Pride/Shame -- My Thoughts on It's a Sin.

(Probably don’t read this if you plan to watch the series. If you haven’t seen it, do. It’s gripping.)

I’ve seen lots of rapturous reviews of It’s A Sin in social media, and I’ve seen some very strong criticism. It’s unavoidable that a series whose subject is the AIDS plague years would arouse strong feelings and opinions among the men and women who lived through those years in those communities.

Most of the negative critique seems to center around the scene near the end, after the death of Ritchie, who, in the first episode fled his homophobic family to come to London (all the characters do that) and who early on dismissed the seriousness of the risk of getting infected and the risk of infecting others. The scene is between Ritchie’s mother and his best girlfriend, Jill. Jill says:

 “Actually, it is your fault, Mrs. Tozer — all of this is your fault… Right from the start. I don’t know what happened to you, to make that house so loveless, that’s why Ritchie grew up so ashamed of himself — and then he killed people! He was ashamed, he kept on being ashamed, he kept shame going by having sex with men, infecting them, and then running away. Cuz that’s what shame does, Valerie, it makes him think he deserves it. The wards are full of men who think they deserve it. They are dying, and a little bit of them thinks ‘Yes, this is right, I brought this on myself, it’s my fault because the sex that I love is killing me.’“

The monologue is a gut punch when you’ve spent your life arguing that promiscuity was not killing us, sex was not killing us, we were not killing ourselves. Governmental neglect and societal indifference and antipathy were killing us.

A common slogan on posters and other ACT UP media was “Homophobia kills.” Meaning that a homophobic government was ignoring the pandemic because it was queers who were dying. A homophobic society didn’t care that we were dying, because it was our own fault, and we deserved it. But this series asserts something deeper and more insidious: homophobia causes gay men to feel shame, and shame makes them hate themselves, which causes them to believe their lives are worthless. They internalize society’s view of them, and that causes their promiscuity and carelessness about sex. That’s a lot to swallow when you have cut your gay political teeth on the idea that openly celebrating our sexuality is the most potent political weapon we can exercise, the most important act of resistance. 

(And of course there’s a convincing argument to be made that the conservative turn of the post-90s gay rights movement, toward marriage, children, military service, assimilation, and away from sexual freedom is a community-wide shame reaction to the plague years. It’s A Sin is very much a post-90s work of art, a product of this era.)

Here’s what I think. Can we allow for the possibility that we experience, and perceive, our promiscuity as both things: freedom, joy, celebration and a grinding compulsive need to replace our self-hatred, even if it’s just for a few minutes, with the feeling of worth and control that being attractive to someone brings? For me, in my life, promiscuity was both these things at different times and often at the same time.

Pride and shame are two sides of the same coin. Can anyone honestly say that when they came out all the bad feelings just went “poof!” For me, coming out, being out, feeling pride, protesting homophobia, all these things are part of a lifelong project to chip away at the shame. We insist on joy because we’ve been told all our lives that our desire is disgusting. We live in a world that hates us. That was true when I was a child, true in 1979 when I came out, true in 1981, and it’s still true. How would we not feel shame?

I think depicting gay men who don’t feel shame, who don’t to some extent think terrible things about themselves, hate themselves sometimes, would be a misrepresentation, but as a community we do it all the time, refuse to acknowledge our shame, our damage, our pain. The relentless rainbows and unicorns PRIDE! message might be politically necessary, but it can compound our shame. Constantly being told that we should be proud and not ashamed makes us ashamed of our shame.

My thoughts, for what they’re worth.

One thing I can’t really make sense of is that this monologue, this “thesis statement,” comes not from one of the gay men characters — who would presumably speak with more authority on the subject — but from the straight woman friend. To be honest, I’m not sure how to parse that narrative choice.