going to focus on the struggle of the gay (male) community to recognise, process and come to terms with many of their number dying. I think RTD raises important questions about what a woman's role is in society. The answer does seem to be, 'to support their male friends/sons/siblings'.

I suppose another factor in the casual sex aspect was also that straight couples were meeting people that they might then consider getting married to/having children, so were kind of trying out people as potential spouses. And since getting married wasn't available, and even living as a long term couple together somewhat more difficult (though Henry and Juan Pablo seemed to manage), maybe there was more of a sense of gay couples just having fun and not thinking about settling down as much.

I thought he did play up the stereotype of gay people being a bit camp, feminine, beautiful, fit, into acting/dance etc, when there's been a bit of a push back against that stereotype since, showing that it's only a small subset of gay people who fit that stereotype. But in the show, most of them seemed to - I guess maybe that was a safer place to come out, in the arts, so that sort of stereotype became what was known.

I think Jill was more able to tell Valerie what she thought of her than she would have been able to say anything to his Dad, just because she probably identified more with her, the female/mother/caring side, which may have just reflected male/female stereotypes/job roles at the time.

She was probably just as furious with his Dad, but she didn't really have the opportunity to say it to him, whereas she did have the chance with his Mum, because they had more interactions.

If HIV can lie dormant for a while, I wonder if Henry and Juan Pablo were thought to have had it for years, or whether it was supposed to show that they'd had other partners in the meantime too. It was early enough in the crisis that they probably couldn't have had it for years.

@thimbleberries The first death from AIDS in the USA is thought to be a young man in the late 1960s, and the average person lives with HIV/AIDS for 8 years without treatment. So Henry might have caught it before moving to the UK, I guess?

Sorry, final point

My interpretation of Colin's dismissal was that his boss suspected he had AIDS after seeing the info leaflets. It was nothing to do with his rejection of his boss.

@Twizbe

I think a big factor was in the 80s it was still very much not done to have a baby outside of marriage. I was born in the early 80s and I know only 2 people who's parents weren't married when they were born.

I think that meant that straight couples weren't engaging in as much casual sex / we're using condoms to prevent pregnancy.

Gay couples had no fear of pregnancy so didn't feel the need to practice safe sex.

Teenage pregnancy, single motherhood was sky high in the 80s. So much so that the Tories made single mothers the 'illegal immigrants' of the day and blamed them for the end of civilisation.

As a young person in the 80s I can assure that there was a LOT of risky, out of wedlock sex going on.

@MoodyMarshall

I was FUMING when Jill laid into Valerie Tozer. Where was the dad? It's always the mum to blame.

I found the scene where the other mother laid into her even more infuriating.

Shouting at her for not knowing her son was gay. Why should she know? She was a middle aged woman in the 80s who lived on a sheltered island. It was a bizarre scene. I don't think people realise that Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Kenneth Williams , Frankie Howerd etc were not considered to be gay. They were funny, 'a caution'
It was not discussed.

It would be perfectly possible for a woman in VT's circumstances to live her whole life not really understanding what gay meant and certainly not what it looked like

@TheFirstMrsDV yes, that was a weird scene. Again, it's blaming the mother who should just know, but as you rightly say it was the 80's.

And let's not forget that Ritchie actively avoided his family. On the occasions he did go home to his family, his took Jill with him as a decoy girlfriend. But apparently, his mother, who I presume lived quite a sheltered life on the Isle of Wight, should've just seen past all that and realised he was gay.

That scene might have stood up if it had been set in present times, and I assume it was in there to make a point and for dramatic purposes, but I think it was bit jarring.

@TheFirstMrsDV

Yes, that scene was weird. Surely Valerie's main problem was that she was in denial about her son, which is no worse than being in denial about having AIDS? I guess everyone is looking for someone to blame, and sheltered, middle-aged women are the obvious place to start.

@AndreaMarteau it felt a bit cringy. Like something a teenage Russell might want to yell at his mum.

I really enjoyed the series. I was there in the 80s. I am not a gay man so it wasn't my story but I was all around the fringes of it because of where I lived , my lifestyle and the industry I was in. It was terrifying. Boys used to just disappear. I knew a lot of 'rent boys' back then. They were so young, unprotected and mostly without family to care for them.

I used to go to Heaven a lot back then. It was a fabulous club.

@personwomanmancameratv

I got the impression that Ritchie was pretty certain he had it - he just didn't take the test because he couldn't face having it confirmed in black and white. But he knew.

Regarding his continuing to have sex with other men... I read an article where RTD mentions it. I think the idea was to almost de-demonise the behaviour - having trouble posting the link but he says "this was something very important and rare to feature ... those people who had HIV and who continued to sleep with people are always portrayed as villains - and they weren't. They were just boys. Just horny, stupid boys who convulsing believe what was happening to them."

Do we need to de-demonize it though?

Ritchie wasn't just a boy, he was an adult man in his late 20s. He knew what aids did as he'd seen a close friend die. Hed lost many people because of aids. Condoms existed. He didn't have to not have sex he just needed to use condoms. He tries to excuse it by saying he was horny and couldn't help himself. I don't know if this was RTD trying to justify it as just horny boys, but he wasn't just a horny boy.

The other side of the coin I suppose is by that point the men Ritchie was having sex with knew Aids was a risk of unprotected sex, and this was a risk they chose to take. There was a reasonable possibility he had Aids and didn't know irrespective of him chosing to infect people