TV Screen Queens

The first episode of Channel Four's Queer as Folk left me open-mouthed in horror. It was like a bad dream, as if someone had taken some sketchy details from my life and was replaying them, but neglecting to include a shred of warmth or humanity. Aghast, I watched as the central character, this shit called Stuart, get away with the most obnoxious behaviour. In an unrecognisable fantasy world, that was purporting to be mine, brutality was cool.

Shallowness, and single-minded selfishness, brought rewards such as loyal friends, a trendy loft apartment, and the gift of paternity, from women who had chosen him above all others. My nightmare was complete, when the 15-year-old he had taken home, shagged, and dumped in the morning, Nathan, turned out not only to have enjoyed it, but showed every sign of wanting to be like him when he grew up. The fact that it was an excellently produced nightmare, with a brilliant soundtrack, did not prevent me from wanting someone to pinch me hard and wake me up.

But first impressions are not always reliable. Since then, I've been wondering where my sense of humour went that night; I watched the first episode again on tape recently, and found myself grinning right through it, as I have done in all the episodes since. I had forgotten one important fact: no television programme will ever capture my experience as a gay man. I made the classic mistake of expecting this series to do it.

TV is entertainment, not real life. This is sexy, funny, glossy soap. It may be about as authentic to gay men as EastEnders is to people living in Stepney, but it's confident enough to stand on its own terms. The central character is supposed to be loathed, like JR in Dallas. Perhaps he'll be redeemed by Nathan's innocence; probably not. But it's going to be a lot of fun to watch.

Russell T. Davies, the writer, has said about the world he's created: "It is driven by sex a lot of the time. It is a world in which sex is more readily available—where you can pick a man up in a nightclub without chatting up, if you so choose; and that's what I like about it. It's not just showing that 'here's a lifestyle that all gay men follow', it's looking at a few men that have chosen that lifestyle, that choose to live that way."

I do wonder about the level of choice involved in the desperate search for casual intimacy that goes on every night, in gay pubs and clubs throughout the Western world. It doesn't feel like I've chosen it, sometimes. I think, initially, no one does. Rapidly, it becomes the lesser of two evils; the greater one being to get emotionally involved, in order to get hurt again.

Stuart's unabashed refusal to have someone more than once begins, gradually, to seem childlike, naive. His relentless flight from any attachment whatsoever I could get to find endearing, though I have no idea how any self-respecting lesbian would ask him to father and take care of a child, if he were the only man left in the world. But he is funny. After a night of insane drugs, wild sex and a blackout, he wakes up and looks in astonishment at the graffiti that he's written all over the walls of his trendy loft apartment. With a joyous, almost Wildean, panache, he earnestly declares, "It's the pens, I've got to get rid of the pens".

The friendship between the characters, however, is what Davies is really writing about, and is the most subtly subversive thing about the series. Stuart and Vince are friends in a way that only gay men can be, and it's a pleasure to see it on screen. Physically affectionate, kissing and hugging, they tell each other everything, and look out for each other as they go cruising together. When asked about why they don't shag, Vince explains that if they were to sleep with each other, they'd never be able to look each other in the face again. It is a form of intimacy that rarely gets shown on screen, but it's one that is very familiar to me. As the series develops, it will be interesting for non-gay viewers to register how friendship between gay men is not unrequited frustrated love in the heterosexual sense, but something quite different.

On the subject of friendship, Andrew Sullivan has been writing about it recently, in his latest book Love Undetectable, a collection of three essays. The third is a paean to the fraternal love he has for his friends. He points out how friendship hasn't been seriously addressed in any theoretical or philosophical manner this century, that it's been taken for granted, or allowed to wither away. His writing is elegant and moving, and elegiac for those he has lost.

Davies is doing the same for television drama, I suspect. His eye for detail is acute, he captures the glorious variety and eccentricity of the men we meet, when we look for sex, and the daffy things we queens do when not on the prowl. Only a group of gay men would sit down together and watch a video of Diana's funeral. As Stuart strides across the dancefloor, with seemingly effortless confidence, and successfully arranges a threesome with the two most beautiful men there, his friends can only stand, watch, and admire. "If only we knew the magic words", says Vince wistfully, with a face full of love and wonder at his friend's chutzpah. As Stuart snogs them both, I am won over completely, cheering the adventurer on in his exploits. "He says those words for all of us", says Vince, and I can only agree.

A damn good show.