Tell the story of a virus

Abstract

This article is part of the special Cultural Commons edition on It’s a Sin. It argues that if It’s a Sin is the queer Friends of the UK AIDS era, it loses its nerve: while it gets right the ways that queer kinship reinvented the conventional family during the AIDS crisis, it still makes the domestic sphere its ultimate thematic focus - and mothers the villains.

The first time in my life that I experienced revisionist history was when the documentary How to Survive a Plague (the United States, David France) came out in 2012. Slick, moving, and accurate – it nevertheless was not authentic to my experience of ACT UP and New York of the late 1980s and 1990s. The film depicts a crucially important element of AIDS activism, but it presents that picture – the efforts of a few individuals to get drugs into bodies – as the whole picture. How to Survive a Plague tells a story that is full of suspense, pathos, and resolution. As Avram Finkelstein (2018) puts it, however, ‘Plague shows us the winding path to protease inhibitors, but neglects to look down at the intricate paving stones that led there’ (p. 7).

In that same year, another documentary about ACT UP/New York came out: United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (the United States, Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman). This film was grittier, much lower budget, inconclusive, and . . . truer. United in Anger does not resolve: it rouses to action. At the end of the film you do not think, ‘oh that was a terrific and moving story, I now know something about history that I did not know before’; you think, ‘where can I sign up?’ Indeed, the website for United in Anger includes a Study Guide and an Activist Guide. ¹

It’s a Sin is not a documentary – it is not purporting to tell the truth or the whole story. It is television –and television does not have a particularly good track record of real representation either. At the time Paula Treichler (1999) was writing about the American television drama An Early Frost (1985), she could say confidently and with many substantiating statistics that ‘internationally, television is the single most important source of information about AIDS and HIV’ (p. 178); and while that is extremely unlikely to still be true, it is nevertheless the case that discourse around acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is circulated so little, that through It’s a Sin television has become, once again, the single most important source of that information. In the United Kingdom, there are data that bear this out – not least the skyrocketing surge in calls to the Terrence Higgins Trust helpline and requests for testing right after the show aired.

A cynical adage of the AIDS crisis was that there were those who need to know about AIDS and HIV – those who had reason to be scared, for themselves or loved ones – and those who might like to know. ² We now might translate that as a television series for those who are starved for representation of a severely underrepresented time, and those who might find it educational and moving. It was underrepresented even at the time: as Vito Russo proclaimed in 1988,

living with AIDS is like living through a war which is happening only for those who happen to be in the trenches. Every time a shell explodes, you look around and you discover that you’ve lost more of your friends, but nobody else notices. It isn’t happening to them. ³

For some of us, the AIDS crisis is a memory soaked in blood; for others, it is history they have not had to learn. The success of It’s a Sin is partly it being news to people. We could even say that It’s a Sin is the queer Friends of the AIDS era. Though it loses its nerve. What it gets right about queer kinship is the ways that family was reinvented, not only during the AIDS crisis but long before that as a means of queer survival: loyalties and affinities were forged by sex and exes and community and solidarity. But It’s a Sin lets us down in that portrayal by making its ultimate thematic focus and finale the censorious conventional domestic family.

Mothers tend not to fare well in the historical discourse of homosexuality: overbearing mothers or insufficiently nurturing ones are the paradoxical causes of homosexuality itself; the opposite of Winnicottian compassion where good enough is the antidote to exactly right, all mothering is a potential risk for homosexuality. That there is an exceptional mother in It’s a Sin (and even that there might be some in real life) does not undermine this enduring legacy. In fact, the trend lately in gay film has crept from always and only and forever about Coming Out to being about Coming Out and also gaining acceptance of parents. If you want to make a grown queer cry, put them on a sidewalk when PFLAG marches by. ⁴ Everyone wants parental acceptance and love: gays and lesbians historically have had to get the wording right, the partner right, the moment right –and the illness right! – to get it. Or even just to hope to get it.

Mothers have also carried a lot of the weight of consequence and blame in the AIDS crisis – first and foremost, not as people who themselves might be vulnerable to HIV infection and AIDS but as vectors of transmission – whether to their unborn children, to their children in the process of being born, or to their babies through breast milk. The first pharmaceutical trials ever conducted on women were conducted on women as potential vectors of infection – and medicine – to their babies, in which AZT was given to pregnant women to see if it would save the baby. Here, instead, we have a representation of mothers as vectors of shame.

It’s a Sin gets right the implication that homophobia caused the AIDS crisis – I have said so myself (Pearl, 2021). And it is true that the family home is the toxic place that frequently has to be fled in order for young gays to find their people; this is accurately depicted in It’s a Sin as a journey from the suburb to the city. Here, we also have mothers carrying the weight of deciding whether their child will be cared for and surrounded by their friends or else involuntarily isolated from their chosen community.

