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IT’S A SIN (2021) REVIEW: They all die because of you.Please note, this review will contain spoilers.Did you hear the one about the bat and the global plague?Once upon a time, in a country far, far away, some numpty ate a bat.As a disclaimer, I’m fully aware that the whole “bat soup” story was debunked as horrid Sinophobia. But go with me on this, because I have a point to make here, one based on the public perception and moralisation of viruses. So, a virus spreads from the bat to the human, which will later receive its official designation as SARS-CoV-2, better known to my readers as COVID-19. A little while later, a mass-spreader event takes place in a Wuhan wet market, bringing the existence of the virus to the attention of the country’s authorities and terrifying the locals as an unknown, invisible assailant.In response to COVID-19, the Chinese government doesn’t act immediately. In fact, they have been accused of lying to the rest of the world about the extent of the damage that it can cause. But still, they were pretty quick to lock their residents down in their homes before the domestic issues could worsen. As the virus spreads across the world, affecting the old predominantly before being proved to kill children and adolescents too, other governments follow in the Chinese example, with varying degrees of success.The entire world clamours for a vaccine to save them from COVID-19, and every major pharmaceutical company descends upon the chance to make the winning cure. Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, you name it, vaccines are being researched and tested and created, all with a goal of saving the world from the clutches of the virus. Everyone is scared, millions are dying, until at last in November 2020 positive reports begin to indicate that the virus will at last come under our control. By February 2021, hope has been restored.The COVID-19 deaths are a tragedy.Let’s take another story.This time, we’ll have a comedy.Once upon a time, in a country far, far away, some numpty ate a primate.The simian immunodeficiency that the primate carried in its blood passed into the hungry human and began to mutate after making sufficient contact into a virus known as HIV-1, which adapted to weakening its human hosts instead of the original primates. HIV is the virus which leads to AIDS, the dreaded (and now infamous) acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Get it, no matter who you are, and your immune system collapses, leaving you exposed to every kind of cancer, respiratory condition, or neurological fault imaginable.In 1959, the first known case of HIV in a human was found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the virus later went on to ravage Africa. In the late 1970s, the virus found its way into America, and in the early 1980s it landed in Britain. Its most prominent sufferers were men who have sex with men, which provided the perfect motive for religious fundamentalist groups and bigoted political parties to attack the blossoming gay communities of moral degradation. For these moralisers, HIV and AIDS were not problems to be solved, but reasons to celebrate, that the dirty queers would die off.Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher obstructed materials intended to educate the gay community about the newfound AIDS danger, on the basis that it would be “harmful to children” if the materials fell into their hands. Rather than do anything effective at all, her government instated measures such as the Local Government Act 1988 section 28, banning even the mention of any homosexual “propaganda” in schools, which went down about as well as US-based abstinence-only education to prevent teenaged pregnancies. Rather than create an environment wherein people could feel safe to discuss their condition and to get help, the subject faced censorship instead.She may have been a famously practical woman.But she was also an avowed bigot.This was spoken even after her Conservative government brought out the “Don’t Die of Ignorance” campaign against the AIDS crisis (instated in 1986, even though AIDS had existed in Britain as early as 1982; imagine the utter outrage if we’d waited four years to send out flyers on COVID-19!), and just before Section 28 came into play in 1988.“Antiracist mathematics.”“Inalienable right to be gay.”Wherever Prime Minister Thatcher is now, I do hope it’s warm.Meanwhile, in the States, President Ronald Reagan knew of AIDS as early as 1981, but he did not mention it publicly until 1985 (with 12,000 then-dead Americans). His press secretary Larry Speakes (a truly fantastic name for any spokesperson) mocked the AIDS spread during his press conferences, joking with the reporters present that he had nothing on it, “do you?”