Dedicated fans have lived through twenty-plus years in which all of the legendary icon’s albums – Hard Candy, MDNA, Rebel Heart and (my fave of these four) Madame X – seemed to require special pleading. Whilst each contains successful songs, literally no one would place them alongside the era-defining releases from her imperial phase(s) in the 80s, 90s and 2000s.

But, even at the height of her pop domination, did the world ever really love Madonna? She commanded absolute devotion from her fans and the rest of the population was compelled by the sheer force of her power to pay attention.

It’s all the more striking then that last week, four decades into her career, the 67 year-old’s fifteenth studio album Confessions II debuted to rapturous critical praise and a #1 spot on the Billboard 200.

Finally enough love?

Things could’ve gone very differently. When she first teased a new record reuniting with producer Stuart Price, stalwart fans were filled with ecstatic expectations and more than a little concern.

Madonna’s best work has historically emerged from close collaboration with a single producer, as opposed to the grab-bag spreadsheet of songwriters behind her recent offerings. Price was the solo producer behind her last bona fide masterpiece, 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor and this new release would be… its sequel.

For many of us, that’s where the trepidation set in. Until now, Madonna’s pop career has been defined by self-consciously never looking back. Despite having more hit singles than nearly any other artist, she famously resists performing too many old songs on her tours. Forward motion has always been her credo: ‘Don’t think of yesterday / And I don’t look at the clock / I like to boogie-woogie.’

By positioning this new work as ‘Part 2’ of her last beloved release, was Madonna setting herself up for a flop? The original COADF was buttressed by a set of bullet-proof radio singles that seemed unlikely to be replicated in 2026.

When it arrived on July 3^rd, though, Confessions II revealed itself to be anything but a plate of reheated nachos. Despite the title – which cannily got everyone’s eyeballs on the release – I’d argue that it’s hardly a sequel at all.

Yes, she and Stuart have given us a dance album that plays as a continuous DJ set, an epic night out at the club. But there the resemblance ends.

I’ll leave it to those more versed in music production to parse how Confessions II trades the previous album’s 70s references (disco, ABBA, Donna Summer) for Detroit and Chicago house samples of the 90s.

What struck me most was the radically different attitude that Madonna strikes across this new album. For a pop icon who’s continually pushed musical and sexual boundaries, it seems that the final frontier is vulnerability.

She’s ‘stuck around’ longer than any other pop act before her, and this time she’s finally letting the scars show.

The original COADF era famously began with a disastrous horseback riding accident in which Madonna shattered her hand, her collarbone and three ribs – not to mention her marriage to Guy Ritchie. Yet, in a show of total resilience, she bounced back less than one year later by opening The Confessions Tour in Gaultier riding gear as she whipped equine-styled dancers.

Madonna’s message in 2005 was of a piece with what she’d always preached: you can knock me down, break my bones even, but I’ll be back stronger than ever. Watching that tour video back now with the knowledge of the injuries she sustained, the woman seems superhuman. And she peddled the fantasy that we can be, too.

The singles on COADF are anthems of strength, resilience and propulsion. We find her fed up with ticking clocks (‘Hung Up’), delivering kiss-offs to feckless lovers (‘Sorry’) and preparing to leap head first into whatever’s next (‘Jump’).

Great as those songs are, calling them confessional is a stretch.

A few of the songs on Confessions II hit those familiar notes. ‘Read My Lips,’ telling a former lover exactly where he can shove it (set to a Latin beat), would fit in on nearly any earlier album. ‘My Sins Are My Savior’ joins the canon of Madonna’s unapologetic responses to her critics: ‘They tried to take me down / They tried to take my crown’ etc.

But there’s a revelatory strain of self-examination running through this new album like a seam – or a hairline fracture – right from the very beginning.

Madonna has spoken to us at the top of albums before, but here she is not in role as Mistress Dita or any of her other alter egos. Instead, she reveals her motivation for adopting different identities: ‘Sometimes I wish I could just hide in the shadows / Create a new persona… / Honestly, I wish I could be like other people / And just not care.’

On the intro to ‘I Feel So Free’ we meet an unrecognizably awkward Madonna, the pre-fame girl that she’s referenced in interviews who loved to dance but hated socialising and would bring a book with her to the club, waiting for a favorite track to come on. Out on the dance floor, there was ‘safety in numbers’ – and no need to talk.

The original COADF is a phenomenal dance album, but Confessions II is a thesis on dance itself as a social and emotional phenomenon, refracted through the experience of a woman whose life was shaped in the crucible of the club scene and whose music fueled it to new heights.

With the album’s second track ‘Good for the Soul,’ Madonna finds herself ‘traveling through space and time,’ as she has previously on Bedtime Stories and Ray of Light. This time, though, the traveler is not an incorporeal ‘zephyr in the sky-y-y’ but a real woman with history, regrets and wisdom, all of which she carries in her body.

On tracks from ‘Into the Groove’ to ‘Vogue,’ Madonna has always urged us toward liberation, consecrecrating the dance floor as a place ‘to escape / the pain of life that you know.’ How different, therefore, is the tone she invokes in ‘One Step Away,’ still liberatory but tinged with world-weary insight:

Understand your violence and the trauma you’ve survived

Nobody’s free until they’re broken

In fact, the word ‘broken’ recurs like a chime throughout the album on multiple songs, as does ‘fragile,’ sounding notes of breakability that cannot be ignored.

Coming out of a period in which Madonna lost family members, endured a life-threatening hospitalization and spent a key segment of The Celebration Tour floating through a gallery of her departed loved ones, these fixations on life’s fragility seem understandable. What’s more surprising is how an album so suffused with loss winds up feeling more energized than mournful.

On Confessions II, Madonna uses dance as a vehicle for archival excavation, processing and healing. The dance floor becomes a plane on which the past can unspool simultaneously with the present.

This occurs most obviously in the standout autobiographical track ‘Danceteria,’ in which she recounts her literal origin myth, set in the club where DJ Mark Kamens first played her tape of ‘Everybody,’ the track that ‘started the party.’ This song has already spawned a dozen listicles, educating millennial and Gen Z listeners about the history of the 1980s downtown New York scene and the names who populated it.

All of that backstory contexualizes Madonna’s repeated demands to get off our phones, ‘go outside’ and ‘breathe in the air.’ These pleas are more profound than a grandma telling youngsters to touch grass. They are born out of her experience in a very specific milieu, where the cross-pollination of art forms was conducted by analog means. In contrast to our algorithmic age in which careers are orchestrated on TikTok, Madonna’s rise would never have happened without people dancing, sweating and networking in one another’s physical presence as cassette tapes and rolled-up dollar bills of blow exchanged hands.

The singular social conditions that shaped that scene are comprehensively detailed in Tim Lawrence’s essential book Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983:

With digital communication barely on the horizon, answering machines a rarity, and even landlines a premium expense, participants went out as a matter of social and, increasingly, professional necessity. After all, it was in the city’s clubs that one could find out what was going down – where the next party was happening, what band was looking for a new drummer, who needed help with a performance, when the next low-budget film or fashion show required volunteers, which venue was offering door/coat check/bar/DJ-ing work, and so on and so forth, deep into the night. In this manner, the city’s party scene became a hive of informal networking that engendered a cornucopia of creative ventures.

This ‘mongrel’ social scene was born from a convergence of economic downturn and widely available urban spaces, as well as social movements that brought together Black and queer cultures from the worlds of hip-hop, graffiti art, radical cabaret, drag and fashion. Spaces like Danceteria and its ilk offered club nights alongside gallery shows, underground film screenings, performance happenings and other uncategorisable cultural experimentation:

By facilitating what city philosopher Iris Marion Young evokes as a ‘being together of strangers,’ the party network engineered a form of accelerated integration that facilitated encounters between revelers of diverse backgrounds, their interactions anticipated and supported by the compound sounds that surged throughout the city… The party scene also supported a form of democratic socializing in which participants could gain what urban activist Jane Jacobs describes as a ‘feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighbourhood need.’

Of course, that ‘neighbourhood need’ was activated by the emergence of an epidemic that had already been devastating queer, Black, brown and drug-injecting communities even before it was officially identified as ‘AIDS’ in 1982. Social bonds formed by all all of those communities on the dancefloor would soon seroconvert into networks of activism and community care that became essential to combat a crisis.

Madonna’s mainstream stardom has been coterminous with the public emergence of AIDS. The epidemic’s continuing legacy sits undetectable within the cells of this album, as it does in so much of her work. Madonna Ciccone’s encounter with queer culture began when her gay dance teacher Christopher Flynn first took her to a Detroit gay club. From him and Martin Burgoyne on down, she would go on to lose so many of her earliest dance partners to AIDS. Her response was to repurpose the dance floor itself as a space of communal activism, as well as her concerts and even her album sleeves as vehicles for vital public education, at a time when those in positions of power shirked their responsibilities.

It’s no wonder, then, that for Madonna dance music is not ‘superficial.’ The club is a ‘temple of sweat and surrender’ where ‘rhythm replaces reason.’

The emotions that dance channels, she tells us, span more than the pure joy of ecstatic release. Dance can be a means of processing love in all its contradictory facets — beyond the logical restraint of words.

When Madonna’s brother Christopher passed away in 2024, it was via the metaphor of dance that she expressed her feelings. Although he played many pivotal roles in shaping the first chapters of her career, Christopher’s first public notoriety came as one of her backup dancers. As she expressed in an Instagram tribute following his death, their relationship became deeply strained, but they kept dancing together:

We took each other’s hands and we danced through the madness of our childhood in fact dance was a kind of superglue that held us together. Discovering Dance in our small Midwestern town saved me and then my brother came along, and it saved him too. My ballet Teacher – also named Christopher – created a safe space for my brother to be Gay, a word that was not spoken or even whispered where we lived. When I finally got the courage to go to New York to become a Dancer. My brother followed. And again we took each other’s hands, and we danced through the madness of New York City!... We danced through the madness of the AIDS epidemic. We went to funerals and we cried, and we went dancing…

He had impeccable taste. And a sharp tongue. Which he sometimes used against me but I always forgave him. We soared the highest heights together. And floundered in the lowest lows. Somehow we always found each other again and we held hands and we kept dancing.

The surprising suite of songs on the back half of Confessions II, delving into some of Madonna’s closest and most complicated relationships, may at first feel out of place alongside the house anthems that precede them. As well as addressing her brother on ‘Fragile,’ she sings to her ex-love Sean, her stepmother Joan and sings both about and with her daughter Lola.

All of these songs are notable for their embrace of contradiction, making it difficult to parse exactly how Madonna feels. On ‘Bizarre,’ she voices emotions that seem charged with the immediate resentment of her first divorce, but which slip into feelings of nostalgia and rekindled attraction. On ‘Betrayal,’ she tells Joan in one verse that she ‘will not be mentioned,’ then saying in the next, ‘I hope that when it’s over, I’ll still think of you.’ For all that we try to process our deepest wounds, they arise and recur when we least expect them to: ‘Only love can be so bizarre.’

In this last stretch of the album, Madonna does not try to sum up her feelings about these relationships so much as she continues to move through and around them. She apologises to Lola for ‘treading on your footsteps.’ All of our closest relationships, chosen or not, are a kind of partner dance that can shift in and out of sync, better expressed through movement than words:

We’re dancing, yes, we’re dancing

We’re together, forever

Used to hate you, I don’t hate you

But forever, til the end.

Madonna’s final dance partner is the same one she started with, the Lower East Side girl ‘lost in a fragile world’ that she has so rarely acknowledged in public.

In whatever era we first encountered the pop diva who bestrode the world, how many of us have ever seen the heartbroken, motherless young woman she once was? A girl behind on her rent, with Polaroids taped to the wall of a boy she couldn’t forget.

Of all artists who’ve achieved stratospheric levels of mainstream success, Madonna seems to me singular for the way in which she’s almost always kept one foot firmly rooted in the underground scene from which she emerged. The spirit of boundary-pushing experimentation learned at Danceteria, FUN Gallery and the Mudd Club is the DNA code preserved within her all this time.

After a couple decades in which those instincts appeared to be waning, she’s looked again at the ‘cracked mirror in her hand’ to see — and accept — that broken girl who first ventured into a dancing crowd, starting a forty-year journey in which power and pain could ultimately coexist.

Everything fades away, except for you.

What is it about musicals?

Is there any other genre so loaded with stigmatised signification? To acknowledge enjoying them is to expose oneself.

The ever brilliant Grace Lavery turned me on recently to D.A. Miller’s 1998 essay Place for Us, which traces (a certain generation of) gay men’s identification with Broadway musicals back to a commonly experienced primal scene.

Miller describes a ‘puberty rite’ immediately identifiable to me and probably to many of you who opened this post:

…boys destined, as it was said, to be musical, would descend into the basement of their parents’ home (see Figure left), and there they would sing and dance to recorded Broadway music (in one variant, merely mime singing and dancing) under the magical belief that, having lent the score the depth of their own abjection, they might then borrow all its fantastic hope that their solitary condition would end in glory and triumph.

Though each closeted kid enacted this ritual privately, ‘in secrecy and shame,’ it was somehow ‘so widely diffused as to remain, for several generations, as practically normative for gay men.’

Miller in the 1960s communed with a vinyl LP of Ethel Merman in Gypsy. By the 90s, I could put my extensive collection of Sondheim CDs on rotation and walk around the empty house singing all the lyrics to ‘A Little Priest’ or ‘A Weekend in the Country’. With my high tenor voice and repressed sense of romantic intimacy, I found my perfect avatar in Mandy Patinkin’s George, who can’t love anyone because there’s ‘a part of him / always standing by…’ – so much so that I submitted ‘Finishing the Hat’ as my addition to our school’s 1997 senior class mixtape.

Looking back from gay middle age, I’m proud of my teenage self for not pretending in front of his peers to care about contemporary pop music. (What would my alternative selection have been? Toni Braxton’s ‘Unbreak My Heart’??)

I can remember one of my classmates saying, ‘You know, Mullin, I don’t even like musicals, but that was… interesting.’

It’s been more than two decades since I came out and started working in theatre myself – but even still, I carry a degree of internalized shame at being, deep down, a show queen. Tellingly, though I’ve written shows about gay porn and HIV, it was not until last year that I started writing a fully-fledged musical.1

What held me back?

‘In the psyche of post-Stonewall man,’ Miller says, ‘the Broadway musical lies like a nervously watched pod that, having been preserved from a past geological epoch, may nonetheless—say, at any temperature above frigidity—split open to reveal a creature that, in comparison with the less primitive forms of life around it, even with those that must have evolved from it, will appear monstrous beyond recognition.’

Miller imagines a scene entering a hookup’s apartment, for the express purpose of engaging in ‘grown-up’ male-on-male sexual acts, only to discover an extensive collection of cast albums and exclaiming ‘My God, you really are gay!’ Having come out of the closet, it is no longer the predilection for sodomy that brands us, but the surviving evidence of the sissies we once were.

As I began drafting lyrics for our show last summer, the pod had definitely cracked open — and the primal childhood joy of belting out songs surged within me. I listened back through old showtunes as references, but did worry how those searches would warp my Spotify Wrapped, revealing to the world just how gay I was… Until, in the words of Howard Ashman, I thought, But who cares? No big deal. I want more!

The power – and the threat – of the musical lies in its emotional vulnerability. To witness a heroine step into the spotlight and deliver her showstopper is to witness the deepest internal doubts that most people keep mum made manifest and, in doing so, to break through them.

The musical, a genre derided for its blatant artificiality, actually traffics in the revelation of authenticity. We buy our tickets and wait with bated breath for the inevitable moment when the True Self breaks free, in song:

Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I’m through with playing by the rules
Of someone else’s game…

2024 was quite a year for musicals. The quatrain above, sung by a misunderstood ‘wicked’ witch, could have come just as easily from the lips of the free-wheelin’ folk singer or the conflicted cartel leader who serve as the other two musical protagonists from films nominated at this year’s Academy Awards.

It’s been more than fifty years since multiple musicals has been nominated in the Best Picture lineup. And not even in the 1960s, when behemoth road show pictures like My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music were Hollywood’s blockbusters, was there a single year that featured three movie musicals competing for the top prize.

Think before you quibble with me grouping the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown together with a film about singing witches. Minute for minute, the Dylan film probably contains more singing than Wicked (which, after all, was stretched out from just Act 1 of the stage show). Moreover, both films tell the stories of singular outsiders who seek entry into arcane institutions (the upper echelons of American folk music, the hallowed halls of Shiz University) only to end up violently rejecting membership in climactic final gestures of rebellion that are each expressed through a new, radical sound.

Before seeing Wicked, I listened to the songs on Spotify and was struck by Cynthia Erivo’s somewhat restrained vocal quality in early songs like ‘The Wizard and I’ and ‘I’m Not That Girl.’ In the dramatic context of the film, though, this muted expression proves a canny character choice. For most of the film, Erivo is holding back her full vocal power because she knows where she’s headed.

The primary reason most of us bought our tickets at all was to hear ‘Defying Gravity,’ maybe even just to hear how Erivo would interpret that famous, non-verbal vocal riff that concludes the song. The film’s trailer notably gives us Elphaba’s very last lyrics in the song (‘No wizard that there is or was, is ever gonna bring me down…’) but withholds the battle cry. Everyone knows: you don’t give away the money shot.

Elphaba, like Mama Rose in Gypsy, has become a role that every diva must put their own stamp on. Erivo could not simply replicate Idina Menzel’s signature ‘Ah-AH-ah-ah!’ but instead delivers a longer run with additional syllables. Her cry comes from the guts and feels even rawer and more liberatory — especially after the 2 hours and 40 minutes we’ve waited for it.

In the film, Elphaba’s final breakthrough is hard won. Her broom does not immediately fly but first falls precipitously from the Emerald City’s tower. The jolt that she needs to ultimately defy gravity comes from a last minute vision of her younger self (that ostracized kid in the basement again), plummeting alongside her. When Elphaba’s full-fledged belt emerges at last, we interpret it not as something new but a voice within that has lain dormant within her. The egg has finally cracked, and the power of her real self is unleashed.

By contrast, when Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan ‘goes electric’ at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, he plummets head first into accusations from the folk establishment that he has abandoned the authenticity of his early music. This scene, as heavily foreshadowed and indulgently distended as ‘Defying Gravity’ is in Wicked, fulfills much the same function. Both send our protagonists blasting out of the confining milieu in which they were raised, now free agents with lonely, tumultuous futures ahead of them.

Just as girls and gays were primed to dissect every note of Erivo’s performance, Boomer men no doubt bought tickets to A Complete Unknown with trepidation about how this twink might soil their idol’s legacy. Chalamet’s singing may lack Erivo’s vocal pyrotechnics, but it walks an equally risky tightrope.

In contrast to other musical biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody, here Timmy does his own singing, which he further proved by performing as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live in Dylan vocal drag. In a film that pivots around contested questions of authenticity, he could hardly have done anything else.

Dylan has one of the most recognizable (and easily imitated) voices in the history of recorded music. In scene after scene, the ugly growl of this shambling man-boy continually holds listeners rapt. His sometime lover Joan Baez may sound pretty singing hand-me-down ballads, but he offers audiences something new: the prophetic voice of a singer-songwriter, whose currency is not its purity of tone but the expressive, enigmatic poetry of his lyrics.

As played by Chalamet in charismatic fuckboy mode, it can seem as if Dylan cribs his persona’s constituent parts — the folk idiom, the vague gestures at liberation politics — from the women around him, only to discard them when the celebrity of rock music turns his head. The eternal paradox of Dylan is how his undeniably distinctive voice, which seems to ‘speak for a generation,’ could have emerged from someone who fundamentally lacks an authentic self.

And speaking of cynical manipulation…

Emilia Pérez is a mess.

As a narrative, as a political statement and — ultimately — as a publicity campaign, its elements are at war with one another.

The first time you heard about it, someone probably said, ‘So it’s a French movie but set in Mexico, about a drug cartel boss who’s also transgender. Plus it’s a musical.’

That last factoid gets tacked on as the coup de grâce that catapults the project out of the realm of the absurd and into the laughable. Yet, as a fan of a show about Victorian cannibalism, I don’t think that any subject is necessarily off-limits to musicalisation. My disdain for Emilia Pérez doesn’t stem from the supposedly outrageous humour of its easily memeable (and mockable) vaginoplasty number.

Rather, the film’s problems stem from its deployment of the most sincere musical theatre tropes. Take, for instance, the song ‘Deseo,’ which any student of Broadway will immediately identify as an ‘I Want’ number. We’ve entered this story through the POV of Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer who’s forcibly dragged into meeting with a fearsome and secretive cartel boss known as ‘Manitas’ (Karla Sofía Gascón).

Like Rita, we’re initially disoriented about the nature of the highly sensitive job for which she’s being recruited, which turns out to be arranging top-secret gender-affirming surgery. But when Gascón sings ‘Deseo,’ the writers hope to shine light on the inner depths behind the gruff, violent exterior.

The character — like many musical theatre protagonists before — opens up about their heart’s desire, in rudimentary lyrics that could have come from my middle school Spanish class:

No me falta el cielo
No me falta el mar
No me falta la voz
Pero me falta cantar

(I don't lack the sky
I don't lack the sea
I don't lack a voice
But I lack singing)

The distinction between voice and singing is crucial. At this point in the story, ‘Manitas’ croaks out the song in a low, masculine tone. It’s barely even singing at all. We’re meant to infer that this character’s true voice sounds different, and Rita’s assistance will help access it. The lyrics go on to say, ‘I want another face,’ ‘I want another skin’ and (in an especially clunky image) ‘I want the depth of my soul to smell like honey.’

Ariel in The Little Mermaid also longed for a different form, trading fins for legs. But the person who will soon be called Emilia Pérez longs for an even more fundamental transformation. ‘Let everything that I was no longer be,’ the song continues, ‘My only desire is to be her.’

Is this a song of gender dysphoria, or of moral regret – or both? It is here that the film’s logic starts to go off the rails. When Emilia wakes from surgery, she seems to have become not only a woman, but a completely different person. Her pre-transition self was broadly and vaguely sketched in cruel and violent terms. Now, having affirmed her femininity and posing as the cartel boss’s sister, she decides to start an NGO that recovers the bodies of victims ‘disappeared’ in the cartel wars. (Makes a certain amount of sense, right? Who’d know better where they are than the person who oversaw the killings?)

Do the filmmakers view gender transition as a… metaphor? Are we to understand the character’s shift from masculine to feminine as a transition from the Universally Violent into the Universally Benevolent? It should be noted that Emilia doesn’t contemplate giving up the vast wealth, multiple mansions or staff of servants acquired from her previous life as a criminal mastermind. She and Rita are lauded for work that is, in fact, a form of evading justice.

So far, so simplistic. The middle section of the film, in which ‘Tía Emilia’ keeps her true identity secret from her ex-wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and kids even whilst living with them, shares a sentimental sitcom vibe with Mrs. Doubtfire. Even in allegedly tender moments, the incoherent gender essentialism peeks through, as when one of the kids sings to Emilia, ‘You smell like Papa. / You smell like the mountains, like leather and coffee.’ Remember how she wanted her soul to smell like honey? Honestly, WTF.

Soon, though, old emotions surge within Emilia, prompting the vestiges of her previous self to resurface. And her voice is the tell. When Jessi reveals that she’s remarrying and plans to claim the kids, her kindly ‘sister-in-law’ snaps instantly. As if possessed by an older demon, Emilia’s voice drops down into its previous low register as she violently shoves Jessi onto a bed and growls, ‘You can go fuck your mother, with your fucking pimp, but my children stay here!!’

Possessiveness and aggression still reside in Emilia but they are coded as ‘masculine’ traits that she has not shaken off. As a characterisation, this gender Manicheaism is completely reductive; as a representation of actual trans lives it’s utterly laughable. From this point on, Jessi and her boyfriend retaliate against Emília, leading to kidnapping, severed fingers and gunfights, with all three characters’ lives ending in a violent conflagration.

