Today ‘Gay Aliens and Queer Folks, how Russell T Davies changed TV’ comes out. That moment of abject terror before anyone has really read it, but also an opportunity to talk about it before anyone has read it.
Why Russell? Why Rusty T? RTD?
Many reasons, as as there are for anyone to want to write a book. Primarily, I think the sheer variety of the work he’s done. Rather than being focused only on one show (as previous books have done for both book and theatre), this was a genre-hopping, style-hopping ride. (a note on which, I know I don’t cover it all in detail, someone find me the time and the publisher the budget, and we’ll do a sequel OK?). The fact too Davies offers a chance to talk about so many queer topics as well as things like politics, Welshness and women.
That, too, Davies’s work raised me. He’ll not thank any of us for implying he’s old enough to have raised several generations of queer TV viewers now, but it’s true (and some of us were very young I promise). But from 1999, when I was in Sixth Form and Queer as Folk burst onto screens, through to my final years of Uni where the Tardis flew back in, to finishing a Ph.D. on AIDS theatre and having Russell say ‘hold my beer’ and write Its a Sin to everything in between. It’s been Captain Jack and Cassanova. Bob and Rose and Years and Years, and Paddington and Hugh Grant in the House of Commons. It has been a hell of a ride so far, Russell, and with the Doctor Who 60th looming, I’m very aware it’s not over yet….
Oh by the way fun fact, this book contract landed in my inbox the very same HOUR that Russell was announced to be going back to Who you couldn’t write this…well Russell could.
What was Davies for me then? Personally (Again, with apologies), I’m a fraction too young for Queer as Folk to have been on my radar as it broadcast. I know a friend had the VHS, but I didn’t see it until a few years later. That anarchic scandalous, and oh-so-free duo of Stuart and Vince showed a world that was at that time unimaginable.
I know it’ll cause some people to turn their noses up at my ‘Queer’ credentials that Queer as Folk was neither my queer awakening nor my Russell T Davies awakening. But alas, it was not to be. In between, I saw Bob and Rose (the underrated gem in his crown forever) and Casanova (which remains one of my favourite TV shows ever, daft as it is). But it was of course, Who that was my Davies awakening.
Even then, I will get points deducted for not being their first time round. Now for Classic Who I have an excuse, born in 1984, I am the ‘lost’ generation. However, for the reboot, I have a cast-iron excuse of being in Canada when the reboot started, I crossed over with broadcast there and here, so the first episode I saw was The Christmas Invasion. And in that moment, I was hooked. When I tell you the years 2005-2010 were so deep in Who, so very deep. I live in Cardiff; it felt like Utopia (not that one). It’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there just how BIG Who was particularly in Cardiff then, and it was joy. From location hunting and sneaking off at lunchtime or on days off to find them filming. To the constant rumour mill. To see the big man himself going to Tesco almost every Sunday while you walked the dog (not once did I think to speak to him).
For me, Who was a welcome escape at a time of being lost. And that’s the very essence of Who and the queerness of Who. The wandering lost soul who finds a place they belong, even if temporarily, in a place they should not. That for me, also is the very queer heart of the show. Because that too, is what Davies does to his work, ‘queer’ overtly or not, as a queer writer, he inherently brings out the queer in what he does. And while Who has always been very very queer on multiple levels (fight me straight fanboys), Davies brought that out more.
I never was deep in the Who fandom, more a very invested bystander who still knows more facts about a Tardis and 2005-2010 production than is probably healthy. But it still felt, in hindsight like a queer safe space. An escape from workplaces and friendship groups where I couldn’t be me, to somewhere I could. The Doctor never rejected anyone for being who they are, and that’s the queerness of the Tardis that really pulled me in.
That too, the Doctor, I now realise, is an asexual, nonbinary alien, helps in this. The older I get the more queer I realise Who was (is hopefully) and that’s why I gravitated towards it. As I’ve grown into my own Asexual identity realising this character I loved so much was asexual too explains a lot but also means a great deal. The wandering loner collecting queer family along the way also seems both aspirational and identifiable.
So yes, the heart of my Davies love will always be Who because for me that’s what was formative. But his other works are also forever etched into my mind, my soul, and yes my heart (even if he often is breaking it). Of course, alongside Who was Torchwood and while there’s a part of me that’s slightly embarrassed to be associated with the, erm more extremes of that fandom, even tangentially, Torchwood was still hugely important. It gave us queer characters at the heart of a sci-fi show, a queer action hero, and a gay romance at the heart of a show instead of queerbaiting. Did it end in a…less than ideal way? Yes. Were some choices made…also yes. But at that moment, it was something special to a lot of us. And I still think of Ianto fondly every time I pass by that way…
That’s not to say Queer as Folk doesn’t mean a great deal to me. It really does. It’s a problem of, interestingly our queer community and TV fandoms that if you weren’t there ‘at the start’ then you weren’t there or you don’t count. But actually, how many folks who grew up in homophobic homes in 1999/2000 had to wait until later to discover the misadventures of Stuart and Vince? I admit I’ve felt something of Queer (as folk) imposter syndrome writing this book. That I wasn’t there at the beginning, I can’t quote it all verbatim, I didn’t even try and live my Vince and Stuart life. But it doesn’t mean it wasn’t formative to me either. It showed me gay people where I’d never seen them before. It showed me families who cared for their gay children and other people. It showed me gay people from working-class backgrounds too (Our Hazel’s life looked so much like the life I lived down to the making Christmas Crackers at the kitchen table to earn some money). And while I know most folks want to be Stuart or Nathan, I’m really happy being Vince…happily, the quiet nerd. There’s nothing wrong with being the Vince either (or the Kate Winslet as he’d put it).
