While Sidaction is 30 years old this year, France Télévisions has decided to broadcast It’s a Sinthe brilliant mini-series by Russell T. Davies (Queer as Folk, Doctor Who). It’s a Sin takes place in London in the 1980s and follows a group of young gay people in their daily lives, their loves and their dreams at a time when the AIDS epidemic begins to wreak havoc within the homosexual community in England. The disease initially takes on a mysterious appearance. Some speak of a form of cancer. Others believe that it can be contracted through simple contact with the patient, an idea that pushes hospitals to separate infected people. One of the heroes, Ritchie, a young actor who moves from one lover to another, thinks she doesn’t exist. “There’s no such thing as a gay flu,” he explains.
This denial is at the very foundation of It’s a Sin, which takes the viewer for five episodes between the carefreeness of a group of young people who intend to continue to live freely, to assume who they are, and the reality of society: the deaths which are becoming more and more numerous and the homophobia which is expressed in full force within homes, streets and institutions. The ostracization of homosexual people is one of the central themes of the series, which bluntly explores the multiple ways in which Britain has kept AIDS patients aside and silenced the epidemic. At the time, AIDS exacerbated tensions between the State and the homosexual community to the point that a law, passed in 1988, prohibited “the intentional promotion of homosexuality”.
Suggest a series like It’s a Sin in the context of a health crisis (it was first broadcast in January 2021 on the British Channel 4) could seem like a foolish bet, doomed to failure in an era which desperately seeks optimism, in search of a fiction which would have a role of escape from reality. Not only It’s a Sin found its audience across the Channel, allowing Channel 4 to break audience records (more than 6 million people watched the entire series on the channel’s platform), but it also concentrates all the qualities of Russell’s series T.Davies.
It’s a Sin is a bit of an anti-Years and Years, the previous mini-series from the English producer, or at least it takes an opposite trajectory. There where Years and Years invited the viewer to take part in a journey into the future, that of an English family from the year 2019 until 2034, by integrating contemporary questions (the nuclear threat, the migration crisis or the Uberization of Company), It’s A Sin starts from a period known to all, the AIDS years, to reveal something more intimate and unexpected.