. The Moral Majority latched onto the virus, with key players (including President Reagan himself) either advocating loudly for gay rights to be denied or just keeping silent enough on the matter so to not lose too much political support.Even though AIDs can be spread through breast milk, sharing needles, blood, vaginal and rectal fluids alike, and semen, only the gays and their allies were lambasted as monsters, thanks to the excessive moralising (and, to an extent, anthropomorphising of the virus, assigning it some intentionality where none existed). True, there were more gays dying from AIDS, but they were left to die, alone and unloved. And now, the world scrambles for a COVID cure because this time, the deadly, alien plague actually affects them.One allegedly came from bats, one came from monkeys.Both have caused immense tragedy across the entire globe.And yet, only one of the viruses is seen as a God-plague on immoral scum.Funny, right?Anybody?Mr Speakes?President Reagan?Prime Minister Thatcher?No?Blimey.Tough crowd tonight.It’s not very nice to hate people, but sometimes it’s right to.The HIV/AIDS moralisers are one such example.If the coronavirus pandemic has proved anything, it’s that viruses are not moral entities. I don’t say that to insinuate that they are immoral; rather, they are amoral. They don’t care about human life. They’re doing what their own composition demands of them; infect a host, spread to new hosts, keep the host alive while breaking it down, kill them eventually. Rich and poor, gay and straight, cis and trans, everyone is equally vulnerable.But when a virus “targets” an outsider group, it’s a whole other matter.Suddenly, it’s “God’s divine judgement” on gays, as they die in their hundreds and thousands, treated as lepers in a community that wouldn’t have cared about them if it had been paid to try. It didn’t matter, of course, that the virus had originated in primates and had only found its home within sexual fluids as a coincidence rather than design (and if it was design, the designer can fuck itself to death). All that mattered was that the Moral Majority, the evangelical community, the traditionalists and Conservatives and Republicans had a brand-new shiny stick with which to beat those who went against them.And when moralising affects judgements, it’s often unpleasant:Baron (1998) has demonstrated that people following their moral intuitions often bring about non-optimal or even disastrous consequences in matters of public policy, public health, and the tort system. A correct understanding of the intuitive basis of moral judgment may therefore be useful in helping decision makers avoid mistakes, and in helping educators design programs (and environments) to improve the quality of moral judgment and behavior.Jonathan Haidt, The Emotional Dog and its Rational TailIt took the US authorities finding an example of a non-gay, white haemophiliac teenager in Ryan White for them to give two shits about the AIDS pandemic, passing laws in White’s name (posthumously, at that) to care for HIV/AIDS sufferers at the federal level.That was at the end of 1990, nine years after the pandemic began.You can’t sit with a loved one as they die of COVID-19.It’s heartbreaking, I really do know that.But imagine what it must have been like to have been denied access, not because of the virus itself, but because the carrier was considered to be a filthy perversion of the course of nature. And imagine what it must have been like for the sufferers who were “taken home”, not necessarily to be cared for by their families, but to be hidden away in attics as the family’s shameful secret within the polite society that embargoed any discussions on how to help people who were enduring the most horrific, agonising deaths imaginable.Hatred doesn’t quite cover my feelings for the moralisers here.It’s far stronger than that.I make a big deal of this point for two reasons.One is to give you context (happy LGBT+ History Month in Britain, we drink tea and discuss our murderous bigoted governments!).The other is as an extra buffer from spoilers.Because it’s really best to go into this show as blind as possible.On that note, it’s time to get stuck into the meat of It’s a Sin.One of Russell T. Davies’ biggest strengths is in how he handles a large ensemble cast.Some can’t handle it. Writers such as Chris Chibnall cannot give one Doctor and three companions the space they need to grow in two whole seasons of ten episodes each (plus two specials), but Davies can juggle enormous lists of actors in a quarter of that time. He proved how he could manage these sorts of tales in his prior epic Years and Years (the man really loves his music-based titles, huh?), wherein he juggled the sprawling trees of the Bisme-Deacon-Lyons families as they held close to one another for comfort in times of intense political upheaval, spearheaded by the Trumpian Vivienne Rook.Here, though, Davies pares his main cast down a little, focusing mostly on the lives of five gay/non-conforming twenty-somethings as they make their way through London life on the gay scene. Some have dreams of stardom, some have more modest ambitions of working and making an honest life as tailors. Some are extroverted club animals, some just want to make new friends. But they all end up living together in London’s “Pink Palace”, having a party every night while they work out who they want to be.Of course, not all of them get that far.Because the AIDS pandemic arrives from America.Davies does a phenomenal job of building up the tension in the story. He also addresses a crucial question that many non-LGBT+ people have about the crisis; if gays knew that AIDS was a thing, why wouldn’t they just stop having sex with each other? To answer this, it’s important to remember that the LGBT+ community was (and is) highly mistrustful of the government. Of most authority. Black people have the Tuskegee experiment, and the LGBT+ community watched that and other incidents as a similarly hated group.Think about it; if you had spent your life being