The Real Sin: Women’s Erasure in Russell T Davies’ It’s a Sin

Despite the growth and capitalisation of LGBTQ+ representation in the media, lesbians remain largely unmarketable. The white cis gay man’s monopoly on queer representation is an uncomfortable topic, but the tropes of the poster gay man and the unpalatable lesbian still pervade in TV and film.

This is strikingly apparent in Russell T Davies’ new series, It’s a Sin. As the first British drama to centre the experience of the gay community during the AIDS crisis, it explores beautifully the prejudice and suffering gay men faced and, more importantly, the communities forged to support them. But, in its portrayal of gay lives, there is a glaring absence of the women, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans women who died of AIDS, suffered with their own stigma, and who were at the forefront of AIDS activism.

The invisible activists

Because the show was created with so much compassion and with unmatched writing, it is nothing but baffling that no mention could be given to the other victims. They are not even given the periphery.

This absence follows a long history of lesbian invisibility in media. And what makes it even more disappointing is that Davies knew these women. In a recent BFI interview, he addressed their absence, saying he wished the series could have been “20 episodes long, because [he] never got to pay tribute the nursing staff who were lesbians”.

“[…] when some staff wouldn’t touch a patient, it was the lesbian staff who would step forward and say, ‘We’ll do those late nights, we’ll do those extra shifts’ – that’s slightly in there, but I could have written a whole episode about that.”

While gay men should be at the forefront of representations of the AIDS crisis, women played crucial roles that need to be seen and explored. As devoted caregivers throughout the beginnings of the crisis, to strategists and organisers in later activist movements, women were always deeply involved. The most notable lesbians in the ACT UP organisation included Maxine Wolfe, Gerri Wells, and Sarah Schulman; they provided a significant voice within the group that encouraged other queer women to participate. The presence of women and POC also gave the movement a larger sense of purpose, these groups recognised and highlighted the collective social issues of homophobia, racism, and classism that fuelled the dominant attitudes around AIDS, and worked towards targeting their sources.

Their presence was also motivated by a sense of fear around what could develop. Marion Banzhaf, in an interview with VICE, explains her thoughts during her work with ACT UP: “my background is in women’s health, which critiques the Western medical establishment for not caring about people if they’re not white and rich. I figured this would soon affect people beyond gay men.”

Erased histories

The movement was built on the necessary unity of the LGBTQ+ collective, but Davies’ portrayal erases this fact.

While women’s roles in the AIDS crisis are known, its effects on women are still something of a mystery. Because AIDS was considered a ‘gay man’s disease’ this meant that women weren’t given the same support, were isolated from the rest of the community and, as a result, have been mostly written out of the narrative of that period. Schulman’s novel Rat Bohemia testifies to this period where most people didn’t believe it was possible for lesbians to get HIV:

“I’ve never heard of anyone who really got HIV sexually from another woman,” I said.

            “No, there’s a case in Arkansas. My friend told me about it.”

            “There’s probably a man or a needle lurking there somewhere,” I said. “If lesbians were getting AIDS from each other, don’t you think we would have noticed?”

Many lesbians did die, but homophobia and lesbian invisibility heavily impacted the reporting of cases and research on transmission. It took over 10 years for the CDC definition of AIDS to acknowledge women were affected by opportunistic infections and, in most reported cases, information on whether a woman had sex with women was not included. Lack of information has meant that cases of transmission between lesbians have been underreported, but the evidence is there. A number of cases were reported between 1980-1991 in the National Library of Medicine and, in 1992, the Lesbian AIDS project was started in NYC. It began with 30 cases which, after two years, rose to 400. It is now at over 1,000.

“Sometimes I felt like I was the only woman with HIV.”

Women were victims, too

Women who suffered from the disease faced a different kind of stigma, they often buried the fact and died unacknowledged. Writer Juno Roche, author of Queer Sex and Trans Power recalls a woman she knows recently admitting she had kept it a secret for years, “sometimes I felt like I was the only woman with HIV.”

Roche herself was diagnosed with AIDS in the early nineties: “When I watched It’s A Sin I fell into a pit of darkness. I thought, can’t you wait until we’re dead? Us survivors who did not die, but had to exist in stigma, and who are now triggered by this show and the enormity of what we went through?”

For women like Roche, going through the pain of watching a series about something so deeply personal to you, and to not even have your experience acknowledged, is a real kick in the teeth.

Jennie Copeland 

Featured Image courtesy of Daan Stevens on Unsplash. Image license can be found here. No changes were made to the image.