Weeks before his latest drama, “It’s a Sin,” was set to air, the British showrunner Russell T. Davies lay awake in bed, convinced that he’d made a terrible mistake. The series, which follows a group of friends in the early years of the Aids crisis, had wrapped in January, 2020, just as covid-19 arrived in England. “We were editing the show while all the P.P.E. started to be introduced, and all the distancing,” he recalled, over Zoom, the other day. He began to fear that his timing was awful: “I quietly thought the series would die.” Last month, it premièred in the U.K., to excellent response: friends and fans got in touch; H.I.V. charities credited the show with a spike in both testing and donations. Davies found himself booked on ITV’s flagship news program.
Davies, who is fifty-seven, was in Swansea, having decamped from Manchester to be closer to family. (He’s in a bubble with “the better sister, and the better niece,” he joked.) He wore a blue shirt and black glasses, his hair slightly askew. “Blasted,” he said, from a walk in the wind. “But I’m alive!”
Behind him were posters he’d drawn for productions at a Cardiff theatre where he had worked before landing a job at BBC Wales, in 1985. It was a formative, risky period in more ways than one: the following year, he appeared in an educational film about H.I.V./Aids. He moved to Manchester, discovered the city’s vibrant gay scene, and sneaked L.G.B.T. story lines into soaps. But by the time he developed “Queer as Folk,” his first series about gay life, aids “was beginning to not be a death sentence. And I was absolutely determined that we would stop being defined by an illness.” He stands by his decision to keep the epidemic out of the show’s plot, which angered activists at the time. “It liberated those characters,” he said. “H.I.V. and Aids had been the constant story of all gay men popping up in fiction—in cop shows, in dramas, in soap operas—they would inevitably drag the disease with them.”
“It’s a Sin,” which will be released on HBO Max this month, recalls the uncertainties of the era, but also the unprecedented freedoms, with triumphant one-night stands and a hookup montage that captures the joy of coming out and coming into one’s own. “It’s a really horrible virus. It’s a nasty little fucker,” he said. “I think we’ve spent a lot of time remembering the deathbeds; it’s time to remember the lives.” He added, “And, my God, we’ve all had some great nights, frankly—even this withered old husk sitting here.”
“Queer as Folk,” with its similarly blunt but celebratory ethos, became a cult classic. After running the 2006 revival of “Doctor Who” (and earning an O.B.E. for “services to drama”), Davies leveraged his influence to pitch “Cucumber,” a spikier series that he’d been quietly developing for years, about a middle-aged gay man in present-day Manchester. He considers the triptych of “It’s a Sin,” “Queer as Folk,” and “Cucumber,” which premièred in 2015, to be his life’s work. “I’m not saying it’s finished—I’ll gladly still be around to write about gay men in their seventies,” he said with a laugh, then paused to consider the idea more seriously. “That will fascinate me. Already, I hear stories about old men having to go back into the closet when they go into care homes. Suddenly, they’re entering a straight world again.” Davies may pitch the care-home idea one day, but he has no intention of living it. “Not me!” he said. “I’ll be sitting there playing ‘Hello, Dolly!’ if I have to.”
For now, he plans to focus on mentoring screenwriters who’ve reached out during lockdown, responding to notes from bereaved viewers, and enjoying some calm—the first he’s had since his husband, Andrew Smith, died of a brain tumor in 2018. Davies had spent eight years as Smith’s caretaker, and he wrote much of “It’s a Sin” while the loss was still fresh. The death of one of the characters, who exhibits signs of dementia following his diagnosis of Aids, “is almost stage for stage Andrew’s death,” he said. The parallels, although not conscious at the time, were cathartic. “I’m immensely sad he’s not here at the moment, because he would find the success of this hilarious,” Davies continued. “He would be loving it. Me being on ‘News at Ten’—he’d be very happy for me, but he would be taking the piss like you wouldn’t believe.” ♦