told, from the highest political positions, from the holiest of pulpits, that you were broken, sinful, foul, and guilty by default of life, far more so than your straight counterparts, why would you ever listen to warnings? Could you, as a hated group, trust that this wasn’t just another concocted “moral panic”, the same way that the evangelicals screamed and cried about about heavy death metal music, the Comics Code, cannabis use, tan suits, Dungeons & Dragons?Could you escape the feeling that this was just a new conspiracy?I think not.With gay people refusing to believe in the virus, inspired by the hatred that they’ve had to face over the years, the party scene kicked into overdrive right at the time that AIDS was spreading. This was a deadly cocktail of bigotry fuelling mistrust, and Davies portrays the clash between the real science and human resistance in a very affecting light. We know with the benefit of hindsight that AIDS was one of the most dangerous viruses to ever exist (at least in the days before treatment), but they had no way of knowing that this wasn’t just another Moral Majority/British moral standards crusade.And so, AIDS remained in the shadows.Unspoken of, unbelieved, mythical.A poster here, a whisper there, never believed in.Until it was far, far too late.Straight white COVID deniers don’t get this blanket excuse, because they’ve never once in their lives had to deal with the likes of Tuskegee or AIDS. They can just turn off the telly when AIDS adverts come on, they can switch off if the issue comes up, because it’s not their problem (thanks, Mr Speakes!). AIDS may affect straight people too, but the discourse was so fixated on gay people that the issue became a sticking point for that community in a way that it couldn’t for straight people. The name for AIDS was originally GRID: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. It’s a sticking point, you’ll understand.Although, straight white women have also had to deal with the moralisation of their medication (especially in reproductive health). But that’s voluntary healthcare that they have a right to; though the denial of abortion rights is just as cruel as the abandonment of gay men to AIDS, one entailed a certain glee at the prospect of gays dying off, while most people would likely agree that abortions are a tragedy even when they’re needed. So, it’s unfortunate that COVID deniers exist within the LGBT+ community and among people of colour, but we kinda have a good reason to be a little bit wary on some topics.It’s very fortunate that we live in an age of information, where every trace of the virus can be tracked and recorded, but the AIDS crisis took place in a time when your best phones weren’t going to be surfing the net at a touch of a glass screen.Davies’ writing humanises not only the people who suffered under the AIDS crisis, but also their choices during it. The mistrust in the government. The suspicion at the rumours. The realisation once their friends start to “go home” in secret. The disappearances racking up. And yet, the shame, the constant shame, the years of internalised homophobia racking up, but the sex feels so good and its available in every single gay bar without question, just find a nice guy and give him the eyes and five minutes later you’re being ploughed behind some bins! It’s the ultimate escape from your worries!Forget your troubles, come on, get happy!You better chase all your cares away!It’s so, so peaceful, on the other side…I detest when evangelicals liken being gay to murdering and drug abuse, but in the context of the AIDS crisis, the escape provided in sex was very much a means of escape by substance. Shame breeds shame and poor choices. But let’s remember where the shame originated from; those evangelicals, who led the marches and demanded gay silence and opposed basic rights. That’s the source of the shame and bad choices, and it’s an issue that continues even to this day in the hook-up culture and COVID gay party circuits. Being gay is not wrong, but anything that’s used as an escape can become an issue where it’s not practiced safely, and the 1980s gay scene in Britain and America alike threw caution to the wind in an understandable but self-destructive cycle.But always remember the why.The shame that nobody asked for.That vicious, violent, evil, moralised shame.It’s a Sin is a triumph in showcasing the times through the gay lens.And the lens through which the tale is told is phenomenal.As I said before, the leads all live together, all helping one another to get through the crisis. There’s no weak link out of any of them; all five are given excellent space to grow. Olly Alexander plays Ritchie, the group’s main AIDS sceptic who eventually contracts the virus. Lydia West (a rising Davies star) plays Jill, a straight ally who devotes herself to AIDS campaigning at a time when few others would have cared. Omari Douglas plays Roscoe, a non-conforming gay man who has to run away from his home before his family can send him away to get “cured”. And Callum Scott Howells plays Colin, a sweet-natured and introverted tailor’s apprentice who falls ill with AIDS after just one boyfriend.Of the main cast, Nathaniel Curtis as Ash is perhaps the least well served in his own right, acting as more of a gay mentor to Ritchie as he enters the scene. But he still gets some nice moments in dealing with workplace homophobia and Section 28’s educational impact.Prime