By the end, as a statue of Emilia is paraded through the streets by mourning extras, one has to ask: who does this movie think it’s fooling? The last sequence depicts the title character — a deceptive, emotionally volatile murderer — venerated as a martyr. The only sensible reading is one of irony. The poor, powerless Mexican masses have been duped into believing a narrative of sainthood… just as so many audiences and awards bodies appeared to be since this film premiered at Cannes.

But if anyone was uncertain about the hollowness of this film’s ‘trans allyship,’ that’s been made undeniably clear in the film’s Oscar campaign, which ended, just like the film, in an abrupt, destructive car crash. As you most likely know, an enormous number of indiscriminately offensive tweets from lead actress Gascón resurfaced, much like the demonic ‘Manitas’ voice in the film. And she’s only made the situation worse in unhinged and unauthorised interviews trying to defend herself.

But its not only the actress’s mask that dropped. Her filmmaking colleagues from Netflix execs and director Jacques Audiard on down have (understandably?) refused to appear with her and cut off most of the financial support for her awards campaign. It becomes hard to advance the film’s purported message of ‘allyship,’ when the cis filmmakers have rendered their team’s sole trans member invisible.

Emilia Pérez will live on as a tawdry ‘own-goal’ story tailor-made for the next edition of Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars. Its inadvertent value as a cultural narrative may be to dispel the notion that gender transition is a form of moral rehabilitation. Real-life trans women, like everyone else, are contradictory and worthy of three-dimensional representations — which they themselves have authored.

Cis-het director Audiard looked to the exoticism of a Mexican trans narrative to explore some half-baked intellectual ideas of good and evil. And he lacked the musical filmmaking chops to even render it as camp.

Meanwhile, in basements around the world, young trans and queer kids are belting out songs by otherworldly witches and mermaids that tap into relatable feelings of otherness and abjection but also ready them to survive as their authentic selves.

One or more of those kids will turn their own stories into song. That’s what I want to buy a ticket for.

An end-of-year post I read last week cited the old Lenin quote: ‘There are whole decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.’

Apparently Lenin never actually said that – though it might’ve plausibly been applied to an eventful period like the 1917 October revolution, also known as the ‘ten days that shook the world.’

By those standards, I’d posit that 2024 – while a truly exhausting year – was distinctly lacking in revolutionary events. We lived through frantic news cycles, feverishly observed, that pretty much failed to change the status quo.

In the summer, we saw assassination attempts that might have upset the course of history, but did not. At year’s end, a successful assassination on the streets of New York revealed a wellspring of anger without any outlet to generate structural change beyond hand-wringing think-pieces and thirsty memes.

Most anticlimactically of all, we had the unprecedented withdrawal of a US Presidential candidate, but after such a long delay that the dreaded outcome it was meant to avert came about anyway.

The mood of the year was such that even the fall of Assad’s murderous regime in Syria, after twelve years of civil war, prompted little sense of hope or renewal. Somehow, we suspected, this turning point would slot into the 2024 pattern of regressions, setbacks, stalemates and ongoing atrocities that show little likelihood of ceasing.

Whether Lenin said it or not, some years do age you more than others.

This year, my forty-fifth, was notable for the urgency with which my body made itself felt. It was the year I learned a new vocabulary word, fascia, as in ‘living a sedentary lifestyle can shorten or stiffen fascia.’ Fascia are the thin fibrous tissue around your muscles and, in my case, if I don’t do some pretty dedicated stretching as soon as I get out of bed, activities I once took for granted – like sitting – can become pretty painful.

Like me, some democratic institutions we once took for granted have shown major signs of aging. From Europe to the United States, one senses a societal impulse to stiffen and shut down, to harden borders and police identities.

A large and powerful proportion of the population desires things to remain fixed in place, whatever the painful cost.

Subscribers may have noticed that, despite all that sedentary time at my laptop this year, I produced hardly any essays here. That’s partially down to a set of new theatre-writing projects that consumed more of my energy (about which I’ll say more another time) but also to a suspicion that my essayistic insights were hardly appropriate to the gravity of world events.

As the months of 2024 wore on, the half-completed drafts of half-baked theses accrued. No one will ever learn the links I semi-perceived between heroic but untrusted sleuth Jaz of The Traitors UK-fame and gamesmanship in Middle East Diplomacy. That’s probably for the best.

Someday I hope to complete my long-gestating tribute to stalwart radio host Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air and her decades-long imprint on my consciousness. The moment seemed particularly ripe this summer, if only because Terry presented such a striking counterpoint to the angst surrounding Biden’s waning abilities and refusal to anoint a successor:

Knowing that Fresh Air is a forty-year old media brand almost entirely wrapped up in one aging woman’s personality, Terry and her Fresh Air staff have worked with typical patience and sagaciousness to ease listeners into a new regime by quietly announcing Tonya Mosley as co-host and allowing us to grow used to her interview style. Terry’s not gone yet, but the plan for succession is clear.

Elsewhere, though, 2024 was haunted by the failure to willingly and graciously transfer power: Trump’s criminal efforts to negate the election on Jan. 6^th were the clearest of his many signs of unfitness for office, and yet Biden’s hubristic vanity prevented him from ceding his own power until it was too late. In France, the Left coalition helped Macron’s party hold back the far right tide and he still wouldn’t yield any Parliamentary power to them, with disastrous results. Netanyahu’s refusal to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza stems in large part from his personal drive to cling to power and avoid criminal prosecution.

Our stiffened systems support a stagnant gerontocracy and seem to make the barriers for change increasingly insurmountable. Across the globe, ascendant political movements are backward-looking, invoking the supposed golden times before inflation, before widespread migration, before reproductive rights or gender-affirming care, as they roll back progressive policies.

In this context, perhaps it’s not really surprising that a film like Conclave should have struck a nerve in the 2024 prestige cinema lineup. After all, no system is as famously stiff as the Roman Catholic Church.

If you haven’t seen it, this hammy, old-fashioned melodrama curiously shares many of the trappings of a reality competition show. Think of it as Drag Race: Vatican City.

Dressed in full Ecclesiastical Eleganza, a collection of cardinals are vying to be crowned the next RuPope. The action is structured around a series of votes in which they deliberate over their ballots with the grandiosity of All Stars queens choosing which lipstick to select. Each of the leading contenders gets eliminated one by one, with secret alliances, confessionals, reveals and backstage interference along the way. Isabella Rossellini = Michelle Visage.

The makers of Conclave surely understood that this film about choosing a new leader would be viewed through the prism of the 2024 Presidential election. We have a coterie of ineffective ‘liberal’ bishops who can’t get their act together, leaving an opening for fascism in the form of a rabid traditionalist Italian Archbishop who longs to bring back Latin Liturgy and European supremacy. At one point, Stanley Tucci channels the opinions of citizens worldwide when he opines ‘Is this what we’re reduced to? To vote for the worst best option?’

This political allegory climaxes in a set of speeches that come just before the final, fateful ballot. The above-mentioned Italian argues for a full-on religious war against Muslims, with all the bile of Trump/LePen/Tommy Robinson: ‘We house them in our homelands, while they exterminate us!’ It falls upon a mysterious — and heretofore mostly silent — character, Cardinal Benitez, to offer a countervailing vision, delivered (and lit) in a manner that evokes the humble simplicity of Jesus himself:

‘The Church is not tradition. The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next.’

Many a mystic or peace activist has drawn on this same unworldly logic to challenge the accepted order of things: War Is Over (If You Want It). A ceasefire begins once both sides cease firing.

The act is possible, if we only had the will.

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[I am about the discuss the film’s shocker of an ending, which I’ll be coy about. But if you want absolutely zero spoilers, please skip the next paragraph…]

Benitez is at the center of the film’s final twist, which for some critics ruins the movie purely on a plot level; conservative commentators have denounced it as a ‘left-wing fever dream.’ Suffice it to say that the cardinal crowned Pope harbors a secret that is altogether different from those that scuppered the earlier candidates. It is an aspect of identity that lies at the heart of our culture wars. This patriarchal system has anointed someone with an understanding of gender that is not so rigidly locked in a binary system. Lord knows what J K Rowling would make of it.

[OK, no more spoilers! Feel free to read on safely…]

In the film’s concluding shot, Ralph Fiennes looks across a courtyard to see some young nuns, no longer sequestered, scampering out of the conclave’s stuffy confines. To dyed-in-the-wool Catholic lefties like myself, the image recalls the old anecdote about the reformist pope John XXIII telling the Second Vatican Council, ‘I want to throw open the windows of the Church, so that we can see out and the people can see in.’

That symbolism feels too pat, especially in the face of a resurgent rightwing forces around the world. In a film that frequently strains credulity, the most soap-operatic touch is the notion that a stagnant and outdated system will miraculously produce a savior who represents its own undoing.

Restrictions on women’s reproductive freedom and gender-affirming care for trans youth will not be magically restored by the tip a papal fairy-godmother’s mitre. To those who must face such cold, hard facts, the windows appear firmly shut…

The longing for messianic deliverance manifests not only in fiction, however.

To many, the December arrival of Luigi Mangione delivered an end-of-year plot twist as unexpected and compelling as the conclusion of Conclave.

The fascination he’s inspired can’t be attributed entirely to his Instagram (or OnlyFans?) -ready hotness. After a year of setbacks, Luigi became a story that (some on) the progressive Left could chalk up as a ‘win’. He immediately became a figure upon whom to project a longed-for sense of agency in the face of vast, depersonalising systems — even if an objective examination reveals the tragedy of a young man driven by rage to take up a firearm, who will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.

Earlier this year, though, with less fanfare, other young people disregarded the law and took action against a depersonalizing health care system. Unlike Luigi, they haven’t shown us their faces; some of them are still minors and they prefer to act as an anonymous collective.

I first got wind of Trans Kids Deserve Better, the week after this year’s London Pride. Carrying the message ‘We Are Not Pawns for Your Politics,’ this collection of teens were occupying the window ledge of an NHS headquarters on Waterloo Road to demand access to life-saving gender-affirming care.

Their statement of purpose read in part:

We deserve to be heard in all matters which affect our lives. We’re not spectacles, we’re not objects, we’re people, and our lives are at stake.

When I saw the news on social media, with a request for allies to come down and show support, I didn’t need to look up where the building was. About ten years ago, I’d organised a protest at the very same spot, timed to coincide with a group of NHS bigwigs debating access to HIV prevention medication. This was the first effort in a long — and ultimately successful — campaign by many activists more dedicated than me to achieve free access to PrEP for anyone in England.

As I walked down the road toward the Trans Kids action, I did feel old – but not in the same way I do when my hips ache from a lack of proper stretching. Had it really been a decade since we’d started to wage that battle for proper HIV care? I felt very aware of the fullness of time, along with a sense of pride and gratitude for rights that younger people could now depend on.

On the pavement outside Wellington House were older queer activists, alongside straight allies, there to support these youngsters’ cause but also to make sure they were safe. In this situation, anyone over twenty-five counted as an elder. They were offering guidance to the next generation about how to handle the media and the police. They were there with food and water and holding the ladder to make sure that the Kids got down from the ledge without injury.

What the elders did not do was make speeches: they passed over the microphone and let the young people speak for themselves.

That’s when I started to cry. Not out of despair, but pride.

I’d spent that July day doing archival research into the actions of the 1984 Defend Gay’s the Word campaigners, who’d fought back against censorship and seizure of gay literature. That historic moment was a big and satisfying win, which more people ought to know about (which is why I’m part of a team turning that story into a musical), but it wasn’t a final victory. A few years after the case against Gay’s the Word was dismissed, gay-affirming books were part of the justification for Thatcher’s Section 28 policies, which lasted til 2003 and forbid the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in education. Even today, more than half of school librarians in the UK have been asked to remove gay and trans books from their shelves.

These fights that we have to wage against depersonalizing systems are cyclical. The same themes and opponents keep recurring in new guises.

But when I looked up at that building, I saw a powerful lineage, a chain within which I was just one link. In 2014, my cohort of HIV activists had been inspired and tutored by the first generation of ACT-UP agitators who’d developed radical civil disobedience practices in the face of mass death.

Here the torch of that resistance was being taken up and transformed by our younger siblings, who were also fighting for their lives.

Just this past month, the Labour government announced an indefinite, harmful and unjustified ban on puberty-blockers for trans youth (though cis teens can still access the very same medications), brought in by the cowardly, openly gay Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who is a shame on the LGBT community.

The windows of that NHS building may seem firmly shut, for now — but Trans Kids have learned to scale walls.

In the months since July, their actions have continued. Trans Kids Deserve Better have shown signs of dedication, persistence and creativity, finding new and disruptive ways to place their actual trans bodies and life experiences in the paths of powerful policy-makers who would rather ignore them.

Whether you are Biden or a Streeting, it becomes all too easy with age and power to insulate yourself from the harm you’re causing. Please, as I age into queer elderhood, let me not become an embarrassment like Stephen Fry (newly knighted?!, vomit), who in an interview with a libertarian podcast offered an object lesson in self-satisfied drawbridge-raising.

Fry admitted that he had once supported the agenda of LGBT charity Stonewall, back when it was fighting for causes that affected him directly, like marriage equality or raising the age of consent. Since it had turned its attention to a ‘nonsensical’ trans rights agenda, though, he feels it’s been ‘stuck in a terrible, terrible quagmire.’

In fact, Stonewall’s evolution indicates a organization that is hardly stuck, but open and flexible. It’s true we can’t prevent our joints from stiffening with age. I won’t climb a wall with the dexterity of a seventeen year-old, but I can stretch my empathy to see beyond narrow self-interest and find common cause with others.

There is a lesson embedded in the very name of ACT-UP, which stands for ‘AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’: if we wait passively for power to be handed over, systems never change. If we organise in coalition, our collective powers are harnessed and unleashed, making those systems more difficult to operate.

Strength and liberation can come from sharing power, linking hands, gathering forces. If any generation holds too firmly to its own power and privilege, our community’s capacity for resistance will atrophy, and the fascists will win.

Freedom depends not on what’s been won before, but what we do next.

Last month, along with all the other artsy gays in London, we went to the cinema to see All of Us Strangers. Ahead of the film they showed the trailer for the NT Live recording of Andrew Scott’s one-man performance of Vanya. Scott is the star of both the film and the play, so the cross-promotion made sense. After I’d seen Strangers, though, the connections between the two projects appeared even deeper.

In his critically lauded stage show, Scott embodies every single character in Chekhov’s play. He adopts different voices and handheld props to indicate who he’s playing and sometimes finds himself talking animatedly to empty chairs. The Time Out critic concedes that this approach ‘inevitably loses some coherence and sense of narrative, but in doing so becomes almost agonisingly intimate.’

When one takes the birds-eye view of All of Us Strangers — as the final zoom heavenwards encourages us to do — doesn’t it reveal itself to be the same thing?

A lonely gay man talking to chairs?

[This essay will spoil All of Us Strangers; you may want to watch it before you read on – and certainly before attending artsy gay dinner parties anytime soon.]

When I was young boy, I don’t remember talking to chairs, but I did spend an awful lot of my time in the basement bouncing a rubber ball off the wall as I’d make up stories and create dialogue. This kind of imaginative play was my first stab at narrative-building, practicing the skills that I now use professionally.

My basement creations were usually cinematic riffs on the genre films I’d watched on cable television. I can remember making up Agatha Christie-style mysteries and glorious Technicolor musicals. I also dreamed up publicity campaigns to accompany them, featuring the names of fictitious actors who’d star in my work and a trailer voice announcing, ‘The latest from Brian Mullin, writer-director of….’

I remember one that centered on a young girl living with a bunch of siblings in a small Sicilian village who dreamed of bigger things, like emigrating to America. It was no doubt influenced by the headstrong young heroines of Little Women and Ann of Green Gables — possibly even Yentl — but it was also an attempt to imaginatively reconstruct the figure of my mother. Rosemary Sedita was the oldest daughter of an Italian-American family in Indiana, who dreamed of a wider world, visited Europe after college (where she tried escargots), and then left the Midwest for the East Coast.

The sentence above summarizes much of what I knew of my mother, who died of cancer when I was just two years old. Family members recall that during her funeral I walked around in a child-sized suit passing out Kleenex to other attendees who were crying, but I have no memory of that day — or of her.

Although I have some family snapshots and anecdotes to draw from, the imagined mother in my mind has always been a collage, built upon the faces of dark-haired actresses who sort of resembled her: Debra Winger, Annabella Sciorra, Irene Jacob. Initially, I would envision her as bright-eyed and affectionate but later I realized that growing up motherless also meant missing out on potential arguments and nagging. The 70-year old mother I don’t have today might more closely resemble a prodding Patti Lupone, who can say?

In All of Us Strangers, Andrew Scott’s Adam is a character very much like me. A gay man in his mid-to-late forties, he works as a professional narrative-builder, writing scripts for film and television. He even lives up the road (sort of) from my South London address. Writer-director Andrew Haigh wanted to shoot Adam’s nearly empty apartment block in the soulless expanse of new-build towers around Vauxhall and Nine Elms, but the multinational corporations who own them wouldn’t consent. (And so, although Adam goes clubbing at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and travels to southwest suburbs on trains from Victoria, the external shots of his building were filmed far East in Stratford.)

When we first meet him, Adam’s doing just what I did as a child, soothing a sense of loss through a kind of therapeutic narrative imagining; we learn soon that both of his parents died in a car accident when he was twelve. In the opening scene, Adam examines old photos and a beloved fairy ornament that once sat atop the family Christmas tree. These are the prompts, presumably, for some sort of screenplay inspired by his childhood. The only glimpse we get of it comes from a slugline on his laptop screen: ‘INT. SUBURBAN HOUSE 1987…’

The Adam we meet at the start seems to exist completely, almost absurdly, outside of community. He works from home and never contacts anyone. He hasn’t gone out dancing in years. When a fire alarm goes off in his (very tall) building, no other residents emerge.

Some of this disconnection is implicitly associated with his being gay and childless. All of his (presumably straight) friends, he says, have moved outside of London to raise families: what would he do in Dorking? When he was younger, life in the Big Smoke seemed like the answer to his prayers – but thirty years down the line he no longer partakes in the cosmopolitan world around him.

The sadsack emo gay vibe is laid on pretty thick. Adam’s had decades to process his parents’ loss and yet seems permanently untethered from the world of the living. Soon, though, Adam has two encounters that inject some excitement into his world of ennui.

The first is with Paul Mescal’s Harry, a scruffy-sexy millennial queer (the distinction between identifying as queer vs. gay is pointedly made) who appears drunkenly in a somewhat miraculous meet-cute outside Adam’s door and is apparently the only other inhabitant at this void of an address. After Adam’s initial hesitancy, the two begin an affair that progresses from horny hookup to increasing intimacy. Harry says he’s pretty sanguine about his coming out but acknowledges an unspoken distance that’s grown up between him and his family.

So far, so rom-com: the livewire stranger is nudging the withdrawn loner to open up his emotions. And yet, despite the charm of Scott and Mescal, the dialogue between them often sounds, frankly, more like one of my Substack essays than any recognisable post-coital chat. When Adam sits in the bath and opines that he grew up at a time where sex meant death, these two come off more as highly constructed generational avatars than characters.

Much of the film’s love story plays like an extended retread of some of the more forced elements of Haigh’s breakthrough film Weekend, in which Chris New’s character was some sort of conceptual artist, a conceit that allowed him to badger his one-night stand (Tom Cullen) with a recording device and ask for opinions about modern gay life, coming out, dating apps, etc. etc. All of Us Strangers would be richer if it actually set out to dramatise a relationship between two gay men with a fifteen-year age gap, but due to its claustrophobic construction this theme never expands beyond expository conversation.

That’s also because our focus, and Adam’s, moves elsewhere. Just as he’s taking tentative steps into a future with Harry, Adam is concurrently traveling back to his own past: on a screenwriting research trip to his childhood home, he meets his own Mum and Dad (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), fixed at their ages just before death, who seem to recognise him and welcome him in to reconnect.

It is this thread of the film that seems to resonate most with critics and audiences. For obvious autobiographical reasons, I’m a sucker for all dramas of parental loss: I cry without fail at the hospital scenes in Terms of Endearment and bawled for ages at the end of Aftersun (in which Paul Mescal himself takes on the role of dead Dad). In scene after scene here, Adam experiences the longed-for intimacy he never had with his deceased parents – and I was left totally cold.

Adam sits first with Mum and then with Dad for conversations that pulled the heartstrings of many audience members around me. It’s not long before he’s told them he’s gay and receives parental responses of the type spoken in hundreds of period coming-out dramas like, ‘They say it’s a very lonely kind of life.’ We in the audience are meant to flinch at the froideur that overtakes Foy’s otherwise affectionate Mum upon her son’s mention of homosexuality, but that reaction is complicated by the fact that… she’s right. All the evidence we’ve seen suggests that he is indeed leading an incredibly lonely life.

Theses scenes are distinguished, I suppose, from those in other films by the tension of Adam, a grown man, trying not to regress into the awkwardness and pain of pre-adolescence. With Mum, he takes up the mantle of educator, informing her that things have changed now, gay people can get married. But, she replies, he’s not married, is he? With Dad, he opens up about bullying at school and isolation at home. Father and son both felt contradictory impulses back then, each longing to share a comforting hug when young Adam was crying behind his bedroom door, but also afraid to instigate it. In this safe space of spectral projection, the long deferred hug can happen.

Taken as self-contained short films, these conversations do have a special charge. The interactions between Adam Scott and Jamie Bell, in particular, walk a delicate line between paternal validation and subsumed erotic charge. Effective as all the acting may be, though, there’s something at the heart of these scenes that felt inauthentic to the experience of childhood loss.

If I were granted a precious conversation with my mother, is this what I would talk about? Just as Adam’s hookup chats with Harry kept circling around How Hard It Is to Be Gay, the interactions with his parents seem similarly fixated on his sexuality and the difficulties its brought him, as if there’s nothing else about his life to share with them. Perhaps there isn’t, since Adam barely seems like a fully rounded person.

In interviews, Haigh suggests that gay audiences will strongly identify with these depictions:

So many of us grew up feeling like that, and feeling like our lives would be filled with sadness and aloneness, and possibly death… I was growing into my sexuality in the early ’80s, so I saw a world in which there was no possibility of me having a fulfilled, happy life. That’s a terrible thing for a lot of kids to have to have dealt with... And so I feel like a lot of us felt like that, and still feel like that. It can be a very hard thing to shift. 

As broad social analysis, this set of ideas is certainly familiar – but what does it tell me about a young man whose parents were suddenly and brutally taken from him? Elsewhere in the same interview, Haigh betrays the imprecise and offhanded manner in which he’s conceived of Adam’s past:

Obviously losing your parents at a very young age is a horrendously traumatic event. But lots of people experience all kinds of traumas, big and small, that become imprinted on your sense of self… It’s a word that someone used. It’s how you felt about something…

The risk with a premise that ‘so many of us’ have felt is that it becomes overly generalised. Instead of a particular person who’s experienced a specific (and highly unusual) loss, Adam becomes a cis gay Everyman upon whom audiences can project any of their own unresolved emotional pain.

The limitations of this approach are summed up perfectly in the headline quote from Haigh’s Guardian interview:

Many of us within Haigh’s age bracket might question this blanket diagnosis. Moreover, though, any artwork that tries so blatantly to encompass the experiences of ‘a generation’ risks becoming a story about no one in particular.

I’ve noticed that the friends who’ve reacted most emotionally to All of Us Strangers tend to be those who have complicated relationships with living parents, perhaps a history of estrangement or less than full acceptance of their sexuality. The same ghost-parent dialogues that struck me as untrue to the experience of grief may play very well as the cinematic equivalent of Family Constellations therapy, with A-list actors cos-playing as Mum and Dad.

