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My own private London. A gay life in the first year of It’s a Sin. (in six parts: Part one London)
(Contains spoilers and may trigger some AIDS survivor readers. Names in quotation marks are pseudonyms. Many of the names from the 80s aren’t mentioned because I don’t remember. Other names are real, taken from my occasional diary or letters I wrote)
The year 1981 was one of the happiest, craziest and upsetting times of my life. London in 1981 — and that’s where I was living for that happy year — is the setting for the opening of Russell T. Davies’ international hit television series, It’s a Sin, about a group of young friends, most of them LGBTQ, enjoying the freedom of life in London on the cusp of a darker days ahead when HIV/AIDS would strike.
On January 22 of this year, 2021, as I do most mornings, I was casually reading The Guardian online over breakfast. As I scrolled down the page I spotted the headline “It’s a Sin review — Russell T Davies Aids drama is a poignant masterpiece “ with the publicity photo of a good looking young man, unidentified in the cutline, enjoying the affection of a second. That handsome devil — and in the show he is a bit of a devil — is Ritchie played by Olly Alexander.