Minister Thatcher may not have wanted to moralise as her main priority, but she made damn sure that others did so on her behalf.And real lives were lost to this.A lesser writer would have taken the time to explain simian viruses and technical details, even in an anachronistic manner, but Davies knows better than to get so bogged down in that. The source of the tension is not in which viruses do what, like in a medical drama; rather, it's on the human beings who suffer through an ignorance-based and bigotry-fuelled genocide. It's a Sin benefits enormously from this prioritisation.It’s made clear throughout the series that these people have more going for them in their lives than just being “gay”. Ritchie and Jill dream of performing on stage, seeing their names in lights and becoming massive stars. Roscoe might have shallow goals in becoming rich, but he knows when to walk away from lavish lifestyles for good causes (taking a nice piss in Prime Minister Thatcher’s coffee for good measure). Ash’s career as a teacher comes into conflict with his orientation. And Colin just wants to learn and explore, always with an earnest heart and a desire to do well for those he cares about.This is a wonderful sight, both in the writing and in the actors, as they do not fall into the gay stereotypes. Ritchie is a catty brat who embodies some of the unsavoury traits most associated with gay people, but he’s far from a static character, progressing from a baby gay into a fully-fledged ringleader of the Pink Palace, before the true calamity of the AIDS crisis hits him as his friends start to die. There’s not a single death that we don’t care about; even minor characters like Gregory/Gloria are hard to watch as they break apart.The divide between the characters makes one thing clear; it didn't matter if you did everything right like Colin, or if you were wrong from the start like Ritchie. AIDS doesn’t discriminate between sinners and saints; it just killed as many gay men as it could find.Some of the cast could have been given bigger roles, such as Neil Patrick Harris’ character Henry Coltrane and Ritchie’s agent Carol Carter (Tracey Ann Oberman), but there are some limits on what you can do with five episodes. Each actor and actress plays their role perfectly, and the end result gives those actors time enough to make lasting impressions.And what’s better is that Davies doesn’t shy away from the fact that some gay men are very toxic people.Gay life wasn’t all rainbows, even before AIDS.Stephen Fry plays a Member of Parliament who uses Roscoe for sex and racial publicity stunts to boost his career. Colin’s boss is a sleazy old man who tries to sexually assault him, only stopping once he sees that Colin is researching AIDS at Jill’s request. Men have an earned reputation as being a little (shall we say) forward with their advances, and gay men are no exception to this problem. The LGBT+ community has to face up to this fact, just as much as straight men do. We should be working together to respect people, whether it’s in stopping a straight man hitting on ladies in a bar with roofies to hand, or a gay man who abuses their position of power against their young underlings.Indeed, Colin’s boss’s insistence on sleeping with him, only to fire him once he sees what Colin has been reading, is scarily reminiscent of the abuses of power committed by the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Roger Ailes’ abuses.Moreover, those who might have complained about Jill’s racebending (the real Jill (Nalder) was a white woman, not black) will be pleased to know that the inspiration for Jill Baxter has a role in the show, playing the fictional Jill’s mother.It’s a poignant, heartfelt cameo.And it lays bare the human core of the show.Speaking of mothers, It’s a Sin is glorious in its depictions of maternal grief.Colin’s mother Eileen weeps openly for her son and refuses to let him be imprisoned in hospital like some kind of diseased lab rat, preferring to take him home and to find him a proper medical service. She refuses to leave her son to die a lonely death, she allows his friends to visit him, and her unapologetic love for Colin against society’s homophobia as neurological diseases eat away at his brain is nothing less than beautiful.Eileen refuses to believe that her son is infectious, she demands that he be given the warmth and the dignity that he deserves as he dies. She never leaves his side, and she accepts his homosexuality without a thought.On the flipside, we have Ritchie’s mother, Valerie.I’m not ashamed to say that I was shaking.Not with sadness.Not with love.But with utter, unmitigated fury for her.Borderline hatred, in fact.It’s a testament to the supreme talents of Davies’ writing and Keeley Hawes’ acting that I could even sit looking at the screen for long enough to watch her scenes.When faced with her son’s condition, Valerie lashes out at Jill for acting as Ritchie’s homo-shield (even though Jill reminds her that they had always been upfront that they were not dating). She screams at doctors and nurses who can’t get her the information that she needs quickly enough. She slaps her husband Clive (who’s not exactly a paragon of familial support himself) when he starts crying at the news of his son’s impending death. In an instant, she switches from loving mama to grieving, demented harpy.Valerie gets one of the scariest lines in the entire show:That's what they say [that AIDS can’t be cured]. That's what those queers and those women and their doctors all say, because they all do and they say and they think the same things. They all worship the same rubbish.Growing up religious, I’ve heard that language a million times.As if we worship facts and base reality.It’s not a good argument.Compare her to another It’s a Sin mother, Sandra, who spits at Valerie’s wilful blindness while coping with her own son Derek’s diagnosis:What the hell were you looking at? If you didn't know he was gay all those years, what did you see when he was 11? When he was 15, 16? How old is he? 30? All 30 years and every little speck of him's bent as a nine bob note since the day he was born. I'll ask you again, love, what were you looking at? You're his mother, you're supposed to think about him day and night. So what the fuck were you doing?True, Sandra saw Ritchie acting “queer”, which he hid from his mother.But always ask one simple question:Why did he have to hide?Valerie perfectly captures the attitudes that straight communities (at least, those in tune with the Moral Majority/British moral standards) had for gays, along with those of the evangelicals pushing anti-gay propaganda. Because Christians worship God, we must worship “LGBT”. The men they know would fuck a chicken if they had to, so gays must be objectifying one another on a similar level. Because the Majority say and think and do the same things, so must every gay (despite their God having no empirical research beyond a holy book’s intuitions and AIDS being an observed biological phenomenon).Even when they’re trying to look as though they care (indeed, Valerie does care, and that’s the really scary thing about her; she cares so damn much, even with her bigot flag flying high, in literally every other respect but the deadly one she’s a perfect mother), they degrade the “queers” as objects of disgust, to be ridiculed as contrarian elements.The scarier part is that, no matter how much people like Valerie may claim to “care” about the gay sons they raise, they can never quite get it.They’re on the “outside”.And when they’re not “inside”, they get angry.They’ve been “lied to”, despite fostering conditions wherein lies are needed.They don’t consider why heaven and Earth had to be moved at all.They adhere to that Moral Majority, they throw gays to the wolves, tutting at the evening news as the “Ignorance” ads come on the telly, rather than ever engaging with the deaths and the suffering and the losses. They pretend that the problem is happening to other people and so it doesn’t and shouldn’t concern them. They cry as they burn their gay son’s possessions, as if crying about it does that son any good. But still, they consider themselves to be loving enough that their sons should tell them about being gay.“I’m your mother, you can tell me anything!”, they’ll all say.Forgetting the conditions at play.That’s the Moral Majority world out there.Even in the twenty-first century.Nobody’s doing a damn thing to shut them up.And then. the “nice” members of the Majority, the ones who just sit and tut, they’ll wonder why they never knew, why their sons never told them about their homosexuality in the first place, why they had to keep their lives a secret, why they would keep secrets from their own loving mothers, why they marry women to avoid societal shame, why they go out and fuck and kill others by fucking in the middle of a crisis because GOD they hate themselves SO FUCKING MUCH thanks to the shame, the constant fucking shame.There’s a level of personal responsibility, but that shame destroyed everything.And when Jill reminds Valerie of how much blood she has on her hands, her limp response of “I didn’t know” is disturbingly hollow.That’s the point.She knew.You all know.Maybe you don’t know who is gay and who is straight, but turning our backs on suffering communities and laughing about them on the evening news, or even just making a dismissive tut and saying “that’s a shame” before going back to your morning coffee? You know that that’s wrong. You know it’s just building up a wall, to shield you from your prejudices. You know that AIDS isn’t “Angels in Disguise”, as Ritchie’s neighbour Charity tries to tell him that it is, nor is it God’s judgement. It’s a virus, plain and simple, that causes AIDS, and moralising it killed thousands upon thousands of gay people.If you ever did that during the AIDS crisis, It’s a Sin has one simple message.They all die because of you.In Davies’ work, there is a common theme.Society’s flaws are our own flaws.In Doctor Who, the companions were forced by the Doctor to become better people, focusing on what they could do to help the universe. While Rose Tyler had her eyes opened to a life beyond her little flat and job, and Donna Noble became the most important woman in the universe for one shining moment, Martha Jones was arguably the epitome of this message. She travelled the entire world in Last of the Time Lords to defeat the Master, and then she called the Doctor out on his treatment of her upon her return.Years and Years followed in this trend, with Muriel Deacon’s speech in the last episode reminding us that, while ten-thousand days might seem like a long time for things to change in, it’s really not very long at all. It’s not like we didn’t see the changes coming, it’s not like we stopped our support of Amazon or automated checkouts or anything else. We may not