By the time we arrive at Claire Foy trimming a Christmas tree as she recites very on-the-nose Pet Shop Boys lyrics to a pajama-clad Andrew Scott – and by extension to all the other insecurely attached little boys in the audience – the film is aiming for a cathexis that borders on camp:

Maybe I didn't treat you
Quite as good as I should
Maybe I didn't love you
Quite as often as I could
Little things I should have said and done
I never took the time

Speaking on the podcast Script Apart recently, Haigh implicitly endorses the therapeutic interpretation of Adam’s parental haunting: ‘I mean, look, essentially you can see it as a therapy session and in talking about the past it allows you to move forward in some way.’ Making the film may have served that function for Haigh himself. Indeed, the ghost scenes were filmed in the director’s actual childhood home and, in a pure manifestation of The Body Keeping the Score, eczema he’d had as a boy returned while shooting there.

Significantly, Haigh’s mother and father are still alive but it was in this same suburban house that he lived through his parents’ divorce, around the same age when fictional Adam’s parents die. This divergence of his autobiographical narrative highlights Haigh’s awkward effort to yoke multiple distinct forms of pain – both personal and generational – onto the thin frame of his ghost story plot.

Haigh’s taken his inspiration from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers (or, in the original Japanese, Summer of the Strange People). Wikipedia tells me that it concerns a protagonist who starts visiting the ghosts of people who seem like his dead parents, only to realise they are sucking the life from him. In broad outline, it’s giving me creepy psychological gothic of the Henry James novella variety.

The grief of our flimsy, orphaned protagonist barely has room to breathe in this film, so overburdened is it by both Haigh’s autobiographical emotions and his potted theses of generational gay trauma. Only in one tender moment where Adam confides to Mum in bed an imagined alternative timeline in which the family visited Disney World did I recognise the feelings of a motherless child.

In a curious way, All of Us Strangers suffers from similar problems to a very different film that also left me with a muted response, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Whilst Haigh’s script won’t move away from his ‘gay generation mourning their childhood’ hobbyhorse, Gerwig’s overstuffed comedy bombards us with a thousand theses at the expense of her imagined world’s internal logic.  Much as Adam returns to the 80s to seek out his parents’ love, America Ferrera’s character travels back to the imagined Barbieland of her girlhood to… do something or other… and deliver a monologue about the frustrating pressures of femininity.

For all of the messiness of its plot, both Barbie the film and Barbie the doll arrive ultimately at the intention to exit the play-world and enter human gynecological reality – a conclusion that left some women near me in the cinema weeping. In All of Us Strangers, although Andrew Haigh suggests that Adam’s ghostly encounter allows him to ‘move forward in some way,’ is that what we actually see onscreen?

Through most of the film, we’re brought into Adam’s POV, in which it feels like his deceased parents are ‘really there,’ sharing tea and putting on records. The space-time reality of this hangs together about as coherently as it does in Barbieland: has Adam really taken the train to Sanderstead and broken into his childhood home? Some of these meetings must be happening ‘inside his head.’ In the film’s final third, Harry seems to nudge Adam back into the present and toward the ‘real world’ when the two of them (appear to) go out dancing, but this scene also becomes hallucinatory.

Adam’s final meeting with his parents is the one scene that occurs very concretely in a ‘real’ location: a diner in Croydon’s Whitgift Shopping Centre.

There’s even another speaking character present, a skeptical waitress who says he’s ordered ‘a lot of food.’ After tearful goodbyes in the booth from Mum and Dad, the camera pulls back to reveal there’s no one at the table to share Adam’s ‘family meal.’

Just a lonely gay man talking to empty chairs.

Adam’s parents have never really ‘met’ Harry, though they’ve expressed a longing to see their son happy and settled and, maybe… in love? There’s a worrying whiff of the ‘extended adolescence’ trope here, whereby adult gay men present as Peter Pan figures, delayed in the stages of emotional maturation until they make a home with one partner, just like their straight families. If All of Us Strangers offered Adam this clichéd outcome, I’d have sighed with disappointed resignation. Even that unsatisfying arc, though, is foiled by the film’s final twist.

After that parental parting in the diner, Adam returns home to find Harry. We anticipate a heart-to-heart about how he’s finally ready to let love into his life, the emo-gay equivalent of ‘When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible’ from When Harry Met Sally... Once he arrives, though, Adam discovers that his Harry is actually a corpse. This isn’t a rom-com, it’s the gay ‘Sixth Sense.’

The odour permeating Harry’s flat indicates that he’s been dead a while. Although there’s an ambiguity to the final revelations, I interpreted them to mean that Adam’s dates with Harry have never been real. Instead, the only times he met ‘living Harry’ were the fleeting meetings at Adam’s door and in the lift before the got together. Feeling rebuffed by his one gay neighbour, Harry must’ve offed himself, after which his spirit arrived at Adam’s flat to begin a series of haunted hookups??

We’ve spent an entire film watching Adam process his parental loss so that he can say goodbye to their ghosts – and then conclude with him clinging in bed to another deceased person. The character has progressed from being orphaned and lonely to being absolutely and existentially alone, as everyone transmutes to stars in the sky to the tunes of ‘The Power of Love’.

Maybe Adam’s also dead? Or he’s just a sad, stunted man so haunted by loss that he can’t engage emotionally with any other living being? And we, the gay audience, are meant to feel there’s a bit of isolated Adam in all of us…

Ugh. Sad gays get sadder. Everything old is new again.

All of Us Strangers and Barbie were just two of the prominent films last year exploring the challenges of putting away childish things. Perhaps this mini-trend of stories about stunted growth is a result of projects conceived during the constrictions of the pandemic just now arriving on our screens.

Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, also a ghostly British gothic, is the elegant inverse of Haigh’s film. Adam in Strangers has been shattered by the loss of his parents, but Hogg’s protagonist can’t let her mother’s flickering spirit go until she’s drained it, like a well-meaning vampire, of artistic inspiration. Mother and daughter are so enmeshed that they seem like part of the same person, both played by Tilda Swinton.

Emma Stone’s Bella in Poor Things is another enmeshed mother-daughter hybrid, being an adult woman implanted with the brain of her own infant. Raised by her creator-father in a scientific setting as cloistered as Barbieland, she confronts the real world’s conventions and cruelties with a child’s fearless innocence and upends society’s accepted notions of maturity.

For me, though, the year’s most compelling portrait of stolen childhood came from a film about heterosexual marriage that feels far queerer than All of Us Strangers. In Todd Haynes’s May December, an act of sexual violation has left multiple emotionally stunted children in its wake. At its center is Charles Melton’s Joe, who at age fourteen fathered a child with an adult woman (Julianne Moore’s Gracie) to whom he remains married.

In Strangers, Adam’s tragic loss from decades past is imprinted on his muted demeanor from the start and never lets up. Melton’s Joe, however, morphs back and forth from a secure, square-jawed provider for his family into a nervous man-boy shunted too soon into adult responsibility. His repressed trauma response is contrasted with that of Gracie’s first son (Corey Michael Smith), an adult who still has an adolescent blond dye-job and whose experience of his mother’s boundary-breaking behavior has left him with the dangerous energy of an exposed electric wire.

Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch have rendered their characters with an unexpected emotional slipperiness. Joe raises monarch butterflies, but his emergence out of the chrysalis of his suppressed pain is fitful and uncertain. In their marriage, Gracie can switch instantly from motherly scolding to manipulative petulance, revealing the willful girl inside the predatory adult. These are neither plastic dolls nor paper-thin ghosts, but fully fleshed out humans.

Gay men have long been subjected to pop psychological analysis that assesses our progression, or lack thereof, against the benchmark of heteronormative maturation stages. How often have we been diagnosed with traits of the ‘Peter Pan complex’ — supposedly obsessed with youth, clinging on to hedonism and evading responsibility long after we ought?

Andrew Haigh’s thesis about his fellow gays feels adjacent and equally reductive. A generation that grew up experiencing rejection and death will inevitably remain, he suggests, caught in the loop of that grief. Despite the words of the song, the Power of Love has no real impact on Adam in All of Us Strangers; his attachments all remain facing backwards, fixated on objects that have been taken from him. Nor can the power of community help him, since Adam seems to lack one entirely.

As I know from repeated childhood viewings of Disney’s Peter Pan, if you chase the second star to the right and head straight on til morning, you arrive at Neverland. Mum, Dad, Harry and Adam all become stars at the end of the film. Fixed in time, lives cut short, they will never grow up.

As a boy, my Peter Pan complex was easy to diagnose. Sometime in the late 1980s, probably around the same time that Adam’s parents died, I could be found trick-or-treating dressed as Peter in a green outfit and feathered cap. It was my favorite story.

Yes, it was fun to fantasize about flying and pixie dust, but even back then I knew it was Peter’s pain that I connected to. In the Disney version, the action slows just before the third-act showdown with Captain Hook for Wendy to sing a song to the Lost Boys called ‘Your Mother and Mine.’ It’s one of those slow lullabies that so many children would zone out of, but I would remain rapt, never fast-forwarding the VHS…

After Wendy’s done, her brother Michael requests in a sleepy, babyish voice, “I wanna see… my mother.” By the end of the tape, he always got what he wanted. The Darling children were only visiting Neverland temporarily. Peter was not.

You can call it ‘never growing up’ but really Peter had to mature faster than most, he didn’t have much choice. Out of necessity, he created his own family.

For so many of us, learning to mother ourselves is the true work of our lives.

Ira Sachs’s sleek melodrama is an old-school arthouse flick, showcasing fashions and furnishings that are every bit as chic as its pan-European cast of German, French and British actors. The film’s buzzing box office has surely been boosted by coverage of its frank sex scenes and controversial NC-17 rating in the States. Yes, you could catch it at home once it ends up on MUBI, but isn’t this the perfect picture to watch in a dark room full of strangers?

There aren’t many other places where you can share a frisson in polite company at the sight of Ben Wishaw’s butthole. In fact, though, Passages plays on other pleasures of collective watching that go beyond the sexual.

Witnessing Wishaw get fingered is nothing compared to the extremes of emotional fuckery that he and Adèle Exarchopoulos are subjected to by Franz Rogowski’s Tomas. Sachs’s off-kilter camera framing emphasises intimacy and a sense of voyeurism, but it’s the consistently codependent behavior that may make the characters feel uncomfortably close to some of us in the crowd.

For all its cinephile sophistication, Passages traffics in the kind of immediate emotional response associated with soap opera and will have many viewers debating the characters’ choices as if they were real people:

He did not just do that.

Girl, what were you thinking????

In this manipulative ménage à trois, Ben and Adèle put up with more bullshit than it seems like any sensible person would realistically tolerate . And yet, as the audience gasps and groans at Tomas’s latest dickish move, one senses that many of us have more or less been there IRL.

I certainly have. And also with Ben Wishaw.

I haven’t seen anyone else point out that Wishaw has starred in an earlier story with exactly the same premise: a man in a long-term gay relationship begins an affair with a woman and then can’t make up his mind as he plays the two lovers off of each other.

Fourteen years (and three relationships) ago, Mike Bartlett’s Cock was the first play I saw at the Royal Court as a playwriting student newly arrived in London.

In it, Wishaw plays the opposite point in the love triangle to his put-upon husband in Passages. That time around — although still wispy and soft-spoken in a very Wishaw way — it was his character John who broke away from the male partner, seeking something different and setting off all the conflict that follows.

The play was assigned for our MA cohort to attend in November 2009. My then-boyfriend, with whom I’d just moved across the Atlantic from New York, tagged along out of interest in Ben Wishaw. Watching James Macdonald’s forensically sharp production, played out with the audience fully lit in the tiny confines of the Theatre Upstairs, I remember two thoughts racing through my head:

1)    who is this actor playing the other boyfriend?? {Answer: it was Andrew Scott, years before Fleabag, and I still haven’t got over it.}

2)    I HATE THIS PLAY.

During the bows, I was shaking with agitation and found myself circling Sloane Square for what felt like an hour afterward, debating the play’s dramaturgy. In class the following week, I thoroughly denounced the script, saying how absurd it was that any character would put up with that kind of treatment from his partner.

My tutor, channeling Ester Perel before I’d ever even heard of her, posited that perhaps my strong response indicated just how spot-on the script actually was???

Of course, it was not Mike Bartlett’s writing that upset me — it was the mirror being held up to my real-life relationship.

During our Sloane Square post-show circling, my boyfriend repeated how much he could relate to Wishaw’s portrayal of a character whose solipsistic passivity and indecision masks a deep disregard for others’ emotions.

I, on the other hand, was just as apoplectic as Andrew Scott’s outraged partner:

Always, unfortunately John, for me, always.

And I hope you realise what that means.

That means that I will always be unhappy because I have a feeling that as long as we’re together you will always do this to me, you will let me down, stand me up, cheat and lie and fail and cock things up like this, and then you’ll wonder why I tease you why I’m always going at you, being sarcastic well it’s the only way.

Meanwhile, I’m sure that speeches like this one of John’s hit my boyfriend with a similar sense of identification:

I mean he always made me feel like I used to be, as I was when we met, and you know we met when I was twenty-one, twenty-two really young, and I was always the younger one and he wanted me to stay like that and it’s only now that I’ve realized, I’m a completely different person, and acting like that like twenty-two was making me so depressed

Sometimes, the emotional accuracy of an artwork hits us in such a way that it bypasses all critical faculties and goes straight for the amygdala. We can no longer be discerning viewers because we are so filled with rage or pain or grief. We become Don Quixote attacking the puppet show as if it were real.

I’ll never be able to reasonably assess Terms of Endearment because my brain has hard-wired a connection between that 1983 film and the death of my own mother a couple of years before, when I was two years old. It’s not even the whole movie that affects me (sorry, Shirley MacLaine) but the Debra Winger plotline, and primarily the one scene where she’s in the hospital speaking in a plain, matter of fact manner to her two children and saying goodbye.

The older boy storms out of the room but the smaller one stays, nodding to to his mother like a little adult as he holds back his tears.

That scene, in all its tearjerking Hollywood cliché, has filled a space in my actual emotional experience I was too young to consciously remember. Whenever I go back and watch it, I am that boy. I had the film on VHS and sometimes I’d just fast-forward to that scene to access the tears that I once held back.

Watching Passages last Saturday didn’t prompt a particularly visceral reaction from me, although it did for some: discussing the film on Slate’s Culture Gabfest, critic Laura Miller confessed to such a strong aversion for Rogowski’s Tomas that she had to stop watching the film multiple times rather than keep looking at him.

Were there other audience members with me at the Curzon Soho cinema who felt as tiggered by Tomas’s toxic behavior as I’d been years ago by Cock?

Sachs’s film is explicit in ways that Bartlett’s theatrical version of the same scenario is not — and I don’t just mean sexually.

The copulation in Sachs’s film is absolutely integral to its meaning: Rogowski and Wishaw’s most extended sex scene occurs after the male couple has officially broken up. With the pleasure of risk now reignited in their dynamic, Tomas can’t leave his wounded partner well enough alone and returns to their bed, using his body as a lure to circumvent Wishaw’s self-protective instincts.

Bartlett’s script, on the other hand, contains zero stage directions and states that it should be presented without set pieces, props or even mimed action. Therefore, when Wishaw’s John and his female lover consummate their sexual relationship, the actual mechanics of their physical actions are left up to the audience’s imagination:

W: Okay okay okay. Yes. Yes.

Right. That’s.

That’s really

Up

Isn’t it?

JOHN: What were you expecting?

W: I mean you’re getting into this aren’t you?

Onstage, Bartlett’s characters use words alone to persuade, entice, skewer and wound. Sachs’s move through a very visual world. His central gay couple are both image-makers (on film and on paper), their costumes colorfully expressive and their apartment cluttered with objects and artwork.

But Sachs’s characterization of Tomas is also explicit: his toxicity is telegraphed to us from the very first scene, which has nothing to do with relationship drama. On the set of his film, he bullies and exposes his actors. He will soon turn domestic scenes into versions of that film set, directing attention to himself at the centre.

Upon first viewing, Tomas’s relentlessly bad behavior felt like a limitation of the film. There’s little gray area in our sympathies as we watch him callously abuse first Wishaw’s Martin and then Exarchoupolos’s Agathe, love-bombing them, then turning cold, returning to offer sex when he’s newly excited, then humiliating them all over again. With a destructive force like this driving it, Passages has the compelling but blunt watchability of a grisly traffic accident.

In Cock, Bartlett makes a different choice. John’s two lovers, denoted in the script by their only by their genders as M and W, are by far the more forceful personalities. His passivity comes across on the surface as helplessness and yet his continual indecision inflicts pain of its own. As a viewer, it’s possible (when not clouded by real-life relationship bias!) to see each of the three characters and their use and abuse of power through subtly different lenses.

Did I respond so reactively to Cock all those years ago because my own behavior, reflected in Andrew Scott’s wounded snarkiness, was equally being held up for scrutiny?

Since that night at the Royal Court, I’ve now been the Taurus portion of more than one Taurus-Gemini relationship (I know, I know…) and would like to think I’ve learned a thing or two.

Perhaps that hard-won emotional distance explains my cooler take upon leaving Passages. My response upon leaving the cinema was primarily one of wariness, a resistance to being too drawn in by the film’s beautiful surfaces and soap operatic highs and lows, just as its naive lovers had lost their senses when Tomas bombarded them with his charismatic chaos.

As the days passed, a subtler appreciation of the movie wheedled its way into my brain. Unlike Cock, which presents three characters jockeying for position, Passages is a study in one man’s manipulations. The other two are collateral damage. We begin and end the film with Tomas: although he demands control as a film director, we learn to detect just how much his insecurity drives him.

Note how he responds to new people and situations: when his husband wants to go home from the club, he possessively seizes upon Agathe as first a dancing and then a sexual partner. He tries a similar move later when he finds Martin getting on well in a bar with attractive novelist Amad (the stunning and soulful Erwan Kepoa Falé). Tomas thrusts himself into their conversation, trying to claim the new relationship as his own; once rebuffed, he immediately sours on Amad and dismisses his writing out of hand. If he can’t dominate a situation through charm, he does so by sabotaging it, as when he shows up late and inappropriately dressed for an important meeting with Agathe’s parents. Like an infant in the Lacanian mirror stage, who’s just discovered his own image, every situation must be de facto about himself.

It’s telling that Tomas’s comeuppance finds him crumpled on the floor of the elementary school where Agathe works. Dressed in a tuxedo like a successful artist off to a big film premiere in Venice, his posture reflects the internal emotions of a child used to being coddled and forgiven for his bad behavior. But not this time.

An earlier, autobiographical movie of Sachs’s, Keep the Lights On, offered a numbing, cyclical depiction of chemical dependency and the unconscious enabling of addiction by romantic partners. Passages examines similar patterns.

On a fundamental level, Tomas is fueled by the cortisol of chaos; when sexual satisfaction is ultimately denied him, he gets it through frantic, risky cycling on the streets of Paris. The stimulation of emotional extremes blunts whatever pain he would like to ignore. He’ll do anything to get the next hit.

The plot of Passages ends with a rupture that satisfies the audience’s need for accountability: no one should be able to get away with that.

Bartlett’s play ends more unsettlingly. With the original domestic arrangement seemingly restored, John’s male partner seeks confirmation and closure:

M: Before you come in can you bring the cushions and make sure the lights are off?

Yes?

John?

John?

You fucking prick I’ll go I’ll go but I just need a yes from you.

Cushions and lights.

Yes?

One little word. One little word and I’ll.

Come on say it.

Say it.

Yes.

Say it.

Say it.

Theoretically, we enjoy artworks that reflects our emotions because they allow us to re-experience them safely. In actual fact, though, the comforts they offer can be of a very complicated kind.

We return to certain works in the same way we return to certain relationships: in the darkened cinema or bedroom, we’re drawn to repeat and relive the past — but each time we bring with us both new and old versions of ourselves.

Eventually, we trust, the lights will come back up.

The groundbreaking gay musical La Cage Aux Folles premiered on Broadway forty years ago this week: August 21^st, 1983. Decades later, its affectionate depiction of a loving, same-sex couple had theatre critic Michael Billington declaring, ‘No piece of theatre has done more to enhance gay self-esteem or encourage sexual tolerance.’

So why had I – a flagrant homosexual show queen – failed to see it, or even listen to the recording, until this week??

Because I’ve always been #TeamSondheim.

Let me explain.

Most of the world knows La Cage, currently enjoying a successful summer revival at London’s Open Air Theatre in Regents Park, as a joyous comedy about same-sex love. Its score by hit-maker Jerry Herman includes the classic empowerment anthem ‘I Am What I Am,’ beloved of drag queens and disco divas the world over.

To me, though, La Cage had always represented one side in an artistic feud between two musical theatre icons.

On the surface, the divergent careers of Jerry Herman and Stephen Sondheim demonstrate different approaches to popular art: accessible show tunes vs. atonal experimentation; critical vs. commercial success.

But the twinned stories of these gay artists, whose careers began pre-Stonewall and continued into the AIDS era, also encompass internalised homophobia, HIV stigma and the thorny question of how to express your identity through art.

Let’s rewind…

1984

Upon its debut, La Cage swept the Tony Awards, winning all the major prizes including Best Book, Best Score and Best Musical. Although shoutouts to queer pride are ubiquitous at the Tonys nowadays, book writer Harvey Fierstein caused a controversy back then by thanking ‘my lover Scott’ in his speech.

Jerry Herman, however, avoided any references to gay visibility in his acceptance speech, but weighed in on a different kind of culture war:

This award forever shatters a myth about the musical theatre. There's been a rumor around for a couple of years that the simple, hummable show tune was no longer welcome on Broadway. Well, it's alive and well at the Palace!

Although the term ‘subtweet’ had not yet been coined, everyone in the audience could’ve guessed where Herman’s shade was being thrown.

The ’84 Tonys had pitted La Cage against Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. Sunday went home nearly empty-handed, winning only for its Lighting and Scenic Design.

Reading about this years later as a teenage Sondheim obsessive, I interpreted that loss as a crime against taste and Herman’s speech as unconscionable gloating. Back then, I devoured everything Sondheim, listening to cast recordings over and over and even subscribing to the Sondheim Review. With its intricate wordplay and psychological complexity, Sondheim’s work represented everything layered, postmodern and nuanced that I hoped to emulate in art.

Jerry Herman, composer of middlebrow hits like Hello, Dolly!, represented showbiz schlock, cheap sentiment and major chords.

And I wasn’t alone in setting these two on opposite artistic poles.

On that very same ’84 broadcast, the Tonys offered up two star-studded medleys running twelve minutes each that glided through each composer’s work to date, framing their contrasting talents for the audience at home.

(If you want quick primers on the work of Herman or of Sondheim, consider watching these segments on YouTube before you read on.)

According to the Tony copywriters:

‘If I had to sum up Jerry Herman in one word, there is only one word that could be used: optimism…’

And in the opposite corner:

‘There are many things one might say about Stephen Sondheim and his work, but among them is not that he settles for ‘easy.’ Don’t check your mind with your coat when you buy a ticket for a Sondheim musical!’

To put it in more contemporary terms:

For Sondheim, the ’83-’84 season was something of a ‘coming out’ moment — not regarding his sexuality (which he’d still never addressed publicly) but in marking his transition from Broadway to the non-commercial sector.

His previous show Merrily We Roll Along had closed after only two weeks, prompting Sondheim to develop Sunday through a workshop process Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. In this smaller pond, he was able let his postmodern freak flag fly, writing one of his most conceptual shows yet.

Across two acts structured as ‘theme and variation,’ Sunday doesn’t exactly tell the story of pointillist painter Georges Seurat so much as it meditates on the challenges of artistic creation itself. Seurat, an obvious Sondheim stand-in, stays true to his unique vision, even when that means eschewing popular success and rejecting romance in favor of a steadfast dedication to his work.

Structurally and musically, the show was not traditional Broadway fare, but it had made it there thanks to huge critical backing, particularly from Frank Rich at the New York Times. To some in the theatre community, this may have seemed like special pleading for a niche piece that many audiences found baffling.

La Cage, on the other hand, was risky in a totally different way. A team of all-gay creatives (not just Herman and Fierstein but also director Arthur Laurents and caftan-clad producer Allan Carr) had chosen a story that redefined the concept of ‘family values’ and hinged on its lead characters affirming their sexuality in the face of homophobic bigots.

