Ok, my favourite pornstar is Phoenix Marie...i've watched many of her vids...she always has unprotected sex , even during the time of DP too, no male pornstar suffers from hiv aids??? BUT WHY ...AND HOW DO THEY PROTECT THEMSELVES???
It is telling that It’s a Sin ends in 1991, a few years shy of the first protease inhibitors and combination therapies becoming available—when, suddenly, AIDS ceased being a death sentence and when “the boys” stopped having to go home and started being able to live with their conditions.
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It glancingly addresses the racism that Roscoe and fellow Pink Palace resident Ash (Nathaniel Curtis) may have faced on the gay scene, though neither are anybody’s victim, far from it. This viewer just wanted more for Jill, Roscoe, and Ash, and for other characters who seemed under-developed. Perhaps this comes down to the temporal limitations of a mini-series. Jill and Ritchie have very different approaches to the impact and presence of AIDS, but this—unconvincingly—rarely evolves into conflict between them.
Some of them do. I personally think it's hotter to see the condom. And I think they could use different condoms too, latex, polyurethane, male and female condoms. Porn as education. Imagine.
Throughout It’s a Sin, you will be left winded—for the first time, or all over again, depending on how old you are—by how young the men were, by how many were lost, by how much was lost. But in that time, AIDS was a weapon to be used against gay people; off-camera, and among themselves, as It’s a Sin shows, it was left to gay men and their allies to organize, strategize, and care for one another. Jill cooks, washes dishes, and wears rubber gloves because back then no one knew how HIV was transmitted.
This was a time when men who had sex with men were not just dying of a disease that no one then understood. They were dying horrible, lonely deaths in isolation, not properly fed and cared for, many families either hustling them home to die quietly or ignoring them altogether.
"It’s really disheartening that HR (who have worked entirely from home for the past year, by the way) get to just decide whether people get paid or not,” one city employee said.
It may not seem a long time ago, especially from the vantage point of 2021 with legislative equality for LGB people in Britain won—if not for trans people who are presently the subject of a concerted campaign of prejudice, whipped up by many sections of the British media. It’s a Sin may remind many who were around back then, growing up in another hostile climate, of the present situation being experienced by trans people; the language of the newspapers invoking deviancy, predatory behavior, pathologized otherness—all of it ultimately seeking to diminish, marginalize, and make unequal before the eyes of the law.
Perhaps it also says something about Davies that It’s a Sin does not finally echo with the ring of recrimination, but rather a burst of art and laughter, of life and togetherness, on a beautifully sunny day—an image of bright lives lost to time, but never forgotten.
Shame and LGBTQ people are longtime bedfellows, although we hope—in times of greater acceptance—that the shame is receding more and more. It’s a Sin asks us to confront it and its residual currents anew. It asks the families and loved ones of LGBTQ people to confront it, and, by extension, it asks society to confront it. Davies clearly thinks that it is shame—how it is implanted, how it blooms, how it destroys—that we could all most usefully, healthily confront.
It’s a Sin shows that the bigotry around AIDS didn’t happen in a vacuum. It reminded me of the moment, aged 13, another kid informed me that AIDS stood for “Arse-Injected Death Sentence.” It reminded me of the relentlessly bigoted tabloids: the “pulpit poofs,” and the infamous “EastBenders” headline when the ground-breaking character of Colin in the BBC soap EastEnders, played by (now-Lord) Michael Cashman, kissed his on-screen boyfriend, a primetime first.
Any Pet Shop Boys fan will immediately not only welcome the title of the drama—a nod to their 1987 hit, a charged, caustic piece of pop brilliance—but wait for it to be played in It’s a Sin’s wonderful jukebox of songs. It is played at a significant moment of returning home, and taking stock of a life now in the balance.
His husband, Andrew Smith, died in 2018 from a brain tumor; Davies knows hospitals, illness, and mortality both as a gay man who lost friends in the 1980s and ’90s, and also as a husband who lost his partner in wrenchingly difficult circumstances. He is also romantic, profane, incredibly funny, and always digging into specifics. Words, looks, actions are filleted, even down to calling the classic (and recommended) TV series I, Claudius “I Clavdivs,” which is exactly how the TV graphic read to those who watched it back in the 1970s and ’80s.
Because the exceptional Russell T. Davies, creator of Queer as Folk, has written this scene you hold your breath all the way through it. It is beautiful and tense all at once. How will the straight guy react? What does the gay man want? As with so many of Davies’ scenes it plays against both type and expectation. And then it ends, on a suburban street; the only witnesses to this strange epic are the street-lamps, sidewalk, and silent darkness.
This meant, as we see in It’s a Sin, purges of books in school libraries, homosexuality disappeared from school curriculums, a general chilling, and silence. It stayed on the statute books until 2003. The show also mentions the issue of the age of consent. For years, it was 16 for straight people, and 21 for gay people—before being lowered to 18 in 1994, before finally equality (16 for all) was won in 2001.