be in power, but we do choose who gets into power, and we consistently vote for those who will put the interests of businesses over those of live people.As Muriel says, this is the world we made.Cheers. all.Davies clearly takes his inspiration from the same source that inspired the works of Kahlil Gibran, especially in this passage here:Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree, So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self.Kahlil Gibran, The ProphetIt’s a Sin continues this theme of collective responsibility.It’s our priorities that leave students in so much debt.It’s our priorities that render our health services near-crippled.It’s our priorities that dehumanise refugees and gay/trans people.It’s our priorities that do nothing about systemic racism and sexism.This is the world we made.The world of the 1980s was the world of the AIDS crisis, a world which so many people saw unfolding and yet did nothing about. Precious allies did what they could, but in the face of government obstruction, there was nothing to be done beyond being there for others and giving a little bit of compassion. Some reports do note Prime Minister Thatcher as visiting gay people in the hospitals as they died, but by then, it was too little too late. She, and others like her, consider their duty done in the performative nature of their actions, and then they can turn around and wash their hands clean.While simultaneously introducing Section 28.Prime Minister Thatcher’s private secretary Caroline Slocock might make excuses for her in her solo moments, as a woman who extended some empathy in private visits to gay men. But that purported empathy did not translate into proper care. Politics was all that Prime Minister Thatcher cared about, that and keeping the government purse strings closed to an inhumane degree (such a mindset received the name “Thatcherism”). And she made very sure to denigrate gay men with her health material obstructions and her conference speeches, both of which had disastrous long-lasting societal effects.For her, the place for AIDS awareness was in a public toilet, not on television.For her, publications on safe-sex practices were too “explicit”.For her, the British public’s feelings were too important to risk on a feedback questionnaire aimed at minimising the risk of AIDS.Behold, an Iron Lady made a butcher of the thousands.And some gays, like Ritchie, even voted for her.She let them all down.Not that she was alone, of course:The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester [James Anderton] said in 1987 that people with Aids were 'swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making'. He advocated the reintroduction of corporal punishment: 'They should be punished until they repent of their sins. I'd thrash some criminals myself.' Anderton retired in 1991 shortly after telling Woman's Own that 'sodomy in males ought to be against the criminal law.' He also said: 'I feel very close to God.'Cleanliness is next to Godliness is next to genocide.But sure enough, had COVID-19 reared its head during Prime Minister Thatcher’s leadership, she would have swarmed on that bastard without a moment’s hesitation or mercy, with all of the decisiveness that she displayed in the Falkland Islands.Google it.So, be grateful that COVID-19 can get anyone.Don’t be grateful that it exists, that’s silly.But be very grateful that, if it had to exist, it’s at least a universal threat.Even if your nan or your grandpa got it, even if your siblings died of it. Hell, if you got it yourself, whether hospitalised or incapacitated, or if it’s having a longer impact.Be grateful that it can and will affect everyone it touches. Take a measure of comfort in the fact that it’s been treated as a public health calamity, do not take it lightly or for granted that the governments of the world (mostly, looking shiftily at Trump and President Bolsonaro here) banded together to handle it from the moment it was unleashed into the world. Because it hits everyone, because nobody is safe from COVID-19’s effects, it gets attention and focus that was denied to so many gay men across the 1970s and 80s.Instead of the laughter, we now get national lockdowns.That is good and proper.But there was a time, forty years ago and yet the blink of an eye, wherein a so-called “gay plague” would have gotten nothing of the sort.The World Health Organization (WHO), in 1988, declared December 1st to be World AIDS Day. By the end of the decade, there were at least 100,000 reported cases of AIDS in the United States and WHO estimated 400,000 AIDS cases worldwide.I wonder just how many gay men have had to isolate for the last year, many with intensely homophobic families, either remaining closeted or silent to keep the peace at home in small flats, shielding an entire generation that would only have tutted away at their genocide (that's precisely what it was) back in the day?And AIDS hasn’t gone anywhere, either.All we know now is how to manage it better.So spare us “LGBTs” a thought every now and then. Because, despite my personal atheism, sometimes COVID-19 feels like one of these stupid divine tests you hear about in the Bible, with the Ten Plagues and the famines and the genocides and the burnings and David’s Three Days of Pestilence. You'll know the stories well enough.The last time a virus felt like a divine test, it was launched at my queer forefathers.Final Drury rating: 10/10