Fierstein, who came from the post-Stonewall generation, initially pushed for an even more unapologetic approach to the show’s gayness but Laurents insisted they proceed cautiously. George and Albin were deliberately cast with heterosexual actors and Laurents refused to have the couple kiss at the end. He even insisted on including a couple of biological women amongst the chorus line of men in drag: ‘This way,’ he reasoned, ‘should a straight man feel attracted to one of the performers, he can ease his guilt by telling himself he was looking at one of the real girls.’

The premise itself already tested mainstream (i.e. straight) audiences’ tolerance, so why push it? In his recent autobiography, Fierstein admits that Laurents’s approach was probably right for the time: ‘I wanted to change the world, but you ain’t changing nothing unless you’re putting asses in the seats.’

La Cage is an unabashedly commercial show that isn’t trying to revoluntionise the musical comedy form. Instead, it leans into the sequins and sentiment to make its unconventional lead couple more palatable.

It’s Herman’s lyrics that are arguably the show’s most radical element. He gives us a tuneful Act One showstopper, but stealthily inserts Gay Pride slogans for audiences to hum along to at intermission:

It's my world that I want to take a little pride in,
My world, and it's not a place I have to hide in…

There's one life, and there's no return and no deposit;
One life, so it's time to open up your closet!

Compare this open-hearted declaration to Georges Seurat’s Act One soliloquy ‘Finishing the Hat,’ in which he retreats from emotional entanglements into a world of artistic abstraction:

But the woman who won't wait for you knows
That, however you live,
There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky…
Finishing a hat...

The two composers’ divergent musical tastes coincide with deeper emotional differences in the subjects they’re drawn to.

Herman’s heroines would never keep a ‘part of’ themselves just ‘standing by’. Albin in La Cage, like Dolly and Mame, is another in a long line of protagonists who are wholly and completely themselves.

Born one year apart, both Herman and Sondheim had come of age in the decades before Stonewall. As Sondheim later said, ‘Everybody knew the theatre was full of homosexuals, but nobody admitted to being so.’

In writing La Cage, Herman had ‘opened up his closet’ in a way that his trendier contemporary Sondheim was still uncomfortable with.

If we rewind back a bit, maybe this isn’t so surprising.

1964

In many ways, the template for the Sondheim-Herman rivalry was set twenty years prior.

Hello, Dolly! was a megahit, the kind of popular show that saturates the culture in a way no Broadway show could ever do today. Louis Armstrong’s recording of the title tune rose to #1 on the Billboard charts, dislodging no less of a hit than the Beatles’ ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.

Meanwhile, Sondheim’s show that season was the biggest flop of his career: the offbeat, countercultural satire Anyone Can Whistle (with book and direction, as it happens, by Arthur Laurents). It closed after only nine performances.

It’s impossible to know what a thirty-four year-old Sondheim might’ve grumbled snarkily about his uber-successful contemporary from the corner of a Broadway after-party. It was clear even then that the two had different agendas: Herman was playing for, and achieving, mass appeal, whilst Sondheim was trying, as yet unsuccessfully, to expand the form.

We can get a hint of what Sondheim thought from a little-known song he wrote a few years later for an unproduced film project. The script called for a tune not unlike ‘Hello, Dolly!’ that would be played on the radio over and over – ‘a big hit song from a big hit show that you can’t get away from.’

The pastiche Steve came up with is pure Herman, but curdled:

You thought it all would be pie
No, Mary Ann!
Pink little birds in the sky
No, Mary Ann!

Trite quotidian images, repetitive phrases; one can just imagine Sondheim smirking as he completed the assignment. According to his withering assessment, the idea of the ‘hummable’ show tune was a myth, accounted for by force-feeding:

Hummability really is a matter of repetition, and many of the songs of the so-called ‘golden years’ of musical theater were hummable partly because there were four reprises in these shows, and they got played on the air all the time.

Most of Herman’s famous songs are built on catchy monosyllables and simple declarative statements. They are what they are. His characters introduce themselves with personalities too big to be ignored, take ’em or leave ’em:

You coax the blues right out of the horn… Mame!
You charm the husk right off of the corn… Mame!

Wow wow wow, fellas
Look at the old girl now, fellas
Dolly'll never go away
Dolly'll never go away
Dolly'll never go away again!

This style proved lucrative for Herman in the 60s. Dolly! and Mame both clocked in at 1,500 performances and toured widely across middle America. By contrast, even the longest runs of Sondheim’s whole career were less than half that. He gained accolades and a devoted following, but would always remain a succès d’estime compared to Herman’s succès de success.

Sondheim’s eventual breakthrough in the 70s came hand in hand with a mounting cultural cynicism that made Herman’s earlier earnestness seem quaint. Where a Herman lyric declares itself with its heart on its sleeve, Sondheim’s are often caught in a thicket of self-consciously conflicted rhetorical questions:

Isn’t it rich, are we a pair?

Leave you? Leave you?
How could I leave you?
How could I go it alone?

You're sorry-grateful
Regretful-happy
Why look for answers
Where none occur?

Though they were from the same generation, Sondheim’s embrace of challenging, risqué subject matter made his work seem more contemporary. If either of them were going to present frank homosexual desire onstage, your money might’ve been on the guy who’d already dissected unhappy marriages and murderous barbers.

In fact, the opposite was true.

Sondheim’s personal attitude to sexuality was marked by the same ambivalence he depicted so acutely in his characters. Speaking much later about his love life, he acknowledged, ‘I was never easy with being a homosexual, which complicated things.’ Those internal struggles show up his art.

A show like Company, for example, about a bachelor named Bobby who fears commitment, was subject to many queer readings over the years, which Sondheim strenuously resisted. Whatever the orientation of Bobby (or ‘Bobbie’ as she was re-named in a recent, gender-swapped revival), the show’s whole energy derives from the tension of the protagonist’s sexual hang-ups. The entire piece, as gay critic Adam Feldman convincingly argues, is ‘in some sense, a product of the closet.’

Coming into the 1980s, Stephen Sondheim would’ve had to work through a lot of gay shame before he could write anything as affirming as La Cage Aux Folles.

Herman, meanwhile, was moved to tears a couple years into the run of La Cage when he heard ‘I Am What I Am’ played from a float in the Gay Pride parade. By then, he’d settled down contentedly with live-in partner Marty Finkelstein.

Although his score declared that ‘The Best of Times Is Now,’ it couldn’t have felt that way as HIV/AIDS began to ravage the community. In just a few years, as Sondheim’s sexuality remained secretive, Herman’s life would be upended by loss and an unasked-for outing that halted his career.

1994

The publicity around Sondheim’s musical Passion ventured into hitherto mysterious terrain: his personal life.

Under the headline ‘Mr Cool Tries Passion,’ the LA Times reported:

He is in love, reportedly for the first time in his life. Though he is notoriously private, a childhood friend maintains that ‘Steve is happier and calmer than he’s ever been,’ and that is presumably due in part to his involvement with a young musician.

Coy references to an un-gendered ‘young musician’ were a trial balloon for the public revelation that the maestro of emotional alienation had feelings, sexual and otherwise.

Love was, ostensibly, the theme of his new show, but — this being Sondheim — of course it was complicated.

Passion’s heroine Fosca is sickly, conventionally unattractive and completely obsessed with a hunky soldier. The passion she directs at him is not experienced as pleasure, but a relentless force that cracks the love object open:

I wish I could forget you
Erase you from my mind
But ever since I met you
I find
I cannot leave the thought of you behind
That doesn't mean I love you...

Clearly, Steve was still working through some shit.

He would come out publicly five years later in a 1999 authorized biography. During this same period, though, Jerry Herman was not allowed to maintain his privacy.

First Herman had lost Marty, aged only 36, to AIDS-related illness and then received his own positive diagnosis. Adding to that, his HIV status was revealed without his consent in the pages of the New York Post by gossip columnist Cindy Adams.

As his T-cell count dropped, work dried up. As he later put it, producers began thinking, ‘Oh we can’t hire him, because he could get sick in the middle of a tryout.’

Despite La Cage’s success, Herman would never have another new show produced.

Understandably, Mr. Optimism went through a period of deep despair: ‘Inwardly, I was empty. I like to write happy, romantic songs, and I didn’t feel romantic or happy. I didn’t feel like a whole person.’

And yet Herman’s ultimate response to this truly daunting set of personal circumstances was worthy of one of his resilient heroines. I’ve got a goal again, I’ve got a drive again, I wanna feel my heart coming alive again, Before the parade passes by…

Starting in the mid-90s, when public discourse around HIV had mostly sunk into silence, Herman embraced his role as a long-term HIV survivor, speaking about it in TV interviews and even appearing on the cover of Poz magazine in 1997 to tell the story of his experience with anti-retroviral therapy:

I wanted to tell people in my situation that there are medications now that can normalize your system. At the moment, I have no viral activity in my body. It’s below zero. It’s called ’out of range.’ I can hardly believe I’m telling you this. I’m not a person who believes in miracles. I wasn’t brought up to believe in miracles. But I think I do now.

It would be decades before the U=U findings proved conclusively that those with undetectable viral loads could not pass the virus on. And, of course, back then (and still today) access to these medications remains a huge challenge for folks, especially from Black and brown communities, without affordable health coverage.

What Herman did, though, was not unlike his choice to write La Cage: he offered his face and reassuring image to adjust public perception of an issue that invoked fear and prejudice in middle America. Jerry never shirked from speaking about his status, which was hugely rare in those days, and organised concerts of his songs to benefit HIV/AIDS charities.

Speaking about his participation in the drug trials for the FDA approval of protease inhibitors, Herman the hit-making author of Hello, Dolly! said, ‘I think it’s the best thing I’ve done for this world.’

I only learned about this advocacy of Herman’s recently, after I myself had been living with HIV for nearly a decade. Only in researching this essay did I learn that Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, the theatre community’s leading HIV relief fund, grew out of impromptu fundraisers organised by members of the La Cage chorus during their down-time between shows.

It’s fair to say that my assessment of Herman’s life and career has shifted since I was a teenage sophisticate waving the flag for Sondheim.

As I’ve gotten older and navigated the minefield of sharing my HIV status publicly, even making it a part of my work, I’ve come to respect not only Herman’s brave personal choices but also the virtues of his artistic approach, even if I still consider Sondheim’s work richer.

Jerry’s shows, like his attitude, were open – there’s a conscious attempt to welcome in the biggest possible audience. They also exude a resilient life-force that offers strategies for their protagonists to keep going if they can just open a new window, tap their troubles away or put a little more masacara on.

Listening to Passion on CD for the umpteenth time as a teen, I responded to its intellectual intricacy and sublimated desire at least partially because I was a closeted kid who, like the show’s creator, had some ways to go to acknowledge my identity.

Thanks to Jerry and Zaza, there were probably some other theatre kids out there who were way ahead of me in becoming their own special creations.

Bosom Buddies

In a hetero world, there are multiple ways to be a queer artist. Jerry Herman and Stephen Sondheim embody at least two of them:

— You can aim for the masses, planting positive representations and messages of acceptance inside broadly familiar forms;

— Or you can deconstruct the forms you’ve inherited, aiming to present the world anew — and hope that at least a select few will appreciate your vision…

But, wait a minute, have I learned nothing from all those cast recordings?

Must it all be either less or more?
Either plain or grand?
Is it always ‘or’?
Is it never… ‘and’?

Herman did try to write like Sondheim, at least once. Mack and Mabel, his downbeat show that ends with one of the leads dying from drug addiction, was not what audiences wanted — but he always considered it his favorite score.

Sondheim tried, at least once, to write an openly gay character in a show so confounding that it had at least four different titles and never felt finished — but he kept on trying.

Whereas Herman the traditionalist ended up on the cover of Poz, Sondheim the trailblazer consented to being photographed with… Pete Buttigieg?!?

Tell me again which of them is the more radical role model?

As gay men whose lives stretched from the 1930s to the twenty-first century, of course they contained contradictions.

Jerry Herman himself seemed to think the comparison between them was pointless:

Sondheim is a genius and I'm a songwriter. We're not in the same league as minds. I couldn't write about presidential assassins if you put a gun to my temple. My whole reason for being is to entertain people. I'm a mass audience person. That's where I aim, and that's where I hit.

I’d like to imagine that, if Steve and Jerry do find themselves chatting in that Great White Way up in the sky, they’re not trading barbs like Mame and Vera Charles.

Perhaps Angela Lansbury, newly arrived in the afterlife, can serve as a mediator.

And then they can join forces to Fight the Real Enemy:

As Jerry Herman taught us, time heals everything.

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As visitors approach the gallery, there’s a slight confusion of pathways. Ahead of you stands the entrance door, with a helpful museum staffer ready to take your ticket. Should we go in?

Sound and visuals, however, draw your attention elsewhere.

To the right of the door, Julien’s 1984 film Territories, an experimental documentary of revelers and police officers at the Notting Hill Carnival, plays on a loop. To the left Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983), documenting the community’s response to a young Black man’s death in police custody, plays simultaneously.

Unsure of the right ‘order’ in which to experience all this, I sat a while with both, as their soundtracks bled together in the exhibition’s echoing antechamber.

Reading the wall text that detailed the chronology of Julien’s life, I learned that these early films were made as part of the independent Black film and video collective Sankofa, which he co-founded. Only later did I learn what that name refers to:

In the Twi language of Ghana, sankofa means ‘to retrieve’ (literally, to go back and get) and refers also to a traditional symbol of a bird with feet facing forward even as its neck turns to carry a precious egg on its back.

The sankofa represents the loop of historical time, looking back to retrieve from the past what is needed to move forward into the future.

I’m reminded of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, inspired by a Paul Klee painting, whose face turns backward whilst the storm of historical progress propels him ahead. This quintessential concept of European modernism is itself a belated manifestation of a centuries-old African idea.

Already, this exhibition has me entangled in time.

The outer area of the gallery has offered me facts, both on the wall and in Julien’s early films. Though artfully collaged, the grainy Super 8 and VHS footage has the rough, verité quality we associate with agitprop, overtly ‘political’ art. . .

. . . once we pass through the door to the exhibition proper, though, we’re enveloped by another aesthetic altogether:

Glossy, artificial, composed. We’re in a black and white Hollywood world where multiple movie screens are reflected against walls of shimmering Mylar. Placed between the movie screens are bronze busts and statues.

We’ve experienced a chronic leap, moving from the very start of Julien’s film career directly to his newest work, Once Again… (Statues Never Die). A handsome, tuxedo-clad man wanders through moodily lit museum hallways and airy art studios, amongst sculptures Classical and modern, African and European. He types manifestos at an old-fashioned typewriter as a handsome lover lolls in bed. He stands in a snowstorm as its perfectly-formed white flakes swoon impossibly upward.

Actor Andre Holland (known for Moonlight) steps into the role of African-American scholar Alain Locke. The cinematography evokes the glorified imagery of an unmade Oscar-winning biopic, but no clear narrative emerges. Instead, the film is organized around a series of encounters (sexual, philosophical, colonial). At its center is a dialogue between Locke and art collector Albert C. Barnes outlining contrasting interpretations of African art, drawn from their actual writing.

Across its five screens, the work constantly shifts our perspective, showing us movements and moments from many angles simultaneously. Enfolded within it are other works of art, including Nii Kwate Owoo’s short documentary You Hide Me, which argued in 1970 for the restitution of African sculptures held in the British Museum back to their countries of origin.

Debates about museums’ collections are hotly topical yet, as Julien reminds us, ‘These debates are seen as new today, but they’re actually not new. They’ve just been articulated separately by different generations.’

It culminates in a stunning soundtrack moment from singer Alice Smith:

Visitors emerge from this immense aesthetic and intellectual overture into a new space of forking pathways. The rest of the exhibit presents six more of Julien’s films, which play in galleries arrayed like spokes from a central hub, to be selected in the order of your choice.

The most famous is his career breakthrough Looking for Langston (1989). Until watching the film here in its entirety, I’d known that it evoked the Harlem Renaissance world of poet Langston Hughes but I hadn’t realized quite how radically it remixes queer, Black culture from across history and across the Atlantic. Hughes’s work is recited alongside eulogies from James Baldwin’s funeral. Essex Hemphill’s prophetic poems are intoned over controversial images of Black men taken by Robert Mapplethorpe. Julien’s cast perform joyous vogue routines in an underground ballroom that sits simultaneously in 1920’s Harlem and London’s South Bank in the late 1980s, accompanied by a thumping house track:

The look of Langston clearly bears the stylistic influence of Derek Jarman, who mentored Julien. But the energy of this film is all its own, easily outpacing the often lugubrious tone of Jarman works like The Angelic Conversation (1985). Looking forward, one detects a lineage from Julien’s style to that of contemporary Black (and straight) directors like Steve McQueen and Barry Jenkins, who employ some of the same aesthetics in the service of mainstream narrative filmmaking.

Julien’s smooth camera work privileges images of beauty, even as the intellectual complexity of his work, often centered around archival texts, makes a viewer’s mind crackle. In Lessons of the Hour (2019), a ten-screen meditation on the life and ideas of Frederick Douglass, Julien gives us some of the abolitionist’s most stirring speeches, delivered in lecture halls to audiences dressed in costumes of both past and present. Even as we encounter the political Douglass, however, we are met on other screens with his fractured personal life, in the figures of his estranged first wife Anna and second wife Helen, themselves separated by divisions of time, race, literacy and class.

In its upending of historical preconceptions and denial of any single vantage point, Julien’s work reminds me most closely of another Black, queer artist working not with visuals but words.

John Keene’s extraordinary collection Counternarratives refracts, elides and collides complex moments of colonial encounter through unusual formal devices. In ‘Persons and Places,’ for instance, he imagines two diary entries of the same day by the Black writer W.E.B. DuBois and his teacher at Harvard, the Spanish philosopher George Santayana. Presented in two columns that divide the page, the two pass each other on the street but do not speak.

Like Julien, Keene also takes inspiration from Langston Hughes, rendering his affair with the Mexican poet Xavier Villarrutia in ‘Blues,’ a short story whose brief phrases, separated by ellipses, suggest the fleeting glances and hidden implications of these two men delicately circling their unspoken desires:

. . . poetic language always carries the seed of something revolutionary . . . merely by being a testimony to one’s always complex and difficult interior journeys . . . in language you need to lose yourself . . . to recover yourself . . yes, Langston says, that too, so true . . . still talking they finish dinner, another round of drinks . . . Xavier mentions an early train back to New Haven . . . over Langston’s gentle objections he pays the bill . . . the male couple, now openly holding hands at their table, offer familial approval . . . we are not afraid of night . . . the next one will be my treat . . . shoulder to shoulder, fingers grazing . . . Xavier offers to have a cab drop him off . . . then abruptly says why don’t you come downtown with me . . .

Both Keene and Julien are engaged in what the scholar Saidiya Hartman has called ‘critical fabulation,’ the weaving together of detailed historical research with fictional narrative to fill in blanks in the historical record. Hartman describes a technique that can ‘displace the received or authorized account, to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.’ This approach offers us a means to consider the experiences of those, such as enslaved Africans, whose existence and thought are barely recognised in official histories.

Critical fabulation necessarily traffics in subjectivity since it aims to reclaim the very privilege of being a subject that has been denied to the historically marginalised. For queer historical figures, that also includes the subjective experience of desire.

One detects more than a hint of homophobia, therefore, when a mainstream critic like Laura Cumming, in The Observer, chides Julien’s camera for the way it ‘dwells on shimmering makeup, coiffed hair, buttons, stitches and velvet, on honed bodies and chiseled faces, bentwood furniture,’ which, to her taste, ‘slips in and out of The World of Interiors.’ His work, she sniffs, relies on ‘glossy, luxurious, swanky aesthetics made to carry the burden of history.’

According to Annette Richardson in Time Out, ‘Julien’s work is undeniably serious – his career started in the 1980s with an examination of the Black Atlantic – but he cannot resist making it beautiful. His indulgence of that urge leavens the message.’

To these critics, Julien’s gritty, early work would seem a more fitting vehicle for the themes he examines. But by insisting that this Black, queer artist stay inside predetermined frameworks they approve of they venture quite close to the pronouncements of Albert C. Barnes himself, who pigeonholed ‘Negro Art’ into a category determined by its ‘primitive’ origins and shaped by ‘suffering.’

Why shouldn’t historically serious subjects be entwined with a sensuality of representation? Must we consider the beautiful a form of indulgence? We experience time and trauma in the same bodies with which we experience desire.

Works like Julien’s – and Keene’s – explode those binaries and employ complex aesthetic strategies that imitate the experience of living within history, not just reading about it. Another of the films in this exhibition highlights the work of Italian-Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi. Filming the sinuous movements of dancers against the spiraling structures of her buildings, Julien explores Bardi’s contention that time is not linear but ‘a marvelous entanglement, where at any moment, points can be chosen and solutions invented, without beginning or end.’

After some hours of taking in films, we depart the central gallery to find ourselves back where we — and Julien — started, re-encountering his earliest film about the killing of Collin Roach. Watching decades-old protest footage against police violence, we must consider how history still seems caught in an endless loop.

In the 21^st century, we’ve become numb to the assertion that ‘everything is storytelling.’ To hold onto power, fascists narrate a linear story of progressive decline from a retrospective, imagined past (‘Make America Great Again’) and conveniently ignore the experiences of anyone outside their clans. To hold our attention, corporate streaming services feed us serialised narrative, a relentless succession of hooks and cliffhangers whose ultimate mission is not enlightenment or even entertainment but the unending intake of their ‘content’.

Sitting with Julien’s films is a bracing alternative to the ideology of the linear. You have until August 20^th to visit Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is to Me. I urge you to block out a few hours and consider picking up one of those folding museum stools to carry around with you. Take your time. . .

The shortest film in the exhibit, Vagabondia, is positioned just at the exit, the point before we return to the beginning. A Black female figure roams the labyrinthine corridors of John Soanes’ Museum in London, just as we’ve wandered with Julien across the artefacts and affects of history.

Julien splits the image so that it reflects back on itself, creating a doubled, disorienting perspective which moves two ways at once.

To wander inside of Isaac Julien’s art is to consider time anew.

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

- Frank O’Hara

It’s been a few weeks since my last essay. I fully expected to return from holiday in the south of Italy to first reviews of Madonna’s long-awaited Celebration Tour, scheduled to have begun on 15^th July.

Instead, whilst I was walking around sun-drenched Puglian towns, the world was in a waiting game for any news on her health and the future of the tour.

You have surely heard by now that Madonna was admitted to the ICU in late June with a serious bacterial infection. According to some accounts, she was found unconscious by an unidentified person who may have ‘saved her life’ by rushing to get her medical help.

When planning our Italian trip we’d decided — as any good gays would — to have dinner at Casa San Giacomo in Ostuni, the restaurant where Madonna memorably celebrated her 63^rd birthday…

…I didn’t imagine, though, that I’d find myself in Puglian churches, like a good Catholic boy, saying Hail Marys for the Queen of Pop. What was I praying for? Her full recovery, of course. But more than that, for the triumphant cultural moment we had all hoped for her this year.

oh Madonna we love you get up

In Puglia, shrines to specific saints are everywhere. I’m reminded of the contention by entertaining but eternally problematic scholar Camille Paglia that Madonna in the 80s unleashed ‘the latent paganism and pornography in Italian Catholicism.’

I do know my saints, but in the picturesque hilltop town of Locorotondo I encountered an unfamiliar and striking one. Saint Rocco (take note of the name!) is traditionally accompanied by a dog holding a loaf of bread. Most distinctive of all, though, is his pose: Rocco lifts his cloak to display a naked thigh with bleeding wound

Had I been a young boy kneeling at Rocco’s altar, the ‘latent pornography’ of his statue -- looking not unlike a bruised rugby player -- would hardly have been lost on me. Once I could look past the flesh, I might have learned Rocco’s legend. A young nobleman, he gave up his wealth and went about praying for those infected with plague and curing them. When he himself contracted plague, as indicated by the sores on his thigh, Rocco was banished to a cave (that’s where the miraculous dog came in, conveniently bringing Rocco bread to eat).

