<em>It’s a Sin</em> and the Ritual of AIDS Fiction

The show’s five episodes are rich with texture, and the gang’s ambitions, flings, and catchphrases all come to feel like your own. Yet the engine of the plot is AIDS itself. It stalks stealthily in the beginning, then strikes peripheral figures, then inculcates fear and denial, and then moves in to kill beloved heroes. The characters who do not die end up having their narratives defined by the way they care for those who do. At one point, Ritchie asks for just a single night when the disease is not the topic of every conversation with friends. The truth, of course, is that there can be no escape for these characters. Dance and love and camaraderie come off as precious and fragile things, embattled by social and medical realities.

In this aspect, and in many others, It’s a Sin has a ritualistic feel, touching on all the catechisms of AIDS storytelling. Community-building, activism, shame and stigma, the particular cruelties of the disease: It’s a Sin hits eachs of these motifs with finesse, comedy, gentleness, and guts. The show is particularly canny about the way in which AIDS forced visibility for queerness. Meryl Streep’s Mormon-mom character in the 2003 HBO adaptation of Angels in America gets a number of analogues here: With each young man who confronts the disease comes a set of parents who must choose denial, acceptance, or rejection of their son’s sexuality. In the show’s narrative, in actual history, and so often in popular culture, death makes gay people seen.

What really sets It’s a Sin apart in the genre of English-language AIDS epics is the Britishness of the show’s setting. Cosmopolitan ’80s London—with its old-world structures, architectural and social, housing new scenes of diverse self-expression—replaces the New York or San Francisco of so much AIDS fiction. In a recent column, the British journalist Gus Cairns writes that he recognized many of the show’s locations from his own life and was “concussed by the historical and emotional accuracy of this series.” Still, Davies is a talented-enough storyteller that very little of the show needs translating for a non-U.K. audience. The fact that the disease’s awful logic remains unchanged by its surroundings, in fact, adds to the feeling that the show is simply reinterpreting some ancient and sad tune.

The tune still teaches. It’s a Sin is often openly didactic, such as when Ritchie addresses the camera with a frenetic listing of reasons he doesn’t believe the virus is real. The monologue explains the psychological mindfuck that AIDS represented—and also happens to skewer modern denialism around COVID-19. In Britain, It’s a Sin’s popularity inspired a surge in people seeking HIV testing, and I’ve seen social-media posts from viewers saying they investigated the preventive drug PrEP because of the series. These outcomes show that the work of reaching new generations continues. So does the work of reaching the Black, brown, and non-Western populations most threatened by AIDS—though this series, which is diversely cast yet still white-centering, does not diligently pursue that work.