The consequences of the television closet: It's a Sin (Red Production Company for Channel 4/HBO Max, 2021) as a meditation on the presence and absence of queer lives on British television. (February 2023) - Wheatley, Helen
This short article teases out some of the ways that It's a Sin ((Red Production Company for Channel 4/HBO Max, 2021) engages with television history. It explores how the series figures television viewing and television production in its diegesis, and makes some suggestions about the way that it represents some of the consequences of what we might call the 'television closet'. This term refers to the relative absence of explicitly queer representations on British TV leading up to, and during, the period in which the series is set. The article proposes that It's a Sin is acutely aware of the role that television played in the continuing stigmatisation of LGBT people in Britain well into the 1980s and the lack of information and scaremongering that characterised the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, revealing the acute consequences of the television closet which Russell T. Davies' work more widely has sought to counteract.