Understandably, Saint Rocco is now venerated as the protector against plague and all infectious diseases. He’s had a busy few years, I reckon.

And Rocco’s feast day? The 16^th of August.

If you don’t know whose birthday that is, you’re reading the wrong article.

The image of Saint Rocco is a comfort not for any superhuman powers on display but because of his physical vulnerability. His statue is rare for depicting a very human affliction on a saintly body.

Madonna has trafficked in the iconography of the Church but she’s rarely dabbled in its veneration of suffering. Like Rocco, Madonna’s constantly showing leg, but it’s never been to display her wounds.

The image of a vulnerable Madonna, laid low by illness, causes cognitive dissonance.  Sure, she’s had flop albums, scandals and unsuccessful movie projects. But her strength in bouncing back, proving her critics wrong, has never been in question.

Gay men have identified with plenty of doomed, suffering divas from Judy Garland to Amy Winehouse, but Madonna has won our allegiance by continually projecting a fuck-you attitude of resistance in the face of misogyny, moralism and homophobia.

Coming to prominence during a time of rampant plague, Madonna preached protection without sacrificing pleasure. She will forever be the patron saint of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but her interventions came not through prayers and candle-lit vigils but cheeky latex advocacy and sweaty danceathons.

Later, as she morphed from Camille Paglia’s Whore of Babylon into the her post-Ray of Light Earth Mother image, Madonna embodied a form of Wellness (influenced by the teachings of yoga and kabbalah) that attempts – and, until now, has mostly succeeded – in transcending the bodily. Health and strength have forever been her M.O.

Consider the notable moment from 2004’s Re-Invention Tour when she stops the action with a performance of ‘Lament’ from Evita. According to the thesis of the original musical, this is the moment of Eva Peron’s self-conscious apotheosis into posthumous sainthood.

But for the woman playing her on the concert stage, the cos-play of human frailty becomes a complex text:

She begins by literally spitting in the face of her aggressive male torturers, never missing an opportunity to enact what my favorite Madonna scholars have identified as her signature gesture: pushing men away from her.

Strapped to an electric chair, aged 45 and in obvious glowing health, she turns this dying broadcast into a manifesto of defiance:

The choice was mine, and mine completely
I could have any prize that I desired
I could burn with the splendor of the brightest fire
Or else, or else I could choose time

In her mouth, the message of Tim Rice’s lyrics becomes a refusal of risk avoidance, a disavowal of cautious conservation of energy in pursuit of her single-minded goals.

Remember I was very young then
And a year was forever and a day
So what use could fifty, sixty, seventy be?
I saw the lights, and I was on my way

She was 45 when she sang that, I am 44 now – and coming to terms daily with the limitations of a body that was hardly ever the machine that Madonna’s was.

During her 2019 Madame X Tour, Madonna sustained an injury that led to hip replacement surgery. Her mindset, as expressed from a video Q&A at that time, rejected any notion of slowing down:

“During my tour – I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but I’m limping a lot – I was in more pain than I’ve ever been in in my life… So, how do I stay in shape? It’s all in your head … It’s called will, it’s called no one’s gonna stop me, and how I stay in shape is no one’s gonna stop me. And how I stay in shape is I don’t believe in limitations.”

Limitations consist not just in spent breath and torn ligaments. Life is made up of forking paths and the more of them you take, the more you understand that you don’t have an infinite supply of do-overs.

When Madonna returns to us in October, God willing, she will have had another reinvention, one that she surely didn’t plan but one which, we hope, can bring her closer to us than ever.

oh Madonna we love you take care of yourself

As generations of her fans age, one hopes that she and we can face certain facts not with resignation but with new understanding. The years ahead will require different forms of defiance and vulnerability from all of us.

What use could fifty, sixty, seventy be?

So many of Madonna’s contemporaries didn’t live to ask that question.

The answers, as they arrive, needn’t stop the Celebration.

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I’m not the first to note that the rhetorical power of Jackson’s denunciation of Thatcherism was heightened by her decades of practice delivering classical tirades on the stage. If you don’t know the speech, listen to it.  

RSC vocal coaches like Cicely Berry urge their students to find the muscularity in classical language; they might as well use Jackson’s Parliamentary remarks as a set text. Note her dynamic use of antithesis:

We were told that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice —and I still regard them as vices—was, in fact, under Thatcherism, a virtue.

Those of us on the Left will experience an intellectual satisfaction from the critique that Jackson offers – but the glee in listening and re-listening to the speech (as I have many times) comes from the OTT flourishes in her cadences: ‘London became a city that HOGARTH would have recognised – and inDEED. HE. WOULD.’

(This speech alone makes the case for Glenda as a killer Snatch Game selection for Drag Race UK. Baga Chipz may have given us a memorably demonic Thatcher, but her real-life politics are quite flip-floppy, and it’s high time someone challenged her supremacy by repeatedly intoning the phrase ‘rolls and rolls of SELLOTAPE.’)

Jackson’s Ciceronian rhetorical style is a major component of why those remarks cut through the blather surrounding Thatcher’s memorial. One feels an additional thrill at the sheer force with which Glenda plows ahead, unfazed by boos from the Tory (and probably a few Labour) benches. She feels no need to modulate her tone out of reverence for the recently deceased.

In politics and in performance, Glenda Jackson never gave a toss about what other people thought of her.

Last week on Twitter, writer Isaac Butler suggested shadily that Jackson’s stage work was a ‘relic’ of an old-school, highly presentational mode of acting, akin to ‘visiting a diorama of pilgrims at the Natural History Museum.’

Whilst uncharitable, his analysis wasn’t exactly incorrect. I only saw Jackson perform live once, in her late-career turn as King Lear in 2016: the furious emotional states exhibited in that performance would not have seemed out of place on a nineteenth century stage.

Those of us who respond to Glenda Jackson’s performances rarely do so because of her versatility, her ability to disappear into a role.

Onstage, she was born to play the great dominating female parts: Cleopatra, Hedda, Bernarda Alba, Mother Courage, Martha. But never Blanche. In her most lauded film roles of the 1970s, Jackson could be more psychologically modulated but most of her heroines exuded a similar air of superiority – and a willingness to challenge men.

Whether in period literary adaptations (Women in Love), progressive contemporary dramas (Sunday Bloody Sunday) or frothy sex farces (A Touch of Class), one waits eagerly for the moment when Jackson’s character would let rip at the usually clueless or insensitive male she’d been paired with.

Few actors have enjoyed an intense streak of adulation quite like Jackson’s in the early 70s. The first and last of the performances mentioned above brought her two Best Actress Oscars in the space of four years (though, for my money, it’s her work in Sunday that holds up best today).

Even back then, however, it doesn’t seem like Jackson had much interest in ingratiating herself: she didn’t show up at the ceremony to accept either of her Oscars.

Lauded by her peers, she kept making left-field choices: lending her star power to the increasingly oddball camp directed by her old pal Ken Russell or to the TV sketch comedy of Morecambe and Wise.

And then she gave it all up for twenty-five years in politics.

Who is today’s Glenda Jackson? There isn’t one, and probably will never be. Unless Emma Thompson decides to give up acting and stand for Caroline Lucas’s seat in Brighton on the Green Party ticket at the next general election.

When an icon passes, it’s a commonplace to say that that no one will ever be quite like her, but in Glenda’s case it’s unquestionably true.  

I’ve made a diagram to prove it:

Plenty of actors’ careers possess some of the attributes of Jackson’s. It’s pretty standard, for instance, to demonstrate your versatility by swapping between prestige drama and broad comedy.

It’s rarer nowadays to consistently shift between stage work and screen, but some still do. A rare few even take on the great roles of the European dramatic repetoire: Jessica Chastain, one year off of her Oscar win, played Ibsen’s Nora, as Jackson did with Hedda; having won Best Actress in 2014, Cate Blanchett then appeared with Isabelle Huppert in Genet’s The Maids, a 21^st century answer to Jackson’s 1974 turn with Susannah York in the same play.

Of course, though, it’s her approach to politics that distinguishes Glenda Jackson from everybody else. Many, many celebrities take on roles as political advocates. Jackson’s contemporary (and Mary, Queen of Scots co-star) Vanessa Redgrave became a lightning rod for her support of Palestinian rights, never more so than when she used the platform of the Academy Awards to express her support for their cause.

Jackson’s mode of political engagement was of a different character altogether, though. Early on, like Redgrave, she leant her celebrity to causes ranging from abortion rights to famine relief. But eventually she eschewed mere celebrity grandstanding for the hard graft of electoral politics.

Jackson has said that her motivation for becoming an MP was simple: ‘Anything I could’ve done that was legal to get Margaret Thatcher’s government out I was prepared to do.’ She was courted at multiple points to stand for the Labour Party in places like Bridgend or Leeds, before finally standing in 1990 for the seat in Hampstead & Highgate and taking it away from the Conservatives.

If Labour thought Jackson would inject glamour into their midst, however, they got something else. The trajectory of her decades as an MP consisted in a gradual move away from the spotlight. Initially, she flirted with high office, briefly holding a post as transport minister in the first Blair government. She stepped down from that to put herself forward in an unsuccessful bid to be Mayor of London.

Her ambition to rise in the ranks seems to have ended there. Instead, this internationally renowned actress settled into a role on the back benches, working on bread and butter issues. The concerns highlighted in her famous Thatcher speech — proper housing, affordable education, care for the vulnerable — have always formed the core of her socialist values:

My life was transformed by the Labour government of 1945. It was transformative for millions of people like me, you know – education, the health service. It was proof that politics can make life better for people; that a social dream can become a social reality by the power of government.

The same woman who’d done little to court the Academy also had no instinct to suck up to the party powers that be.

Whilst Jackson’s attack on Thatcher is better remembered now, she was often quite hostile to her own party leader’s policies, starting in 1998 when she opposed Labour’s move to introduce university tuition fees. Tony Blair is probably lucky that YouTube didn’t exist in 2003 or we might have viral trades to re-watch of Jackson’s calls for his resignation over the Hutton report. Three years later, she was one of only 12 Labour MPs who voted against his Government to establish an Enquiry into the Iraq War.

Not unlike Bernie Sanders, Jackson made a career out of steadfast Left-wing cantankerousness during the years of Third Way ascendancy. By the time she retired from politics in 2015, the old fashioned Labour values that she’d always espoused had become more fashionable amongst a younger generation who likely couldn’t name a single Jackson film of the 1970s.

In her final, post-politics years, Glenda Jackson cut a singular figure. She won late-career awards on stage and in television, as indomitable as ever, but without a trace of vanity. Londoners could spot her now frail figure trudging from Waterloo station to the Old Vic, fag in hand, gripping a grubby canvas bag on her shoulder. When she attended the 2017 Olivier Awards (and won) she wore a dress off the rack from Marks & Spenser.

Even with the Labour Left gaining power in the party, Jackson still refused to toe any party line. Her verdict on Jeremy Corbyn was typically doubled-edged:

I found him marvellous to work with, always cheerful, used to talk to everybody, wrote me a very sweet letter when I didn’t stand at the last election. I wrote back to him saying my only regret was that, as I was no longer a member of parliament, I could not nominate him for the leadership, which I would have done, because I was a firm believer that we always had to have a left-of-centre candidate.

Never in a million years would I have voted for him, though!

It is in her many contradictions that Glenda Jackson will never be replicated.

A girl of working-class roots from the Wirral with an innate knack for playing monarchs. A woman of commanding authority who carried herself without a modicum of pretension.

When a Guardian journalist commented on the ‘fear’ she instilled in others, Jackson didn’t immediately recognise the characterisation. Pressed further, she chalked it up to the directness typical of her upbringing:  ‘Oh, I see, yeah! It’s the north versus the south. It’s what we do in the north!’

By never standing on ceremony, she stood up consistently for the values she was raised with.

How’s that for antithesis?

“If you wanna know if he loves you so, it’s in his kiss.” -Cher

The Shoop Shoop Song is one of a very few diva anthems that does not feature as a needle drop on I Kissed A Boy, BBCThree’s new gay reality dating series, but the show’s creators clearly concur with the lyrics’ sentiment. I would’ve loved it if Cher had flown into the Puglian masseria by helicopter, a la Mamma Mia 2, to oversee the proceedings. Instead we’re granted a diva of somewhat lesser wattage (Dannii Minogue) who warmly coos as matched couples of boy and boy face repeated kiss-offs to test and continually re-seal their affections.

I should say right up front that I have never watched a minute of ITV’s reality dating juggernaut Love Island, which bombards Britain’s airwaves every summer with more firepower than the Luftwaffe (do they really broadcast six episodes a week?!???!??). Such is its cultural dominance, though, that I’m aware of the show’s general format, featuring buff and bouncy bed-hopping heteros who employ ‘bants’ and ‘graft’ to keep coupled up and win £50,000. My sense is that the real name of the game on Love Island, as in most reality shows, is advancement in the attention economy and that successful Islanders court controversy as a means to accrue followers, endorsements and the like.

I’m also aware that two years ago one of Love Island’s producers stirred up a miniscule controversy of his own in response to calls that gay contestants be included on the show, calling it a ‘logistical difficulty.’ As wiser voices said at the time, this was one battle for integration that was not worth fighting. Why should gays insert ourselves into this format of rampant, relentless heterosexuality when we could just create our own dating show? The BBC was listening.

I Kissed a Boy, which aired its finale on Sunday just in time for Pride month, is far from a Love Island knockoff. I doubt that any of the straight Islanders have ever taken time to deliver an emotional PSA about the realities of testicular cancer, as lovely Liverpudlian Mikey does in episode 2 of IKAB. Fear not, license fee-payers! This is still the BBC, so participants get no prize money. Instead, their dating dramas and past traumas are aired for the advancement of what the Beeb calls social and community value, ‘enabling the UK’s many communities to see what they hold in common and how they differ.’ To a surprising extent, the show delivers on that mission – and still remains a bit of summertime fun.

[This write-up avoids any major spoilers for the series — which doesn’t have much suspense anyway — but do hold off reading if you want to experience it like a virgin!]

One can imagine a sluttier version of a gay dating show that turns Love Island’s sexual strategising into three-dimensional chess, with every guy a possibility, and contestants flipping and throupling from partner to partner in surprising combinations. It’s possible that IKAB’s producers were hoping for more man-grabbing when they devised the format: the boys arrive in match-made pairs and then lone wolves called ‘heartstoppers’ are inserted at key moments to turn heads and threaten budding romances. One of these, livewire Vitor, announces upon arrival that his first relationship at age nineteen was with an older married couple. His subsequent behavior, though, like that of the rest of the cast, does nothing to challenge what sociologists have dubbed the ‘Tenacity of the Couple-Norm’.

In classic BBC fashion, the selected contestants hail from all over the UK and represent a diversity of ethnic and national backgrounds, and even somewhat different body types. (Though, for the most part, they pair up in physically like-with-like fashion.) Perhaps the biggest distinguishing factor amongst them are their relative levels of dating – and, by extension, reality game-playing – savvy.

Scottish Ben seems schooled in the Love Island playbook, talking about how he’d put on his ‘grafting gloves’ to win over some newcomer. (I had to use Google Translate to interpret the oft-repeated phrase ‘He’s a bit of me.’) It’s no surprise that Ben becomes a useful apex in the various triangles that do get created: one senses that he knows that vacillations will keep him at the heart of the plot. Garrulous Gareth, from East London via Northern Ireland, never wavers from his initial coupling but easily earns his keep as our reality show narrator, serving one-liners for days.

Other boys in the initial lineup are less skilled – notably Josh, who is not only a Turkish-British gay man from rural Wales but also a newly out, lapsed Mormon who says he’s never even kissed a boy before. As he ogles his new housemates, he exhibits the frenetic expression of a starving man who’s just stumbled upon a smorgasbord. I suspect I was not the only viewer simultaneously pleased that he was living out his authentic desires and worried for his survival as he swam in the deep end of the dating pool.

It’s not only the audience who feel protective of these boys. Despite her glamourous gowns, Dannii Minogue behaves more like that straight female co-worker we’ve all had who wears her LGBT ally badge with pride and can’t wait to hear the goss of how your date went last Friday. She professes pain at any blip in the harmony between the boys, hoping earnestly that they’ll all settle down with their perfect match.

One can also imagine a less audacious, ‘love-is-love’ version of this show pitched squarely at the straight viewership that Dannii stands in for, preaching that cuddly gays have feelings just like the rest of us. Thankfully, the show mostly sidesteps that. The boys’ conversations feel authentic, without overly catering to mainstream audiences: early on we get frank appraisals of ‘power bottom’ status and an extended discussion of ginger Ross’s douching technique. A ridiculous glory hole game prompts compliments on Ollie’s ‘back arch.’ Any straights still with us better be taking notes in order to keep up.

The producers of I Kissed A Boy have attempted a high wire act, and the programme hits most of its targets. The UK’s first gay dating show is neither overly salacious, nor overly sanitized. As on the gay dating scene itself, there are a lot of boxes to tick: be sexy but smart, well-rounded but not overly worthy. The boys speak of the pressures they feel on the scene and the show itself is under a pretty big burden, too. Being the sole representation of gay romance on reality TV, it’s got to be good at everything, delivering sauciness and social value, tears and memes.

In this regard, I Kissed A Boy sometimes feels like a manifestation of another classically gay phenomenon: Best Boy Syndrome. Just take stunning-but-sensitive Matty, one of the last heartstoppers to arrive. Not only does he have chiseled abs and a square jaw, he also works in climate change!! What a catch. But as we spend time with him, it’s clear that he’s far more comfortable opening his shirt than his heart to other boys. For all the boxes that he ticks on paper, Matty breaks down discussing the self doubt and shame that boils beneath the surface.

One hopes that his time in the masseria will help Matty loosen up and become more comfortable with his gayness. One hopes the same for this show, as it, too, gets to know itself. The first series of I Kissed A Boy barely put a foot wrong, and that’s where it still has room to grow. Surely the show would’ve benefitted from keeping some of those fun-but-unkissed boys around longer. (Bobski, we hardly knew ye.) As in IRL gay spaces, the atmosphere is always enlivened by a bit of ‘chaotic twink’ energy.

The final episodes ultimately lacked surprise as the final (mostly predictable) couples met one another’s loved ones and professed affection in a wedding-like final Kiss-Off. I was happy that none of the remaining boys set too much store in the significance of tying the knot legally. Gareth, in particular, is withering about the excesses of some gay marriages: ‘Girl, calm it down. We don’t need swans at a wedding.’

It’s refreshing, also, that the show is not a competition per se, with a pair crowned as the One Couple to Rule Them All. In fact, the only sour note comes in the penultimate episode when the boys have to vote another couple out for being ‘least likely to survive in the real world.’ Modern dating is a gauntlet and the pressures for queers are even more acute. These boys get to know one another off of the apps but also with a wider queer community around them.

I Kissed A Boy is clearly a hit, and the BBC has already announced a girls-only version. Dannii’s end-credits theme tune ‘We Could Be the One’ is a catchy would-be banger. I’ve only just clocked that the elision of singularity and collectivity in the song’s title may point toward a further queering of romantic possibility.

The joy in this show is not contained solely within the bounds of coupledom. It’s also the joy of queer social circles, where you date people who end up your friends and remain there to support one another as the dates come and go.

What if, in looking for ‘the one,’ we could be the one we needed all along?

As this franchise continues to develop, I hope to get even more of that sentiment, please. And no fucking swans.

And then one night in September, you turn on both the TV and the radio simultaneously – because two of the nation’s public broadcasters are in sync for an unusual event. Channel Four (the “gay” station) and Radio Three have collaborated to air the work of a radical, sexually deviant artist who’s spent the last several years actively protesting government policy.

With both devices on you’ll get the effect of a rudimentary ‘stereophonic’ sound, which is important because there’s not much to ‘look’ at in this film. It’s more of a meditative experience: a blue field of color, and words. Of rage, poetry, mortality and communion. The audience is taken almost inside the artist’s own body: ‘all that concerns either life or death / is all transacting and at work within me.’

This world is 1993.

I never know how to use the word ‘palimpsest.’ It’s a term I picked up young, probably reading the New York Times Book Review.  But I think that 1993 and 2023 fit the definition. As we live through this year now, can’t we detect lingering traces of the earlier one underneath?

That sense of temporal layering is used to palpable effect in Blue Now, a live presentation of Derek Jarman’s final work, directed by Neil Bartlett and featuring a quartet of contemporary queer readers. A live soundscore by Jarman collaborator Simon Fisher-Turner vibrates at a ritual frequency that is simultaneously between past and present. The show’s tour, which I saw in Brighton, concludes this week at Tate Modern.

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In 1993, I was not in Britain to experience the first Blue’s first broadcast. I was in suburban Massachusetts, but AIDS had made its way into my consciousness that same year, via Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia. It was probably the first film I ever saw that depicted two men dancing romantically (not kissing, though, this was Hollywood). Philadelphia ‘brought AIDS home’ to an imagined ‘mainstream’ audience (my family? me?) that had never seen an actual KS lesion. Blue didn’t represent any of the physical marks of the condition. Assuming intimacy, it explained little, showed nothing

I first heard the name Derek Jarman from Siskel and Ebert (god love em) when they reviewed his earlier, homoerotic film of Edward II. I already loved movies and watched the show religiously every Saturday afternoon, videotaping it when I couldn’t be home. No doubt disdained by their peers as middlebrow, America’s two best-known film critics offered a valuable public service to budding suburban cinephiles. In between the blockbusters and Oscar bait, glimmers of a different kind of cinema shone through.

I don’t recall them covering Jarman’s Blue. Coincidentally, though, another 1993 film with the same title caught my attention: the first in Krzysztof Kielowski’s Three Colors triology, featuring Juliette Binoche. I recognised her from Damage, a steamy film that Roger and Gene had reviewed around Christmas just the year before. I didn’t see any of these films upon immediate release but I filed their existence in my brain. These segments on syndicated television were missives from an adult world of European eroticism, elliptical non-Hollywood storytelling and queer politics. Foreign in almost every way, yet connected by tenuous threads to other, more familiar cultural products. Damage had nearly been given an NC-17 rating and was thus way too sexy for me to see. But we’d watched director Louis Malle’s previous film Au revoir les enfants in my high school French class. I was also intrigued to know that this arthouse auteur was married to the actress I watched every Monday night on TV.

While European cinema still eluded me, Murphy Brown was just the kind of culture that a precocious but sexually hesitant thirteen year-old could easily glom onto: quippy sitcom liberalism targeting the tail end of a Presidency that seemed increasingly bound to topple just as the Berlin Wall had a few years before. My upbringing had happened entirely under Reaganite Republican rule, but now a new regime was emergent. All through the previous year’s Presidential campaign, we were told ‘Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.’ Our new leader came from ‘A Little Town Called Hope’ and was poised to usher in a younger, fresher Left-wing politics.

Murphy was a mainstream show that (mildly) challenged the Moral Majority and was easy to rally behind. Never moreso than when the Bush/Quayle ’92 campaign launched a cynical culture war over the dangers of single motherhood, with my favorite fictional character in the crosshairs. This was a ‘sex scandal’ I could process easily and pick a side. I was so resolutely #TeamMurphy that my 8^th grade book report on The Scarlet Letter featured a point by point comparison of her vilification by Vice President Quayle for an out of wedlock pregnancy and Hester Prynne’s treatment for the same crimes in Puritan New England.

I knew that this ‘family values’ rhetoric was outdated and harmful, but I was not yet clear-eyed enough to understand that Clinton’s values were equally cynical. His promises were a rhetorical phantasm, progress in sheep’s clothing, without justice or accountability. So hollow were the victories of Clinton’s Third Way that here we are again thirty years later, combatants in the same battles, with right-wingers trying to ban books and scapegoat queers. In Britain, a party on the center-left is again poised to take power by studiously avoiding any extremity that might be mistaken for ideology. In a culture obsessed with sex, those with the least political power, are conveniently cast as the biggest threat to our precious children.

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Everywhere you look, it’s 1993 again.

