This was the first time many gay teenagers saw same-sex affection, let alone gay sex.
Watching Queer As Folk, then, was an all too brief refuge from a repressively homophobic world: a TV series that revolved entirely around a group of gay friends living their lives. It remained an era of unapologetic media gay bashing: in the year Queer As Folk graced Britain’s scenes, one front-page Sun splash asked: “Are we being run by a gay mafia?” Less than a year earlier, the first openly gay footballer, Justin Fashanu, hanged himself in Shoreditch. The year Queer As Folk aired, just 27% of Britons thought “sexual relationships between two adults of the same sex” was “not wrong at all”, according to the British Social Attitudes survey nearly half the population thought it was “always” or “mostly wrong”. In the 1980s the chief constable of Greater Manchester police had declared that HIV victims were “swirling around in a human cesspool of their own making”. There were no civil partnerships, let alone same-sex marriages. Several anti-gay laws were in place: a different age of consent the right to discriminate in goods and services the banning of same-sex adoption. This was only just over a decade after the introduction of section 28 – the first new homophobic legislation since the 19th century – that meant LGBT issues were not discussed by a single teacher at my school, save for one occasion, when my class was told that anal sex was bad for you. It’s difficult to overstate how courageous or revolutionary Queer As Folk was. It wasn’t for another six years, after a silent unrequited love for an evangelical Christian and several relationships with girls, that I came out.
It may as well have been a different universe: I lived in a suffocatingly laddish, heterosexual world (the Facebook wall of one of my then best friends is today rife with Tommy Robinson videos) full of jibes about being gay – taunts I would indulge, in order to fit in. I grew up in the centre of Stockport, and Queer As Folk was set just seven miles away, on Canal Street (“Anal Street”, my peers would snigger), the heart of Manchester’s LGBT community. Being gay seemed to me to be a mishmash of the threat of Aids, not being “a man”, dying alone, and a lifetime of misery and rejection. A vision of a supposedly normal future life – wife, kids – was being snatched away, with no clear desirable alternative. Any thoughts of same-sex attraction were met with an oh-God-please-not-this panic. When Queer As Folk was first televised, 20 years ago, I was a closeted 14-year-old who was, frankly, desperate not to be gay.