This is not the only tale that has been told about mothers and their sons dying of AIDS. There seems to be a legacy of precisely this tableau of a son with AIDS returned home to a doting mother, ambivalent father, and sullen sister. ⁵ An Early Frost was the very first AIDS television. In that drama, as in It’s a Sin, a son comes out as gay by telling his family he has AIDS, a common phenomenon. In the 1993 short story ‘In the Gloaming’, the young man also wishes for more conversation, more intimacy – but in this tale, he gets to have it. They are in sync, mother and son, because she puts herself in sync with him:

Soon she was following Laird’s breathing, and picking up the vital rhythms, breathing along. It was so peaceful, being near him like this. How many mothers spend so much time with their thirty-three-year-old sons? she thought. She had as much of him now as she had when he was an infant; more, in a way, because she had the memory of the intervening years as well, to round out her thoughts about him. When they sat quietly together she felt as close to him as she ever had. It was still him in there, inside the failing shell. She still enjoyed him. (Dark, 1993: 98)

As in the final episode of It’s a Sin, this mother and son in Dark’s story also have a conversation about sex, but it is not triumphantly blazoned against the mother’s disavowing puritanical objections. In the short story, the mother, Janet, has instead to coax it out of him. They are discussing sex in fiction. He says, abruptly, ‘maybe we should change the subject’. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t’, Janet replies, and then ventures, ‘I’ve been wondering. Was that side of life satisfying for you?’ Laird replies, ‘Ma, tell me you’re not asking about my sex life’. Not repulsed, not resisting; on the contrary, ‘She felt very calm, very pulled together and all of a piece, as if she’d finally got the knack of being a dignified woman’. ‘I’m asking about your love life . . . Did you love, and were you loved in return?’ ‘Yes’, he answers; ‘I’m glad’, she responds (p. 91).

This conversation in An Early Frost is the most tentative of these scenarios: the mother mutters, ‘it’s just hard for me to imagine’. Her son helps her finish the thought: ‘that I was with another man?’ She nods yes. ‘I haven’t been unhappy, mom’, he responds. In contrast, in It’s a Sin, Ritchie, upon apotheosizing on his sex life asks his mother: do you understand what I mean? The mother replies, ‘no’.

And while the series itself seems bravely transparent about the protagonist’s sex life, it is nevertheless cravenly silent about safe sex. Condoms are only ever discarded in this show, each instance a doomful foreshadowing: first when Ritchie tosses a package of them overboard on his way to his gay life in the big city, exposing how little his father knows him (‘I don’t want you getting some girl in trouble,’ says father to son on the ferry from the Isle of Wight, ‘but make sure they all get used’), and next when Ritchie and his lover Donald decide not to use them, promising each other they are ‘clean’, ‘trustworthy’.

The series spends the entirety of its five episodes trying to undercut its title, but then seems actually ultimately to endorse it: It is a sin – by blaming sex for their illness, by suggesting that by having sex after they knew they might be infected they killed each other: this is the film’s dénouement, its final pronouncement. That the mother is impugned for the shame that creates these conditions does not vitiate the liability of sex itself. It is not just that these men do not practice safe sex, but according to this television show, there is no such thing. There is only luck – good luck and bad luck. Roscoe remonstrates with his father that he was not blessed by god but lucky. Jill reassures Ritchie he was not reckless only unlucky.

After he dies, Janet, the mother of ‘In the Gloaming’, wishes away her son’s declining days instead of coveting them as in It’s a Sin:

A young man shouldn’t spend his early thirties wasting away talking to his mother. He should be out in the world. He shouldn’t be thinking about me, or what I care about, or my opinions. He shouldn’t have to return my love to me – it was his to squander. (p. 95)

In It’s a Sin, when his mother admits she cannot understand his orgiastic life in London, he responds, slowly, uselessly, ‘that’s why I need to see Jill’ – he craves his queer kin. He wants his story of the virus and everything in his life that swirled around it to be heard – and understood.

Maybe there is no other way of telling stories – distorted versions – and I now know that it is not the victors who get to tell the story of history, but the ones who were always already the winners – the privileged (whether that privilege is conferred by class, by race, or by the conventions of family as it is normatively conceived). And of course – the living. Like the ACT UP Oral History Project – the most accurate portrayal of activism and AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s because the most replete and the most conflicted – it is nevertheless only the survivors who can tell their story. It will always only be an incomplete story.

Although I did not come up in gay London in the 1980s – that is not the city where my despair, intervention, and activism was forged – in watching It’s a Sin, I felt the twinges of both recognition and misrecognition that comes from having your life reflected back through the prism of popular media. No less true now than when this was first published in 1993, Paula Treichler (1993) pronounces that the ‘AIDS epidemic poses problems of representation, identity, and narrative convention for network television’ (p. 176). A dearth of representation makes what representation exists carry all the weight of hopes, demands, and expectations – and produces the heavy plunge of disappointment.

But I suppose we must tell the stories anyway; it is only through an avalanche of voices that we get something approximating getting it right. ‘I’ve come to understand that the virus is a virus’, Brian Mullin (2021) shares about his own reactions to It’s a Sin – and others’ reactions to his HIV status – ‘it doesn’t care about any story’. Yet, in John Greyson’s mad wonderful musical Zero Patience, HIV – the virus itself – personified by the much-missed Michael Callen, actually sings to us: ‘Tell the story of a virus’. Stories are the only ways to make sense of something unimaginably cruel, chaotic, and baffling to comprehend without narrative to help us make sense of it. The actual experience of a time that mixed desire and demise, sex and illness and death, friendship and loss upon loss, was potent enough: representing it, capturing it, feels misguided, impossible – and anyway vital and necessary to keep trying, to keep the conversation going.