I came back from Blue in Brighton over the Bank Holiday to an episode of my favorite film podcast that mashes up Murphy with Malle. As part of her essential Erotic 90s series, Karina Longworth argues (convincingly) that the sitcom marked the end of the Reagan-Bush years, just as Damage was the film first of the Clinton era.

Something must be in the air, truly, because Damage was also adapted last month into a flash-in-the-pan Netflix series called Obsession. Like so much content these days, it cannibalized something no one thought needed to be remade, presented itself for binge-viewing and was soon forgotten, such is the speed of our current consumption cycle. Instagram tells me that I just missed traveling to Spain to catch an exhibit called ‘Meisel 1993,’ dedicated to the work of 90s zeitgeist photographer Steven Meisel (who just the other week announced he and Madonna would be auctioning off photos for charity from their infamous 1992 collaboration the Sex book). In March, I saw the other Blue again in my local Picturehouse. Kieslowski’s Colors trilogy of European unification was re-released to UK cinemagoers at a time when this island is now a continent-free nation adrift in the Atlantic. What would Derek Jarman have to say about Brexit? Or the Gender Recognition Act? 1993, I learn, was also the year of ‘Tampongate’ and look now who’s on the throne….

So what, you’re saying. This was 30 years ago, and our self-devouring culture uses anniversaries as an excuse to resuscitate content and profit off of nostalgia. The thirty-year cycle makes sense: people who had their formative years in the early 90s are the ones now making films and podcasts and think-pieces, so they’re inherently biased to view that period as significant. Maybe. Maybe in the 80s there was an obsession with the 50s (does that explain Reagan and Thatcher’s revanchist rise?). But the early 90s feel singular to me. (I would say that, wouldn’t I?)

The 1990s were a ‘cusp’ time. Looking back at the culture I consumed in 1993, I see myself grappling for the first time with adult understandings of Art, Politics & Sex. (I did eventually watch Damage on VHS and was dumbfounded by the contortions that Juliette Binoche got into with Jeremy Irons – adults found that pleasurable??)

All thirteen year-olds feel a similar sense of transition, but the 90s were ‘cusp’-y for the wider world, as well, a decade self-consciously branded as the endpoint of everything that had come before (just ask Francis Fukuyama). It was giving fin-de-siècle energy supercharged by fin de millennium. From the fall of communism to the dawn of the internet, the zeitgeist was full of optimism and promise. For some.

If teenage Brian had had access to more to queer voices, I might have picked up on the darker notes in that millennial thinking: the fatigue, rage and rebellion from years of plague and suffering. At critical junctures, some of these prophetic voices were able to cut through the mainstream messaging and call out the system. Clinton’s era-defining catchphrase ‘I feel your pain’ was actually uttered in response to Bob Rafksy, an ACT-UP member who interrupted the candidate at a campaign event in 1992 demanding a more urgent response to the epidemic from the Democratic Party. How much of that pain was truly felt? Clinton’s promise of massive increases in AIDS research funding was never met. By 1993, the President had signed the United States’s HIV travel ban and Bob Rafsky was dead.

We return to examine the 90s because today’s cultural battles seem analogous. Let us look now though with eyes unfiltered by false faith in systems:

‘If I lose half my sight, will my vision be halved?’ - Derek Jarman

The sounds of Simon Fisher-Turner’s eerie, unclassifiable soundscore for Blue NOW resemble radio transmissions from somewhere past the river Lethe. Jarman’s words first reached the world through the BBC; now, on any given day, you can turn on the radio to hear broadcasters reduce the rights and existence of our trans siblings to a matter of ‘debate.’ In interviews, the new centre-left leader who hopes to usher in a post-Conservative era is already backtracking on his pledges.

Together in community at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, Jarman’s energy vibrates through us anew. Queer power comes in resistance to systems that were never set up for us. We mustn’t be distracted by the debates they create, or the spectacles and Bank Holidays they offer. Then as now, our survival depends on bonds forged with chosen family: we will always take better care of ourselves than they can. Keep your arms linked in solidarity with your siblings and your gaze fixed firmly into the blue…

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Learning about the day jobs of great writers is revealing: Chekhov the provincial doctor, James Joyce the EFL teacher. In his Introduction to A Swim, Saunders speaks with refreshing candour about working in an oil field before his writing career got off the ground. The whole book is premised on the duality of Saunders’s career: even after building a successful career writing short stories and an absolutely singular, Booker Prize-winning novel, Saunders still teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. (And — in a very 2023 move that many of us lesser writers can relate to — he’s also started a subscription Substack.)

I’m hooked on A Swim because, like all good teaching, it’s also a performance. Saunders’s teaching persona jumps off the pages of this book: ‘There’s a different sensibility when I come into a classroom,’ he’s said, ‘I’m a slightly nicer and less egotistical person.’

A Swim in the Pond is ostensibly devoted to analysis of some classic Russian short stories by the likes of Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy etc. Really, though, it’s about the nuts-and-bolts of writing itself. The stories are printed in the book for us to read, followed by chapters where Saunders pulls them apart. The style is not standard literary criticism but ‘shop talk.’ It’s insightful but in a friendly, funny way, with well-honed observations, jokes and adages peppered throughout:

We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that questions.

(See?

Structure’s easy.

Ha, ha, ha.)

If you’ve taught for any decent length of time, you recognise the tone of what Saunders is doing here. A teacher develops charming, memorable little lines delivered with a wink. They have at the ready a set of texts that slot perfectly into the pedagogical schema they’re trying to get across. The performances gets refined over time, with exercises, examples and explanations that run along well-worn grooves. This lecture-performance aspect is not far off from stand-up comedy.

But there’s a quite different skill set that distinguishes teaching truly great teaching, and it’s analogous to hosting a party. How do you create an atmosphere? Gradually, as the class or the term goes on, there should be less of you and more spontaneous participation from the group. A host sets things up so that the party takes on a life of its own. In the same way, a teacher lays out stimuli and sets things in motion, hoping that eventually they’ll be able to stand back and watch the students guide their own learning.

I’m assuming George Saunders is good at that, too. His conversational lack of pretension in this book doesn’t imply that he’d lead the sort of class where you walk in timidly with a sense of reverence for the Master you’re about to encounter. It’s miles away from the persona of someone like Harold Bloom, who spent decades writing from a position of haughty authority that pronounced about what did and did not constitute great literature. Bloom was still teaching seminars when I was in college at Yale. Based on descriptions from friends who attended, he had his own performance schtick: with the self-aggrandizing modesty of Norma Desmond, he’d slope to the head of the table and greet the class with, “Who will sit next to the wretched Bloom??”

As a teacher, one can perform as a spotlight-hogging headliner or supportive ensemble player. The former, though dazzling to watch, is limited in the real learning generates. An awareness of this distinction separates the artists who just show up to do a bit of teaching from those who think about teaching as an art in itself. It belies the old adage that hangs over the heads of all creative artists who work as educators, “Those who can do, and those who can’t teach.”

Thanks to the prevalence of that sentiment, self-doubt seeps in whenever the balance of your teaching time seems to overtake your creative output. Saunders seems to live the dream so few of us can achieve, dividing his working life into three days of teaching and four of creative work.

The income Saunders receives from teaching is surely less of a necessity than it is for me – but it’s reassuring to read that, for both of us, it provides a sense of satisfaction. ‘Some of the best moments of my life,’ he acknowledges in A Swim, ‘the moments during which I’ve really felt myself offering something of value to the world, have been spent teaching…’

I know artists who phone in their teaching, ready to drop the gig as soon as they can afford to leave it. My guilty secret is that, actually, I love teaching. It has become a forum to work through ideas, to connect, to solve issues in my own work and to continually re-encounter the craft.

In the first chapter of Saunders’s book, he moves page by page through Chekhov piece about a provincial schoolteacher who’s bored with her monotonous life. The subject of the story created a kind of Hall of Mirrors effect on me. I enjoyed decoding the text along with Saunders, but kept getting thwacked by home truths about the complex mix of feelings that our ‘day jobs’ can inspire.

At one point near the climax of Chekhov’s tale, his schoolteacher heroine contemplates what type of teacher she has been:

She had begun to teach from necessity, without feeling called to it; and she had never thought of a call, of the need for enlightenment; and it always seemed to he that what was most important in her work was not the children, not enlightenment, but the examinations. And when did she have time to think of a call, of enlightenment? Teachers, impecunious physicians, doctors’ assistants, for all their terribly hard work, do not even have the comfort of thinking that they are serving an ideal or the people, because their heads are always filled with thoughts of their daily bread, of firewood, of bad roads, of sickness. It is a hard, humdrum existence, and only stolid cart horses like Marya Vasilyevna can bear it for a long time; lively, alert, impressionable people who talk about their calling and about serving the ideal are soon weary of it and give up the work.

Saunders fails to mention that Chekhov himself was an ‘impecunious physician’ and continued to practice medicine in the provinces even as he developed a successful following for his short fiction and plays. I’ve always loved that biographical detail about Chekhov but also been puzzled by it. Why did he keep at his other job? Based on the way he describes it here, and from the perspective of the doctor characters in his plays, it often sounds like drudgery. Perhaps it just kept him grounded. Perhaps, subconsciously, that regular exposure to diagnosing people and their problems helped feed his art…

I see myself in both of the teaching extremes that Marya Vasilyevna describes above. I certainly need the paycheck – but I’m also hanging onto the ideal. Teaching is a practice I think and care deeply about. If anything, I’ve got better and better at it:

And if sometimes, the grind can wear you down like grooves in the mud of an often-trod Russian road, there remain moments of genuine epiphany, when the sun hits the windows just so and you see the whole landscape anew. You have your bag of tricks, full of frequently employed insights and examples, but they are a means to set in motion a process that has never happened before in quite this way, with this group at this moment. In facilitating a process of discovery both for and with your group, you can teach yourself something and get invigorated to carry on.

[And, yes, if any of my students are reading this, it goes without saying you can expect some Saunders examples in my own lesson plans soon. The cycle continues!]

[I think I’m gonna aim for every other Tuesday as my regular publication day (this week got delayed due to Bank Holiday) -- what do you think? - Brian xx]

When I need a cultural cleanse, there’s nothing like popping into the cinema for a thoughtful, artful film about bourgeois Frenchwomen experiencing emotions. For me, if it’s distributed by Les Films du Losange, it’s most likely gonna hit a sweet spot that is simultaneously quiet and deep.  A few years ago, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come (L’avenir), featuring a surprisingly gentle Isabelle Huppert as a new divorcée, did that. Now the director is back with Léa Seydoux in One Fine Morning (Un beau matin), which opened a few weeks ago in UK cinemas and is also streaming on MUBI.

Wherever she goes in this film, Seydoux’s character Sandra carries a worn, not especially fashionable backpack. Though she is an adult woman, a mother and, in fact, a widow, this particular prop makes her seem younger, an eternal student. The backpack has no real plot significance, but I found myself clocking it in scene after scene. Backpack people recognise each other.

The film’s story has to do with Sandra negotiating a new romance with an old friend and coping with her father’s ailing health. What first drew me in, though, was its rhythm, which I would call ‘compartmentalised freelance.’

In the early scenes, we glean that Sandra’s a translator. We see her at a desk with her Larousse dictionary open, but then she’s off to pick up her daughter up from school, and then doing simultaneous interpreting at some boring conference on aviation, then climbing the stairs to the flat of her ailing Dad. The editing is not frenetic, but each short scene feels pointedly disconnected. In one very quick cut, we leave behind her Paris routine altogether: she’s on the Normandy beaches and we’re not sure why. Oh, she’s got a gig translating at a D-Day commemoration event. Then leading elderly US veterans around a Calvados distillery. Then back to Paris.

On any given day, you’ll also find me traveling avec backpack. In it: a roll of flipchart paper, marker pens, a Bluetooth speaker, various chargers, multiple notebooks, scripts, a bottle of Huel, gym clothes, bicycle lights. The list goes on. There’s a jigsaw quality to my days, weeks. And so you carry items for any eventuality – whilst also toting around the mental chronogram of unrelated jobs, lesson plans, appointments and obligations.

Even as I felt pangs of personal empathy for Sandra’s jumbled life, I felt aesthetic bliss to be out to be at a movie after weeks and weeks consuming television. This story was gonna give me a full sense of life – and still be less than two hours long!

Almost everything we watch on streaming today, even the good stuff, would’ve been a movie in the 90s. I get consistently restless around episode four, tired of the padded out exposition, repeated dynamics that underline points and subplots for every side character.

Not so this French film. Hansen-Løve sketches in Sandra’s life subliminally, with blissful economy. We work to catch up on backstory. Wait, OK, her parents are divorced but they still hang out? Oh, I guess her husband died. How long ago? It’s not a mystery, but it is a jigsaw, like real life. Hansen-Løve never underlines how “stressed” Sandra must be, overburdened as she juggles her obligations. But of course she is. And when she encounters old friend Melvil Poupaud, it’s clear that one of the things that most appeals about an affair with him is the brief oasis of “me-time” it offers.

After extended flirting, the liaison finally kicks off when he invites her to visit his office, which hardly seems romantic. But it is very stable setting: a place where he shows up daily to chitchat with the same jaded colleague and run experiments on the same scientific equipment… Meanwhile, Sandra’s Dad has to move out of his flat and trundle through a series of hospitals and nursing homes in search of a suitable resting place. Sandra shuttles between each of these, as well as her jobs and her daughter’s fencing matches, whilst finding windows for brief trysts. She arranges for her father’s books to be divided up amongst his ex-students. Is it any wonder that when she and her lover finally get some time together with the daughter off to summer camp, all Sandra wants to do is stay at home eating, sleeping, fucking? Why go out to an exhibition when you can experience the bliss of remaining in one place?

I’ve been making a conscious effort recently to leave the house with just my jacket, when I can. One of the stickiest ideas from my high school English curriculum is an ominous one from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: an individual going along the road of life lugs along all their material possessions, a large colonial house with four bedrooms, furniture, provisions, books, papers, knicknacks. By urging us to leave all that behind, Thoreau was the Marie Kondo of the 19^th century. A millennium earlier, Jesus provoked the Rich Young Man with the very same imperative.

Without my backpack, of course, I’m freer. Unburdened. In theory, my spine should be able to relax, expand. But I’m not used to it yet.

I don’t know exactly what’s in Sandra’s backpack but I’ll bet the items provide comfort as life keeps asking her to give things up – her father’s home, his books, and eventually his mind. At her young age, she’s also a widow (though the movie strikingly never explains how or how long ago). When you’ve already lost someone so close to you, abandonment feels familiar but still not comfortable. Holding onto a few items offers a sense of preparedness but that is an illusion. Her Dad’s situation is a preview of the ultimate divestment awaiting us all. His notebooks have dwindled to scribbles and he has no more interest in his Schubert CDs. Amidst all this loss, Sandra will decide that taking a chance on a relatively unreliable lover is good enough company, for now.

A propos of its title, the film ends on a lovely day in Montmartre, looking out over Paris as the characters point toward home. They situate themselves in time and place, for one fine morning, at least. Enjoy the moment but don’t hold on too tightly.

Containers do more than just hold things. They give them shape by setting boundaries and limits. The forms we choose to fit them in end up determining what they are.

Organic things, however — like historical events, human experiences, houseplants — have a tendency to overflow their containers.

I’ve spent much of the last month re-potting things.

It started with my expansive essay from February about It’s A Sin, which I re-fit at the request of different media outlets. You can read new versions of it in the Los Angeles Times and the queer online mag Them.

I say new versions because condensing a 6,000-word essay for a different audience isn’t just a matter of removing things — it’s more like taking a cutting from an especially voluminous plant, putting it in a new pot and seeing what grows.

Each time I re-set the boundaries of my thinking, new content sprang up. In the TV section of the Times, I was able to highlight the truly radical queer TV programs (like Channel 4’s Out on Tuesday) that tackled AIDS and other issues back in the 90s. In writing about activist counter-images of people with AIDS, I was pleased to recall a demo by lesbian ACT-UP activists at a 1988 MoMA exhibit of AIDS portraits.

Even with a limited word count, my purpose was to expand our understanding of HIV/AIDS historiography beyond that offered by It’s A Sin.

Milestones, Timelines

When I bought my houseplants during the first lockdown, the man at the garden center told me: don’t repot them for at least a year. With some of their roots poking through the holes at the bottom of the pots, that time had definitely come.

Last Tuesday the 23rd, Britain observed a day of remembrance for those dead to Covid-19, although the first cases were recorded in Wuhan in December 2019 and the first British death was on 6th March. Government and media have begun shaping our understanding of the pandemic by setting a marker of ‘one year on.’ Many of us will remember, though, that responsible theatres and businesses were voluntarily shutting down more than a week before. The 23rd actually commemorates the anniversary of Boris Johnson’s belated realisation that it was time to catch up to everyone else.

The advent of AIDS is traditionally pinned to the year 1981, as that’s when the CDC in the US first recorded cases of the syndrome. It’s A Sin contains its drama neatly within ten years (1981-1991) and five episodes. Some people who didn’t agree with my critique of the show pointed out that it was originally envisioned to be longer:

My problem with the show was never that it needed to fit more in (although, how hard would it have been to include a single female character living with HIV?). What I tried to articulate was that the shape of the story — with its progression from libidinous liberation to painful shame and death — reinforced the same old understanding of what AIDS meant for gay men. That story can be told across one hour or eight.

When we contain and demarcate an experience like HIV/AIDS, we implicitly offer a reading of what it means and whom it affects. As Sarah Schulman has noted, cases of AIDS-related pneumonia and other conditions were probably killing scores of homeless people and injecting drug users as far back as the 60s and 70s. The “crisis” began long before 1981 and only gained press coverage in the New York Times because enough (white) gay men with access to health care began dying.

AIDS in the popular imagination is bookended by another date, also commemorated by mainstream media articles. As a teen, my family subscribed to Time magazine and I still remember receiving the 1996 Man of the Year issue featuring medical researcher Dr. David Ho:

I didn’t know then that seventeen years later that I would be relying on the anti-retroviral therapies Ho helped develop in order to keep my own HIV to undetectable levels. The advent of effective ARVs was an undeniable turning-point in the history of HIV/AIDS but it was understood even then as something more conclusive. That same year, arch-conservative gay commentator Andrew Sullivan published an incredibly blinkered essay in the New York Times Magazine outrageously entitled ‘When Plagues End’.

For Sullivan, and others who could reliably afford access to the new medications, the crisis may have been, in some sense, over - but of course that denied the reality of so many around the world (and in the US itself, especially in communities of color) who couldn’t and still can’t afford the medications and continue to get ill and die.

Sullivan’s 1996 essay acknowledges that reality whilst dismissing it in a single breath. He notes, almost be rote, that “many Americans -- especially blacks and Latinos -- will still die,” yet assets a few sentences later that, with ARVs in existence, HIV “no longer signifies death.” Club nights like The Black Party are part of an “emergent post-AIDS gay ‘life style.’” The essay implies that the actual deaths of millions matter less than the signification of the condition granted to Sullivan and his privileged peers.

We’d all love for these pandemic to be over. Who doesn’t want to live in a post-AIDS or post-COVID world? But that’s not the world we’ve got. Ascribing a concluding power to biomedical interventions alone — whether antiretrovirals or vaccines — is a form of magical thinking that denies the realities of global inequality and distribution challenges, not to mention the irrationalities of human behavior.

Stories We (Live To) Tell

I was shown this chart when I was diagnosed with HIV. I was also being sold a narrative about the heroic intervention of Dr. Ho’s antiretroviral therapy.

You can see the drama reflected in the rise and fall of the viral load: following the initial spike at the point of infection, your body is able to fight back for a period of 2-10 years, until the virus starts to get the upper hand. Thankfully, in this story, ARV treatment comes in to ‘save the day’ at stage 4 of the chart, bringing the virus down, down, down to undetectable levels. Happy ending.

Unlike a movie, though, this chart has no endpoint. One lives on, taking pills daily, negotiating the minefield of HIV stigma and misunderstanding, coping with potential side effects, both physical and emotional. People living with HIV are sold the story of biomedical triumph with good reason: it’s important to build up our self-esteem, to counteract that dominant narratives that still associate HIV with death.

There are times, though, maybe years into a diagnosis, when things don’t seem as positive or as manageable. One’s viral load may remain suppressed but other challenges flare up.

It’s this story, based on my own experience, that I’ve been trying to tell in a new piece that will be available to view soon. It doesn’t bear much in common with It’s A Sin, except that it is about a white gay man (me) and it also features 80s pop music (sort of).

Live to Tell: (a proposal for) The Madonna Jukebox Musical is my attempt to pitch myself to the Queen of Pop, whilst also making sense of life with HIV. Like the virus itself, Madonna has stayed on top for forty years by continually replicating herself and absorbing everything around her. Spoiler alert: it’s not really a musical and I don’t have the rights to Madonna’s songbook. Instead, the jukebox format is a way for me to grapple with the narratives around life with HIV and my own desire for Reinvention.

First developed pre-pandemic at the Yard Theatre, I’m currently adapting the show into a digital version to be distributed by Battersea Arts Centre from 24th May-12th June. As with my plants, the show currently is getting re-potted into bite-sized streamable episodes. As with my Bromeliad pictured above, I’ve cut away the old outer leaves to uncover fresh green ‘pups’ within that will grow in new containers.

The art of constant adaptation is a challenge we’ve all gotten used to in this pandemic year. As we transform the live show into a digital experience, I’m determined not to make it seem contrained and constricted by the frame of your phone or laptop screen. Excitingly, it will be filmed in 360-degree VR technology, allowing for an immersive experience that will ‘overflow’ the confines of the boxes it’s put in. Of course, in all of this we’re being guided by Madonna, the Queen of boundary-pushing.

More info about Live to Tell will come soon in this newsletter: for the moment, please follow the show on Twitter or Instagram to stay updated.

All tickets are Pay What You Can, so you can book right now.

Coda: Non-Moralistic Movie Club

As you await Live to Tell, I’ll offer a movie recommendation for the coming months.

There are many stories left to tell about HIV, and it’s about time that we got some new representations. My show is driven by the personal and so it reflects my experience as a white gay man with adequate access to healthcare. Recent theatre like Donja R. Love’s One in Two and Michael Jackson’s Pulitzer-winning musical A Strange Loop are bringing Black, queer experiences of life with HIV to stages in the U.S. When will these receive the worldwide reach that It’s A Sin achieved?

A Year Without Love (2005) represents the kind of story that deserves a wider platform: set in the time after effective treaments became available, and created by someone actually living with HIV. This underseen Argentinian movie was actually the last film I saw in a cinema before lockdown, at a special Barbican screening in London. I went on the off-chance only to discover that captured the liminal experience of living with HIV unlike any other film I’ve seen.

A Year Without Love stands out because of the in-between-ness that it recounts with finely-detailed authenticity. Co-written by Pablo Pérez and based on his memoir, the film is set in 1996, that turning point year when ARVs were just becoming available. The title says it all: the film’s autobiographical stand-in Pablo (Juan Minujín) goes through twelve months of quotidian experiences like doctor’s appointments, odd jobs, and sexual encounters, all while writing a manuscript that documents his life with HIV. He lives with an aunt who doesn’t know his status and conducts tutoring sessions with privileged girls who don’t realize he’s gay. He moves between this domestic world and an underground leather club, where he becomes enamored with one especially beefy dom. Through it all, he debates with his doctor the benefits of going on new HIV treatment and negotiates how he can access the meds in South America.

Pablo’s story is presented without tragedy or moralism. He is not consumed by shame about his HIV, but is also not totally open about it (until his book is published). His dabbling in the fetish scene doesn’t offer him the release he thinks it might, but his desire to experiment there is never pathologized. This refusal to shape Pablo’s experiences into a tidily digestible narrative of tragic loss or ultimate redemption may account for the film’s failure to gain a wider audience. But its this very quality that evoked for me my own experiences of the first years after diagnosis, as one adjusts to a new daily reality and the rest of the world carries on indifferently around you.

Though the film won the Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival, A Year Without Love is not available on any streaming service. Luckily, those interested can view a decent print of it on a random Russian film site (which has an excellent queer selection!).

