It is a peculiar thing that in the UK, we’re more likely to know about the history of gay people in the US than we are in our own country – largely because most of the gay-themed films and documentaries we get come from there.
That’s very true of AIDS, as while those who are too young to remember the 1980s may have seen The Normal Heart or documentaries such as How To Survive A Plague, there’s not that much that’s been made and had a major impact about what happened in the UK.
However now Queer As Folk and Doctor Who writer Russell T. Davies is stepping forward to try and redress the balance, as at a launch event for his new trio of TV series – Cucumber, Banana and Tofu – he revealed he’s working on a drama set during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
As he pointed out, “It’s the kind of story that you think has been told, but then you realize it hasn’t been told in Britain: the story of what happened to those boys in the early ’80s and late ’80s.”
After mentioning the sort of activist gay politics seen in the recent 80s set film Pride, he said, “It kind of looks in dramas like we were all waving placards in the streets and besieging [the prime minister’s residence] about AIDS, and barracking our MPs [Members of Parliament] and our doctors. That’s not how it was at all as I remember it.
“Most of us, as often in life, just stayed very quiet and couldn’t quite believe it was happening. It was the brave few who were out on the picket lines. This is still the case for any issue – most people aren’t on the picket lines. I mean that for myself. I didn’t go out on marches. I didn’t do anything. I actually couldn’t quite believe it was happening. That’s why I need to write this, and I haven’t come to the end of coming to terms with it. That’s what I’d like to do: to find out why I did what I did. I didn’t do anything wrong or bad, but literally I had friends who died and I didn’t go to their funerals, I didn’t write to their mothers. I didn’t do anything. I was young and stupid. I just carried on. I look back now and I’m ashamed of that. And I genuinely wonder why I did that. Maybe you just have to reach this age. The things you have to write just rise up in you. It is not planned, there’s no schedule.”
He suggests that the reason he wants to write it is partly because the last few years – which have included him stepping away from a blossoming US TV career after his partner became seriously ill – have made him take stock of his life. “It’s been building up in me. It’s partly turning 50, and looking back at your life, and partly having stared mortality in the face,” he says. “And I am amazed that I haven’t written this before – I am amazed no one has. I think we are reaching a bit of a generational thing now where men like me in their 50s are looking back and realizing how shocking it was.”
While it will be a work of fiction, it will draw heavily from Davies’ own life as a young man in the 1980s. “I want to go into the bedsits. It’s called ‘The Boys’ because it’s about the boys,” he says. “The story of the politics has been told, the story of the marches has been told, the story of the virus has been told. The story of the boys has not been told. The boys are not here, and their deaths were very quiet. There’s a lot to say about that.”
It will also have a female lead, based on one of Davies’ friends, who was friends with many young men who died of AIDS, and “She sat on the wards and held those boys’ hands,” he says. (Quotes via Variety)
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