In between all this, amid all this even, something else important happened with me and Davies and his writing…he taught me to write. Inadvertently, and along with a host of others obviously. But actually, no other writer has had so much impact on my writing, and taught me so much as Davies has. From his use of humour, how he writes women, and Welshness and working-class-ness in his work. Not to say there aren’t others who did it, do it or that I learned from, but he’s forever been my touchstone on all these things. Some who have read or seen my work probably also argue that I get the penchant for killing off characters in horrible ways from him, too, but I decline to comment. Davies taught me to write the mundane, the small details, and make them anything but. To show ordinary people in extraordinary and extremely ordinary moments. He taught me to put the humour at the most inappropriate time because that’s when it’s most appropriate. His book The Writers Tale while initially intended to be a behind-the-scenes of Who is a better writing manual than any I’ve ever read. And I constantly think of my work when it’s in ‘the maybe’ (IYKYK). I do thankfully not rely on smoking as much as that book implies writing needs.
The bookend to my Russell T Davies life and the more obvious reason for writing this book was of course It’s a Sin. Which came just after I’d finished writing a PhD on…theatre and AIDS drama. And now, the man whose writing I’d loved for decades and whose writing taught me to write was making THE story for me—the AIDS one.
And it’s complicated when the writer you admire, probably most of all, writes a thing you’ve been waiting for them to write, and the whole world is talking about it. As a result, I don’t think I yet have an honest personal reaction to It’s a Sin. I think in years to come, it’ll finally settle in my mind and heart, and I’ll figure it all out. It was almost too overwhelming and too many opinions at the time. But it's also a thing of such overwhelming emotion that it’s not yet a couple of years on truly settled. But I do know I’ll likely be talking about it as long as I’ve been talking about Queer as Folk. And it was of course beautiful, and nuanced and all that so many of us had waited for. It gave us the story that we’d been lacking in quintessential Davies style, with warmth and heartbreak and of course humour. In my own personal life with this narrative too, that we also got Susan Brown, my own ‘Mother Pitt’ from Angels in America and Neil Patrick Harris a Roger, a Jonathan in tick…tick…BOOM! (and giving the performance of his career I said what I said). That here too we got not just the British story, the story of what women really did (I’m looking at you certain other long play about AIDS). We got Welshness, we got queer life and AIDS outside of not only New York but London. But in Wales. We got a ‘Mam’ and a valleys house and little Colin. We got everything we knew Russell would give us, and for me who had spent a decade asking for exactly those stories…it’s forever a little bit special.
And that, in a way, is the ‘why’ of this book…because we need to keep talking about these shows. It would be easy to get complacent in the impact Davies has had not just in the bigger TV sense. But also personally. To take him for granted, assume he will keep doing what he does and get nonchalant about his impact on so many of us. Nonchalance is underrated. Shout it from the rooftops, celebrate it. Put it in a little gay book.
There’s so much more I could and no doubt will be nerdy over. There was so much more that could have gone in the little rainbow book. But to write about something you love is a real honour. But also if little queer me could have known when I frist saw those Queer as Folk VHS tapes that one day she’d be free enough to write a book on that? Or if that little lost Doctor Who fan, in 2005 could know that one day she’d write a book about her favourite Doctor and put him (with a cucumber aimed at his crotch) on the cover. Or maybe, maybe I’d tell that girl too shy to say hello to her favourite writer while walking her dog, someday you’ll tell him what it means in book form instead.
Like the 10th Doctor on their victory lap, that’s maybe my reward. For everything else it took to get here. (and maybe like 10 this isn’t the last of me and Russell T Davies either…)
The book has a variety of acknowledgments, all fuelled by slight book-writing mania and caffeine. But on publication day if I can add a few more: Amy Feldman for thinking this was a good idea (I hope you still do) and Abbie Headon for making a good idea into a real book (and a better one) and to Agnes, Maria, Ruth and Georgina who also made this book what it is. To my cheerleaders in various places; Kristy Baker, Sarah Whitfield, Neil Reading and Steph Gifford (who also takes gorgeous photos). Paul Hunt for shamelessly promoting my book to our colleagues when I won’t, my ‘Grown Ups’ for keeping me sane. And to Jon Rainford, who might not be able to name all the Doctors, but is my constant Tardis companion (like it or not).
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Congratulations 🎉
I remember visiting Cardiff in winter of 2010 when JB was doing Panto, there. The hype of the city for DW was something else.