Check it out as you wait for Live to Tell to arrive on 24th May, and offer observations in the comments. I’d also love to start a roll-call of other lesser-known filmic representations of life with HIV. May we get more of them!

That’s what everyone wanted to know, even if they didn’t ask outright. It’s an instinctive reaction to difficult news: people want a story.

The story that I told them (and myself) about my infection offered narrative coherence at a very confusing time. It assigned right and wrong, villain and victim. It also categorised me as that unlucky someone who’d taken a risk but hadn’t been what you’d call ‘risky,’ which felt at the time like an important distinction to make.

Eight years on, I don’t tell that story very much anymore. I’ve come to understand that the virus is a virus — it doesn’t care about any story.

Over the last few weeks, TV creator Russell T. Davies has offered up his version of the story of HIV/AIDS in Britain with the series It’s a Sin, which has now become Channel 4’s most watched drama ever. It’s based in large part on real people he knew in the 1980s, like his friend Jill who lived in a flat called The Pink Palace and cared for gay male friends as they died, just like the character (also called Jill) does in the show.

By his own admission, Davies himself was late to face up to the reality of the epidemic: ‘I looked away. Oh, I went on marches and gave a bit of money and said how sad it was, but really, I couldn’t quite look at it.’ Like Ritchie, his central character, he says he started out in denial and then spent decades refusing to confront the memories of all that had been lost. Britain’s premiere gay male storyteller couldn’t bring himself to include the words ‘HIV’ or ‘AIDS’ in his groundbreaking series Queer as Folk from 1999 to 2000 — although by that point the antiretroviral ‘cocktail’ was already offering those with access to it a chance to live with HIV as a manageable condition.

With It’s a Sin, Davies is now doing on national television what I did with my own story: trying to make sense of emotions like shame, guilt and regret — except that he’s been wrestling with his for decades. Given the title, it feels like a kind of penance.

The ‘story of AIDS’ has been told many times over the last forty years on stages and screens, in fiction and documentaries. Some of those stories were aimed to galvanise audiences directly affected by the epidemic, others were meant to enlighten an imagined ‘mainstream’ audience. Although it focuses exclusively on white cis men with AIDS (the POC supporting characters remain uninfected), something about Davies’s version has been widely received as ‘untold’ for a British audience:

The imagined TV audience for It’s a Sin seems to be a portion of the population that is unaware of the full extent of the pain and injustice spawned by AIDS, perhaps by virtue of their youth, a lack of proper education or the insulation of their own privilege. Whether gay or straight, they need to know this history.

In 1987, the AIDS activist and video-maker Gregg Bordowitz wrote:

The AIDS movement… creates itself as it attempts to represent itself. Video puts into play the means of recognizing one’s place within the movement in relation to that of others in the movement.

Created collectively to build a protest movement, Bordowitz’s videos with his ACT-UP comrades were intended to help communities affected by AIDS recognise their power. It’s a Sin, on the other hand, is not an ‘activist’ work, even if some of the characters are peripherally involved in protests. ‘They’re ordinary people,’ Davies says, ‘and I’m interested in that because their stories aren’t often told.’

They’re not just people but boys specifically, which was the series’s original title. Cis women, trans women, IV drug users and many others acquired HIV/AIDS (then and now), but it was gay men having gay sex who were most associated with it in the media. Davies’s Colin and Ritchie serve as a matched pair, emblematic of their many lost peers: one a quiet ‘virgin,’ the other a raffish ‘slut’. ‘They’re just horny, stupid boys who couldn’t believe what was happening to them,’ according to their creator. In that sense, they also seem intended to mirror the envisioned young and uninformed viewers consuming the series and learning this history for the first time:

Davies ultimately retitled his show in homage to the Pet Shop Boys hit of 1984:

When I look back upon my life
it’s always with a sense of shame
I’ve always been the one to blame
For everything I long to do
no matter when or where or who

Whilst Neil Tennant’s and Chris Lowe’s lyrics drip with irony and defiance of the moralism they were raised on (‘Whatever you taught me / I didn’t believe it’), Davies’ representation of people with AIDS sadly perpetuates the homophobic logic of shame and guilt it purports to challenge. Victimised, infantilised and complicit in their own destruction, his dying boys of yesterday transmit to today’s audiences a troubling portrait of gay self-hatred.

Flashback #1

Back when I was an uninformed and closeted teen, my first representations of gay men with AIDS came not from youth-driven TV shows but prestige Hollywood dramas. Age fourteen in 1993, I went with my family to see Philadelphia (yes, that’s the kind of teen I was), for which Tom Hanks would win the Oscar playing a man with AIDS who launches an anti-discrimination suit against the law firm that has fired him.

Written by openly gay screenwriter Ron Nyswaner, the film was controversial even then amongst queer audiences for framing its story from the perspective of Hanks’s wary, straight defense attorney (Denzel Washington). Its agenda is clear: Philadelphia is not aimed at LGBTQ viewers or anyone with first-hand experience of HIV/AIDS. It’s an outreach movie, intended to demystify AIDS and preach tolerance for the shadowy gay people who have it, embodied in the figure of American Everyman Tom Hanks.

The audience for Philadelphia is actually represented within the film itself in the form of the jurors at the trial: a racially diverse cross-section of Philadelphians who listen to the plaintiff’s and defendant’s legal cases with silent expressions of confusion, sympathy, curiosity and revulsion. The testimony takes them through a litany of homophobic abuse and indignity delivered upon the pleasant-seeming Hanks by his former bosses. They are even exposed to the sight of his KS lesions to in an effort to ‘bring home’ the severity of the medical complications he is undergoing.

In perhaps the film’s most infamous moment, the opposing legal counsel (and the filmmakers) finally confront the unspoken question on the jurors’ (and the audience’s) minds: ‘How’d he get it?’

‘Do you take risks?’ Mary Steenburgen’s lawyer asks Hanks’s Andy on the stand, and gets him to admit that he has indeed visited the Stallion Showcase Cinema on 21st Street (‘three times in my life’), a porno theatre where he once had an ‘anonymous sexual encounter.’

Her questioning establishes that Andy had heard something about AIDS but had sex in the theatre anyway, then went home to his long-term partner Miguel (Antonio Banderas). ‘You could have infected Mr. Álvarez at that time, is that correct?’ she asks, trying to establish Andy’s sexual compulsion and to paint him as a lethal spreader of contagion for other innocent partners. ‘Miguel has not been infected,’ Andy replies. Of course, one salacious story doesn’t confirm the chain of transmission: Andy could well have acquired HIV any number of ways before or after visiting the Stallion, but as so often happens when discussing HIV infection, moralistic logic supersedes rational thinking.

No image from Philadelphia imprinted itself more permanently on my teenage imagination than the flashback shot of the younger Andy, with ratty 80s mustache, sitting in the grim porno theatre. Watching the clip again, it lasts mere seconds and shows no explicit sexual act, but the implication of ‘dirtiness’ and guilt is clear.

To accomplish its goal of imbuing Hanks’s character with dignity, the filmmakers must confront head-on the homophobic contention that whilst some people with AIDS (those who received infected blood products, for instance, or were born with HIV) acquired it ‘through no fault of their own,’ others ‘brought it on themselves.’

For all its flaws, Philadelphia effectively details the structures of homophobic blame inflicted upon Hanks’s character and shows him withstanding them. He never directly expresses regret for his past anonymous encounters or begs forgiveness onscreen from Miguel. The filmmakers acknowledge a hunger in their audience that is both narrative and moralistic: viewers expect to be given an explanation, so they can determine culpability. The script teases that prurient impulse, but clearly presents the logic of sex-shaming as reprehensible: even Steenburgen’s lawyer expresses disgust that she’s been forced to employ it, muttering under her breath, ‘I hate this case.’

Andy’s legal case ultimately convinces the jurors to award him damages despite their awareness of his sexual past. Squeamish as this 90s film is about matters of sex, it implicitly resists a homophobic logic of blaming gay men for their own infection. The message is muddy, of course. Fourteen-year old me didn’t know what went on in that porno theatre and this film surely filled me with dread about ever finding out.

It would be decades before I encountered a more full-throated and sex-positive affirmation of the dignity of people living with HIV/AIDS, through the slogans of ACT-UP:

Nearly thirty years later, as someone living with HIV myself, I’m shocked to see the same homophobic logic and prurient narrative impulses uncritically reproduced and perpetuated by a show like It’s a Sin. Even gay creators in 2021 must do the work of deprogramming ourselves from a societal impulse that defines gays as compulsive and blameworthy. Then and now, we must remind ourselves that HIV (like COVID-19) is a virus, not a moral agent.

Flashback #2

Episode 3 of It’s a Sin kicks off in 1986: AIDS ‘hits home’ at the Pink Palace with each of the men taking an HIV test and Colin (Callum Scott Howells) acquiring AIDS. First experienced as unexpected epilepsy, the condition is revealed to be caused by AIDS-related inflammation of his brain.

As Colin’s hospitalisation progresses, Davies takes us through a litany of injustices meted out to people with AIDS: dying men locked in hospital rooms with food outside the doors, denied mortgages, fired by employers, shunned by family members, their possessions burnt after their deaths. Poor Colin — already a passive, childlike character — gradually loses his verbal communication skills and must be advocated for at all turns by his friends, family and even by an AIDS activist legal team who pop up out of nowhere (narratively speaking) to spring him from confinement.

Rumbling underneath the narrative, though, is a persistent set of questions, voiced multiple times: Wasn’t Colin a virgin? How’d he get it??

Solving that mystery matters little to his sympathetic mum or to Jill (depicted as such a beneficent, selfless caregiver that she has no other characterisation at all). She’s spent more time than any of the male leads counseling people with AIDS and sagely responds about the route of Colin’s infection: ‘It’s not like that, Ash. Don’t go looking for a villain — it’ll just be some bloke.’

But the question is not ignored by Davies and his editing team, who — immediately after Jill’s pronouncement — serve up two potential villains. As in any good mystery, the clues were there from Episode 1. Earlier in his delirium, Colin had mumbled ‘rugby shirt,’ which attentive viewers would associate with the taciturn lad of the family he lodged with when he first moved to London. If that explanation was too subtle, his former landlady soon strides into the ward insisting that her son Ross, who now has also acquired AIDS, is ‘a normal man, he’s not one of those filthy, dirty queers.’ In this way, Davies satisfies the narrative curiosity that he’s whetted in his audience whilst boldly declaring a thesis that the series will return to: blame for the AIDS epidemic rests squarely with homophobic families (and particularly mothers).

Still not satisfied that we’ve got the point, we are treated to flashbacks intercut into the hospital scenes, tidying up in explicit detail any mystery about chains of transmission. Like the ones from Philadelphia, they zero in on the traumatic scene of presumed infection but this time they show actual gay sex. We see Colin getting forcefully and unceremoniously fucked by Ross, who grunts, ‘Shut up, you bender.’

Even as we’re fed the narrative satisfaction of ‘how Colin got it,’ we’re meant to feel an extra emotional pang at the irony that this virginal boy received such indignity along with HIV. Colin was especially undeserving to die: he only had sex, it seems, with one partner — and he didn’t even get to have a good time.

Rising up like suppressed memories from the homophobic unconscious, Andy’s flashbacks in Philadelphia coded him as a deviant spreader of disease, whilst Colin’s in It’s a Sin present him as a powerless victim. The remaining running time of Philadelphia offers some agency to Hanks’s character and a victory in court. In contrast, the last shots we see of Colin here pair the image of him splayed and sodomised as he receives the virus with one of him lying on his deathbed. Davies’s narrative determinism dooms Colin from the moment he first pursues sexual desire.

Russell T. Davies has tellingly expressed personal relief at not contracting HIV himself during his heady student days: ‘I can’t believe my luck,’ he confesses, ‘because I had a good, old time.’ In this remark, we see a logic that shapes the whole of his series and especially the arc of Episodes 4 and 5, which focus on the diagnosis and death of twink protagonist Ritchie. HIV infection is viewed as part of an economy of pleasure: you have your fun and then you’re expected to pay the price.

As prickly and problematic as Colin is sweet, Ritchie is a sort of gay antihero (even if Olly Alexander’s inherent charm softens the portrayal). Often self-interested and career-obsessed, he is shown to abandon his friends at crucial moments, dismiss concern about AIDS, speak in clumsy racial stereotypes and even vote for the Tories.

Yet Ritchie, like Colin, also ends up passive in bed under the care of a mother — but one who refuses to engage at all with her son’s chosen family. In the end, both these boys are presented as nothing but victims - powerless against the homophobic institutions of family, medicine and society in general. In the early years of the epidemic, such characterisations (even when nominally sympathetic) were strenuously challenged by actual people with AIDS:

We condemn attempts to label us as ‘victims,’ a term which implies defeat, and we are only occasionally ‘patients,’ a term which implies passivity, helplessness, and dependence upon the care of others. We are ‘People With AIDS.’

That is the preamble to The Denver Principles, addressed by people with AIDS to the media, government and medical establishments in 1983 (i.e. sometime between Episodes 1 and 2 of It’s a Sin). It became the Magna Carta of a discourse of self-determination and dignity for people living with AIDS and other chronic conditions and must still be reckoned with today by anyone engaging with the epidemic. (Read it! It’s only one page long.) Contrast those eloquent assertions from real people with the impressions given by their fictional avatars in 2021: as they die, what are both Ritchie and Colin, if not defeated?

The clarity of the Denver Principles remains radical even today because negative, moralistic and self-stigmatising ideas continue to infect the discourse around HIV/AIDS, even within the gay community. Since it first appeared, the spread of HIV has been attributed to a pathological recklessness amongst gay men — an explanation that gets a lot of traction in It’s a Sin.

As Ritchie first faces up to the AIDS-related lymphoma that will eventually kill him, he ponders a question we’ve become familiar with: How’d he get it? He suspects it came from Donald Bassett (Nathaniel Hall), whom he dropped when he detected Donald was positive. ‘You don’t know it was him,’ Jill says. ‘Yes it was,’ says Ritchie, to which Ash responds, ‘But that version’s a bit easy, it cuts out the hundreds and hundreds of boys you were having sex with at the same time…’

Ritchie pushes his examination further, asking, ‘Do you think I infected him? Because I did, with others. Because I knew and I kept having sex…’

The speech he gives next presents such a vivid portrait of the compulsive gay ‘super-spreader,’ motivated by an uncontrollable ‘death-drive,’ that it could have been written by the most virulent homophobe arguing for the quarantine of HIV+ people before they harm the ‘general population’:

There were nights when I was stone cold sober and if a boy would look at me the right way, a boy with that look in his eye, I’d fuck him, I would fuck him hard. And he could fuck me, all night, any way he likes. I wonder how many I killed? I knew it was wrong, and I kept on doing it.

Such portraits of horny, amoral men leading innocent partners into unwitting ‘murder-suicide’ are what prompted the creation of unjust laws around the world (many still on the books) that incarcerate people with HIV.

The first right established for people with AIDS (PWAs) in the Denver Principles is the right ‘to as full and satisfying sexual and emotional lives as anyone else.’ Such an idea seems inconceivable to Ritchie. He contrasts deadly encounters where he ‘fucked all night’ with ones where he was able to stop. He tells Ash, ‘A lot of times I stopped, a million times. I stopped with you.’ The dichotomy is stark: on the one hand he can kill his partners and on the other he can… abstain from sex? Any options that could be both safe and pleasurable don’t seem to exist.

The fact that condom use is not mentioned by anyone in this scene, set in 1991, is shocking. Condoms feature barely at all in It’s a Sin, except in the crucial moment when Ritchie and Donald Bassett make the key decision not to use one, linked narratively (if not scientifically) to Ritchie’s eventual infection. ‘Safer sex’ was the landmark set of practices created by queer people themselves as an HIV prevention strategy that also allowed PWAs like Ritchie to continue to have sexual pleasure without infecting their partners. With rapidity, as the critic Douglas Crimp wrote in How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic, the majority of gay men ‘adjusted our sex lives to protect ourselves and others.’

Did some men like Ritchie continue to have unprotected sex after their diagnosis? Surely. Even today, people often respond to news of HIV diagnosis in unhealthy ways shaped by stigma and denial. I certainly did. In 2021, though, it’s frankly irresponsible to represent behavior like Ritchie’s as characteristic of PWAs. Yet that is precisely what Davies’s script does again and again. The series focuses on only two main characters who contract the virus: innocent Colin has sex once and dies, whilst sexually voracious Ritchie berates himself as a serial killer.

In an unconvincing development late in the series, Ritchie is granted a redemptive (and seemingly Platonic?) love affair with Ash (Nathaniel Curtis). The two don’t even kiss when they chastely profess their love in bed together, further reinforcing the puritanical implication that HIV infection, achieved through excess of pleasure, marks the end of all carnal satisfaction for those who get it.

As Ritchie lies dying and essentially imprisoned in his childhood bedroom, past pleasure is all he has to hang onto. He tells his shocked mother not to lie about how he died, because he really enjoyed himself. Though we don’t flash back cinematically this time to re-watch scenes of Ritchie’s sexual experiences, it certainly seems as if past images are flickering across his glazed-over eyes:

…I had so much fun, I had all those boys, I had hundreds of them — and I can remember every single one of them, some boy’s hair or his lips, the way he laughed at a joke, his bedroom, the stairs, his photographs, his face as he comes…

In this strange speech, which turns out to be his last, Ritchie challenges his mother’s attempts to cover up his sexuality but also seals the series’ persistent equation of sex and death. He ruefullly imagines some of his past shags who seem to have settled down: ‘Seeing him across a club six years later and thinking, Oh, that’s him, and he’s with someone and he looks happy and I think, Oh that’s nice, cos they were great.’ Ritchie waited too long to get cosily paired off. Russell T. Davies again offers us ironic circularity: Colin acquired the virus on his first sexual encounter, whereas Ritchie in Episode 1 passed up the chance of a stable relationship. There’s a hint that had he stuck consistently with Ash (the first man he ever slept with) he might he might have made it safely through the epidemic. Instead, he’s alone at the end, with countless erotic memories as the only compensation for the deadly price he’s paid.

It would be easier to dismiss this perverse sexual economy as the by-product of one self-hating character’s mind were it not for the mind-boggling scene that follows, in which the series’ saintly spokesperson, Jill, advances Ritchie’s same logic as a unified theory of the entire epidemic.

Smilingly embodied by actress Lydia West, the character of Jill is intended as a tribute to Davies’s real-life friend, who actually appears onscreen as fictional Jill’s mother. Since the series aired, #BeMoreJill has started trending, flattening out the admirable history of an actual AIDS advocate to a bland, meme-ified message of caring for others in an age of pervasive narcissism:

Many uninfected allies have supported and fought alongside people living with HIV, then and now. These have included large numbers of women and, very prominently, lesbian AIDS activists. It’s important to recognise their vital role in combatting the epidemic, but could Davies not have given them an avatar with any additional personality traits besides being caring? Also, in a show that presents itself as something like the long-overdue, definitive portrait of the British AIDS epidemic, does it not seem strange that the climactic confrontation scene — laying out its vision of the AIDS crisis as a whole — is played out between two uninfected women, whilst queer people and PWAs are either offstage or dead?

It’s hard to read Jill’s final tirade against Ritchie’s mum (Keeley Hawes) as anything other than Davies’s summary of the story of the AIDS, and it’s another whopper of simplistic, circular irony:

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. Cos 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.’

Out of loveless households came stunted men who didn’t know how to properly love and were therefore so compulsive, so ashamed, that they couldn’t care for their own kind but could only run away. Rather than unraveling the homophobic assumptions of Ritchie’s ‘serial killer’ psychology, Jill repeats it and directs it at a new target. The Denver Principles offer an essential recommendation for the uninfected population: do ‘not scapegoat people with AIDS, blame us for the epidemic or generalize about our lifestyles.’ Yet that is exactly what our ally Jill does when she psychologises all those ‘wards full of men who think they deserve it.’

If we accept Jill’s — and Davies’s — ventriloquism at face value, gay men with AIDS were forever crippled by their upbringing, incapable of agency or solidarity. In generalising this experience (whilst erasing the thousands of non-queer people who also died), Jill is engaging in the same form of reductive infantilisation as Ritchie’s mum. As with so much of It’s a Sin, this expression of sympathy is inexplicably entangled with dangerous pathologising of gay men’s behavior.

Like my first attempt to tell the story of my own infection, Davies’s story desperately seeks to assign villains and victims. Ritchie’s mother gets multiple dressing downs for her culpability (why not the Dad???) but Thatcher’s Conservative government gets off with just a bit of piss slipped into their coffee. Ascribing the spread of the virus to a lack of maternal love doesn’t even stand up to internal scrutiny within the series. Colin, for instance, came from a loving household but still felt the need to keep quiet about his sexual activity. Even if he and rugby shirt Ross had made beautiful, supportive love with full approval from their parents in 1981, the virus could’ve still been transmitted.

Perhaps the simplest yet still most difficult thing to accept about HIV is that, when divested of all moralising and psychologising, the virus is just a virus.

Flashback #3 / Flash-forward

A few friends have said they wish It’s a Sin had found a way to speed ahead to the present to represent advances in treatment that make HIV today a manageable condition (for those with access to medication). In the absence of that, HIV charities have been capitalising on the show’s popularity to advance updated messages about PrEP and U=U:

National HIV Testing Week, just concluded, saw a four-fold increase in requests for free at-home test kits, which many are attributing to It’s a Sin. (Although this is the first Testing Week since the COVID lockdown has forced everyone to stay home, so it’s not exactly possible to make one-to-one comparisons.) The national awareness of HIV/AIDS in Britain is surely being influenced by the show, but advocates and experts have had to fill in some of the blind spots in the script:

I’m lucky to live at a time when my HIV infection is not fatal, and to have access to a health service that makes antiretrovirals freely available. These advances are part of the reason I don’t fixate any longer on the story of my infection or blame the partner I contracted it from. I’ve been given the privilege of time, health and psycho-social support from the NHS and other sources to come to peace with that. I’m also happy to know a huge range of people living with HIV — activists and ‘normal people’ alike — who give me a sense of community that helps combat the deeply negative feelings that can and do still arise over my status.

Watching It’s a Sin did not inspire similar feelings of solidarity. I’d say it deliberately traffics in a sense of abjection about AIDS, as evidenced by online reactions that lead with comments like, ‘I’m a wreck,’ ‘I’m in tears,’ ‘I’m in bits’:

Watching It’s a Sin in a vacuum would leave almost anyone feeling depressed, demoralised and full of fear about gay sex. These issues are so ingrained in its storytelling that they could not be solved by a simple ‘That Was Then, This Is Now’ epilogue.

One could argue that the show is historical and its pessimism is simply accurate to what it felt like ‘back then.’ As we’ve seen, though, debates about PWAs being represented with dignity and agency date back to the start of the epidemic, as does the fight to preserve sex-positivity in the face of plague. For Davies not to represent those forces is a narrative choice, an interpretation of history that emphasises powerlessness, pain, isolation, shame and self-hatred over the countervailing forces of solidarity and communal struggle. Moving beyond the shame of the those years will only come after de-programming ourselves from a moralism of pleasure; it was then and is now possible to be a person with HIV and continue to have hot, safe sex.

To show a way toward that type of representation, I want to cite one more flashback, from the recent French film 120BPM. At its heart is a sero-discordant relationship between two young activists, Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), who is infected, and Nathan (Arnaud Valois), who is not. Having cruised one another in an ACT-UP meeting and protested together, they eventually end up in bed. In one of the film’s more accurate sexual observations, Nathan is too tired and drunk to stay hard with a condom on, so they engage in a bit of pillow talk that eventually gets round to the ‘How’d you get it?’ story.

Like Colin in It’s a Sin, the character of Sean was infected from his first sexual encounter, with a closeted maths teacher. The flashback to that experience is handled elegantly, without a cut, as the camera pans over Sean’s body and his first lover appears to be in bed with him and Nathan, giving Sean a rim job and fucking him. This is the ‘primal scene’ of transmission that we’ve become accustomed to seeing, but it’s presented here with complexity and even eroticism. Nathan, new to the politics of HIV, suggests that Sean’s older lover is at fault for infecting him. ‘You can’t split responsibility,’ Sean replies. ‘When you infect someone, you’re 100% responsible. And when you get infected too.’ Everyone With AIDS Is Innocent.

The scene is notable for its politics, its realism and, frankly, its heat. After sharing intimacy and a bit of political education, Sean and Nathan proceed to fuck (with a condom) and it’s pretty damn sexy.

Not every fictional character living with AIDS or HIV needs to be a perfect exemplar of right-on political messaging. In my role as a theatre-maker myself, I’m struggling with how to represent my own 21st century HIV experience in ways that feel true to the psychological complexity of life with an undetectable virus. And yet, we must think critically about which episodes, characters and psychologies have been selected to represent the history of the epidemic. As AIDS activist Sarah Schulman has said, ‘The AIDS Story has been distorted from the beginning, in part because of the chaos of figuring out what the hell was going on, in part because of bias, but now these distortions are being entrenched.’ (Her new political history Let the Record Show looks like essential reading.)

It’s a Sin is a painful account of some very shame-filled characters. It is a work of penance and mourning from a writer only recently coming to terms with his ongoing feelings of survivor’s guilt. For that reason, it may elicit a powerful emotional response in some audiences, but we must recognise how specific and subjective its ‘untold stories’ actually are. Yes, the preponderance of AIDS narratives do focus on affluent white American men. Audiences seeking out British stories of people living with HIV from the 80s and 90s should dive into resources like the National HIV Story Trust, Season 2 of the incredible podcast The Log Books or the new Instagram account Black And Gay Back in the Day.

However much Davies’s fiction has been birthed from real feelings of guilt and confusion, it would be a shame to let those feelings replicate once again.

And it would be a sin for our AIDS education to end here.

“Puberty is the process of physical change through which a child’s body matures into an adult body capable of sexual reproduction. It is initiated by hormonal signals from the brain to the gonads.” - Wikipedia

In the summer of 1990, I went to see the Touchstone Pictures film Dick Tracy (dir. Warren Beatty) five times in the cinema. I bought an anthology of the 1930’s Dick Tracy comics by Chester Gould, which I read cover to cover. I learned to draw Dick’s square jaw, as well as the distinctive mugs of villains like Flat Top and Pruneface and featured them in a home-made board game, heavily indebted to Monopoly, that I created and roped everyone I knew into playing.

It was perhaps no surprise that an eleven year-old only child who loved drawing and reading would become obsessed with this cartoon-coloured summer movie. But I came out of this encounter fundamentally changed in a way that many other proto-gay boys of my generation may relate to: we were drawn into the Dick Tracy universe by its association with Disney and ended up in bed with Madonna.

The controversial singer-actress plays femme fatale Breathless Mahoney in the film and I barely knew who she was. Even more than her performance, though, the catalyst of my transformation was Madonna’s album of music “from and inspired by” the film. Listened to on endless repeat, that cassette sent signals to my gonads (and other organs) that I sort of enjoyed, sort of resisted, and definitely did not understand.

Within a discography that has always courted LGBT audiences, this odd album is unquestionably Madonna’s gayest. Yes, we all know its hit single, but I’m Breathless is much more than just the album that gave us ‘Vogue.’ Embedded in its mélange of sex-positive provocation and Classic Hollywood pastiche was the DNA of almost everything I would become in the years ahead.

I’m Breathless kickstarted my puberty.

Consider these as liner notes to a late 20th century gay’s sexo-cultural awakening.

1. ‘He’s a Man’

The first thing to understand is that I’m Breathless didn’t need to exist. In the best Wildean sense, it is an utterly superfluous object.

In fact, Warren Beatty and Disney released two other, more traditional albums of Dick Tracy music: one with Danny Elfman’s orchestral score and another featuring period songs written for the film and performed by pop artists of the time like k.d. lang, Take Six and Ice-T. No one remembers these.

Madonna was not making a standard ‘soundtrack album’ but a queer work the very existence of which served as a subversive riposte to the film that spawned it and also to its classically masculine creator/star who happened to be romancing Madonna at the time.

It’s fitting that the opening track links us back to the movie, with Madonna singing in-role as the seductive bombshell who lures Beatty/Dick away from his do-gooding:

All work and no play,
Makes Dick a dull dull boy, career gets in the way.
Square jaw, ooo, such a handsome face,
Why do you have to save the human race?

Full of dirty double entendres, Madonna is enacting a Nietzschean inversion of all the accepted values of this Disney enterprise: heroism is stolid and boring, vice and pleasure are appealing. Not for the last time on this album, she challenges phallocentrism, cheekily disarming her man and turning him into an object of feminine desire: “I can show you some fun / And I don’t mean with a gun.”

In the film, Breathless ultimately dies and Dick’s relationship with the demure, domesticated Tess Trueheart is restored. Here in the queer space of I’m Breathless, we’re told from the start, straight-arrow masculinity is about to get bent.

2. ‘Sooner or Later’

Enter Sondheim.

At eleven years old, show tunes to me still meant The Sound of Music. But with the second track on this cassette I was introduced to Broadway’s poet of verbal dexterity and emotional ambiguity, a relationship that would progress at warp speed. Within a few years, I would have all of his shows on CD, could recite every single lyric and I was a paid-up subscriber to The Sondheim Review. Yes, that was an actual publication.

Being a theatre kid, I would certainly have encountered Steve sooner or later. To meet him simultaneously with Madonna, however, was a curious coincidence of history. It’s hard to think of a less likely pair, given her famously limited vocal chops and his penchant for melodic difficulty. But as was famously said about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, “He gave her class and she gave him sex appeal.” And an Oscar.

‘Sooner or Later’ is a torch song, a paean to the ineluctable power of sexual desire:

But if you insist, babe, the challenge delights me
The more you resist, babe, the more it excites me
And no one I've kissed, babe, ever fights me
Again

Inevitably, Breathless and Sondheim tell us, you will succumb to the longings that you’re currently fighting. That’s a scary message for a barely adolescent boy who doesn’t yet understand what he’s attracted to. But Sondheim coats the come-on in intricate irony. Eleven-year old me could enjoy the clever rhymes and esoteric vocabulary (“When I get a yen, / Then, baby, Amen. / I’m counting to ten”) and side-step any contemplation of exactly what kind of consummation she was hinting at.

As Jessica Rabbit had done for me a few years before, Madonna as Dietrich as Breathless exhibited such a heightened feminine allure that it became a master class in camp. This was nowhere more apparent than in her incredibly ballsy performance of the song on the Academy Awards in 1991:

Even more than in the film itself, Madonna is giving a full-on drag performance here: Look at the way she swings that stole! Or her absurdly ad-libbed seduction of Gulf War military brass (“Talk to me, General Schwartzkopf, tell me all about it!!”)? This is a performer in total command of her sexual personae. With Sondheim’s assistance, she tells the audience in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that identity is mutable, that role play can be simultaneously seductive and somewhat ridiculous. What little boy watching at home wouldn’t want to dress up and join her?

3. ‘Hanky Panky’

We all remember ‘Dita’, Madonna’s dominatrix alter ego who appeared a few years later on the Erotica album and accompanying art-book Sex.

That foray into full-on sadism provoked conservative condemnation, but I will always have a fondness for this gentle, fun introduction to Madonna’s kinky side, performed with a much more knowing wink and a Big Band swing. It’s a perfect taster of non-normative sexual taste, like S&M with training wheels.

The song’s premise is direct and unambiguous: “Some girls they like candy, / Others, they like to grind, / I’ll settle for the back of your hand somewhere on my behind.”

According to Madonna/Breathless, there’s “nothing like a good spanky.” Using childlike language rather than coy coded terminology made the song’s effect all the more disorienting. I knew something ‘dirty’ was being described, but it sounded like a really good time. “My bottom hurts just thinking about it.”

I never sang along to ‘Hanky Panky,’ and was actually embarrassed when it came on in the car. You see, that car was usually being driven by my aunt, a loving woman who raised me but who was also a former Franciscan nun. Content deemed too adult was gently disallowed, yet this song escaped censorship, just as I was also miraculously permitted to follow the bedroom exploits of Blanche, Dorothy and Rose on The Golden Girls. Like them, Madonna in her Breathless mode was horny, sex-positive and unapologetically feminist.

“Please don’t call the doctor,” Madonna tells us. “There’s nothing wrong with me.” It would take years consuming queer theory for me to appreciate these lessons that I first received at age eleven: sexual talk need not be shameful and fetish can be fun.

4. & 5. ‘I’m Going Bananas’ & ‘Cry Baby’

Who doesn’t love a novelty song?

In the first of these numbers, Madonna does a neurotic Carmen Miranda impersonation and the second has her and her chorus girls adopting whiny baby voices.

We forget that the Queen of Pop sometimes exhibits the instincts of a Borscht Belt comedian, even if the jokes aren’t always successful. These esoteric oddities certainly demonstrate her penchant for chutzpah. In fact, the lyric “I’m going meshuggah” was the first time I consciously remember learning Yiddish… as sung by an Italian-American doing a wacky Latin pastiche.

These songs are playtime. As an only child, I frequently sat by myself making up stories and adopting funny voices. Madonna, another motherless child, doing the same on a best-selling album only increased my sense of identification.

6. ‘Something to Remember’

Ironically, considering the title, this is probably the track I most forget.

It’s a serviceable, if somewhat down-beat, ballad that has Madonna looking back not exactly fondly on a recently ended relationship: “I was not your woman, I was not your friend / But you gave me, something to remember.” Perhaps it’s an unsentimental take on her short-lived affair with Beatty (the video features clips of them from the film).

It’s worth noting that a retrospective theme runs through many of Madonna’s ballads (‘I’ll Remember’, ‘This Used to Be My Playground’, ‘Love Don’t Live Here Anymore’). In 1995, during a career crisis that followed much controversy and bad publicity, Madonna released a well-received but unexciting compilation album featuring all of those tracks under the catch-all title Something to Remember.

Fine as some of those songs are, we don’t remember Madonna for this type of music. There is an alternative universe in which, post-scandals, she settled comfortably into being a mother and an easy listening artist. Instead, after a few fallow years, we got Ray of Light and a seemingly infinite number of Re-Inventions. As I go further into my forties, I’d be happy to have that many transformations left in me.

7. ‘Back in Business’

Following that rueful interlude, this fun track registers as a striking jolt back to the Madonna we love.

[Oddly, there’s a Sondheim song with the exact same title that appears briefly in the movie, but not on this album. It’s a catchy show tune, definitively performed by my other favorite living vocalist: Liza Minnelli.]

Madonna’s ‘Back in Business,’ written with frequent collaborator Patrick Leonard, reads as a middle finger to her censors in the Church and the media:

Just 'cause you got a halo don't mean that you can fly.
If you thought it was over, you're way off track
You made a blunder, and

You put me back, back in business,
This ain't no hit or miss, I'm gonna get my way.
'Cause you put me back, back in business,
You're my first witness, and I'm here to stay.

The 80s and 90s were a time of virulent conservatism, anti-feminism and homophobia. Queers of my generation were shaped by that climate and Madonna was one of the lone mainstream voices pushing back against it, confidently and consistently.

8. ‘More’

Let’s be honest, the second Sondheim track on this album isn’t really a Madonna song but a full-on, show-off show tune with intricate, dazzling rhymes. Enumerating a hunger for excess, this is his riff on ‘Material Girl’, complete with winking homage to the Gershwins: “‘Who could ask for anything more?’, I hear you query. / Who could ask for anything more? Well, let me tell you, dearie…”

The nerd in me learned every lyric religiously and can repeat most of them today, in much the same way that I can still recite the Nicene Creed.

Committing complex patter songs to memory was one of my favorite pastimes. I would also learn all the words to other Sondheim tongue-twisters like ‘Not Getting Married Today’ and ‘A Weekend in the Country.’

What was I trying to prove? It’s easy to chalk it up to Best Boy syndrome, overcompensating for my difference by demonstrating intellectual accomplishments.

It was easier - and safer - to adopt Sondheim’s prodigious verbosity as protection than to fully embrace Madonna’s unabashed espousal of emotional and sexual freedom.

9. ‘What Can You Lose?’ (feat. Mandy Patinkin)

This song sums it all up. Listen to it.

I’m sure Mandy Patinkin never expected to be on a Madonna album. In Dick Tracy, he takes on the small role of 88 Keys, the piano player who pines for Breathless and delivers with her this devastating duet of unfulfilled desire.

If Madonna represented the id that I didn’t know I needed to release, Mandy/Sondheim was the asexual avatar I ardently adopted throughout my adolescence. Patinkin and I shared a similar high tenor voice and in high school I loved to sing his solos from Sunday In the Park with George, playing the punctilious pointillist who chooses obsessive pursuit of his art over messy human connection.

‘What Can You Lose?’ mainlines all of Sondheim’s classic themes: longing, emotional ambiguity, hesitation. Think of it as a not-coming-out song written by a man who wouldn’t publicly acknowledge his same-sex desires until age 68:

Why keep concealing everything you're feeling?
Say it to her, what can you lose?
Maybe it shows
She's had clues, which she chose to ignore
Maybe though she knows
And just wants to go on as before
As a friend, nothing more

Unlike the better-known ‘Being Alive’ from Company, here we end not with a breakthrough but in sustained tension (“Leave it alone / Hold it all in”). Having weighed the pros and cons of disclosure, the singer decides “there’s too much to lose.”

The time was not right.

10. & 11. ‘Now I’m Following You, Parts I & II’ (feat. Warren Beatty)

This cute little diptych brings the Dick Tracy narrative to a close, before offering us the world-conquering single that would surpass the rest of the album in cultural impact. It also marks a kind of eclipse in fame from one cultural moment to another.

In the first run-through, Beatty sings alongside Madonna in a voice that’s even thinner than hers. Dominant in Hollywood for decades, his particularly brand of masculine stardom was just entering its decline in 1990, as Madonna herself cannily suggested: “I know I have a much bigger following than Warren does, and a lot of my audience isn’t even aware of who he is.”

Playing on the theme of who leads and who follows, the lyrics depict an affectionate but transactional relationship between two canny partners who know they each have something to offer the other.

Part II puts Beatty and his persona through a Madonna blender, remixing the vocal and returning obsessively to the name “Dick, Dick, D-d-d-d-d-d-dick.” What might seem juvenile is elevated to an incredibly bold statement, though, in the track’s Blonde Ambition tour performance:

Beginning as a rudimentary two-step with a hunk dressed in Tracy’s iconic yellow trench, the stage is flooded with a phalanx of similarly-clad Dicks doing a kick-line and then flashing those coats to reveal skin-tight black briefs. Soon Madonna’s audience is greeted with the sight of sexually fluid dancers of color coupling up in a same-sex partner dance.

If you hadn’t seen that a new world was coming, here it was, hitting you smack in the face.

12. ‘Vogue’

What more can be said?

It’s an iconic anthem and at the same time a blatant act of appropriation. I can leave that discussion to others.

Undeniably, it’s cultural reach is nearly unparalleled. Many, many more people have sung and danced to ‘Vogue’ over the decades than have listened to any of the other songs on I’m Breathless. I was the other way round: many times in 1990 I stopped the cassette before the final track and flipped it around to the other side.

What was I not prepared for?

Those who complain that ‘Vogue’ feels appended onto the album aren’t exactly wrong. Its evocation of 1940’s glamour is the tenuous thread that binds it to Dick Tracy but other than that… Beatty’s comic flick was not a place where it made no difference if you were a boy or a girl. Nor was anywhere I’d ever been.

‘Vogue’ told me that a Gay World is Out There, somewhere beyond the suburban, Catholic reality I’d known. The song beckons us to a place where we can “get away” from the “pain of life” that we know. Even at age eleven, I sensed it was more complicated. Images of gays in hospital beds had flashed before my eyes on the nightly news, unspoken associations of sex, risk and death created a climate of fear.

Of course I couldn’t understand what queer community meant, I hadn’t ever seen one. I’m Breathless (along with Truth or Dare and Blonde Ambition) offered me and many others a partial, and not uncomplicated, glimpse of what such a space might feel like. These works kicked off a process of de-programming, but certainly didn’t complete it. Confronting the complex intersections of race, sexuality, and HIV - of going beyond Madonna - lay even further ahead.

In the meantime, eleven-year-old me set about decoding the list of name-checked actresses (“Lauren, Katherine, Lana, too”). I took out all the VHS tapes from my local Video-To-Go and acquired a freakish knowledge of Classic Hollywood. That was work I could do with my brain.

I couldn’t (yet) “go with the flow” or let my body “move to the music.” Lived experience of sex, pleasure, infection and reinvention was still to come.

But if the music’s pumping it will give you new life…

Eventually.

Rosamund Pike in Marie Curie drag holding a glowing vile of radium. It’s the poster for a formulaic-looking biopic, Radioactive, opening 20 March 2020. A movie neither I nor anyone I know will ever see.

Except now it’s July and it’s still there. Like those bowls of soup or whatever frozen by volcanic ash on ancient breakfast tables at the ruins of Pompeii.

I’m back on the tube again and Ros has been holding that test tube for months, staring straight ahead and asking herself, ‘When will this be over? When can we forget I ever did this film? Wouldn’t you rather go see James Bond?’

I don’t know if societies still do time capsules, those locked boxes of selected items intended to tell future people, ‘This is how we lived.’ When the Victorians laid the cornerstone of a new building they might place things inside like coins, photos, newspapers, religious texts.

No one would’ve chosen this film poster.

Or any of the other ones that stayed on the sides of buses and phone boxes around London all during the lockdown. Public advertising space isn’t worth much during a pandemic so the same adverts squatted there for months, trumpeting films like Mulan (eventually gone to streaming), A Quiet Place Part 2 (delayed til next year) or that British one about the beauty pageant with Lesley Manville and Gugu Mbatha-Raw -- which technically did open, I think, before it went to early to VOD.

These were the visual white noise of normal life, back when we all jostled into crowded carriages, social calendars full, stuffing every minute with any old bit of culture or social engagement. Unremarkable and unremarked upon, we rushed past them expecting that eventually they’d be replaced by the Next Thing and the Next after that. But these overstayed their welcome.

After premiering at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival and causing no stir, Rosamund Pike’s star turn as the pioneering scientist must have been deemed ‘radioactive’ itself since it was relegated to the late winter dumping ground where misbegotten, disappointing films go to wither. Savvy filmgoers know to avoid films that come out in that late February to March slot: they sit decaying through a one to two-week theatrical release in under-populated cinemas, depleting themselves of potential Oscar nominations, critical acclaim and the likelihood of recouping their budgets.

We wait through those fallow months, hung over from awards season and longing for green shoots to pop up at Cannes and raise our hopes again. Such are the normal cycles of growth and renewal in the cultural calendar, which have been warped this year like everything else.

Staring now at this poster that should have long since disappeared, it’s as if the mint green radiation from that glowing tube has caused a kind of mutation, turning the film (or the idea of the film) into a curious and persistent memento mori.

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes called a photograph “the living image of a dead thing.” Some of the dead things signified by Rosamund’s weary expression (at least for me) include:

• her hopes of a Best Actress nomination

• the cultural currency of the prestige biopic

• the viability of traditional cinematic release strategies

• normal cosmopolitan commuter life

• my own relationship with an equally actress-obsessed film fan, which didn’t so much decay as explode under the pressure of lockdown

Certain photos, Barthes says, acquire a sensory effect that cannot be explained by the actual image itself. They possess a particular subjective element that he called a punctum: ‘that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).’

We’re all a bit bruised now.

Though we didn’t know it, that week in late March was a global Sliding Doors moment. What is the alternative plotline where we miss this particular pandemic train and end up taking a different track and emerging as the blonde version of Gwyenth? I wouldn’t be thinking about this poster.

**

‘Half-life’ is the time it takes for a radioactive element to reduce to half of its original quantity. The half-life of radium, one of two elements that Marie Curie discovered, is a whopping 1600 years (basically the amount of time from Christ to Shakespeare). Compared to that, the half-life of most films is infinitesimal: huge quantities of initial buzz and hopes that exponentially deplete once they’ve actually been seen.

Sliding Doors is the exception: a moderately successful 90s rom-com that has lived on for more than thirty years. Along with its philosophically speculative cousin Groundhog Day, it’s survived in general consciousness as a kind of existential shorthand understood by people who haven’t even seen the films.

Find me someone, though, who remembers that before Renee Zellweger successfully impersonated Judy Garland she flopped in a 2006 biopic as Beatrix Potter. Or that Hillary Swank crashed and burned as Amelia Earhart.

Well, actually, I already know one. He’s just disappeared from my life.

The success or failure of human relationships isn’t measured by Box Office Mojo or Rotten Tomatoes. Even the ones that decay (or explode) can offer growth that lasts.

What’s the half-life of a feeling? How long until the intensity of a radioactive love or antagonism reduces to nothing but a tincture?

The huge majority of all films released will eventually sink down in the quicksand of Netflix or the bowels of IMDB. After so much time, creativity and energy have been poured into them, they settle into their final resting place as little more than trivia fodder to be dredged up by obsessives like me and my ex.

He and I even hosted a Zoom quiz back in April. Remember those?

The temporal experience of this pandemic has been surprisingly hard to describe. Rather than the tedium of a Beckett play, it’s had the double timescale of a Christopher Nolan movie. Looping, layering, somehow moving both slowly and quickly at the same time. Something you can only figure out in retrospect when you sit with your friends to unwind the threads: ‘What the hell was that about?’

As the groundhog days of lockdown cycled by in their endless loops of repetition, most people felt an even greater hunger for variety and a ravenous cultural consumption. Not enough content to fill our hungry holes.

In self-isolating homes around the world we consumed media like it was rapidly approaching its sell-by date. Remember the week everyone watched Tiger King? Good People? Hollywood?

I didn’t watch any of those. I was wrapped up in a real-life serialised drama and I haven’t haven’t had much appetite for a new movie or episode of TV in… what’s the date again?

Six whole months of this. Half a year.

That sounds like a significant benchmark, but we can’t see it proportionally if the end point is invisible. Speaking in the Commons yesterday, Boris said we should expect his new restrictions to last six months. I’m sure they chose that because there’s a nice symmetry to it: March to March.

He also added the word ‘perhaps…’

**

Cinemas have reopened and in some kind of cosmic coincidence we’ve been offered Tenet, a palindromic Nolan joint where time can go backward, allowing us to redo mistakes. We wait to see if Kenneth Branagh (somehow playing both Putin AND Trump) will be allowed to destroy everything – our past, our future, and our present.

In ‘normal’ circumstances, this is one I would’ve skipped, and yet there I was the other week in a cavernous cinema at the Vue Leicester Square, doing my part to Move On from everything that’s happened.

The experience was fun, in part, but also a little funereal. Before the film began, the audience of about eight people was subjected to not one but two promos convincing us of the unique power of in-person movie going. “This is not a Cinema,” I was told by Ridley Scott and John Boyega. Apparently, it’s some kind of communal, religious experience, someplace we can all be with one another again.

But we were already there. It seemed more like a message intended for everyone who should’ve been in those empty seats: absent companions, departed partners, nervous neighbours who decided to Netlfix and chill.

John David Washington in a sharp suit can go back in time to retrieve and rebury that nuclear material (or whatever the hell it was) but everything off-screen won’t be so easily reset.

Cinema-going was dying before this lockdown.

Maybe my relationship was, as well. I’m still talking that one through.

There will someday come a point from which all of us can look back and survey the wreckage.

Jobs lost.

Businesses gone.

Lives changed.

On the tube home, the posters for Radioactive were gone. I wanted to take a picture to accompany this essay but most of the advertising space has now been papered over with generic TfL images.

“Mind the Gap.” Literal placeholders until such time as the half-life of pandemic paranoia has passed and we allow ourselves some raised hopes that new stories, experienced together, might just be worth the risk.

Until then, we wait on the platform. “Next train approaching.”

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