Television
Gorgeous and gay
Simon Hoggart
ueer As Folk (Channel 4) returned fj week, set in a Manchester which looked like a cross between Rio and the Upper East Side. It seems to be a very dif- ferent city from the one in which I used to work. On the Guardian in those days was an elderly sub-editor, a nice inoffensive fel- low in a mud-green cardigan. Once he said wistfully, 'This gay liberation business, you know, it's all come a bit late for me.' It was one of the saddest things I've ever heard.
Of course, if he's still alive, he'll have cottoned on to the fact that he's no more welcome at the party now. There are few quietly desperate men in mud-green cardies cruising Canal Street. Everyone there is young, gorgeous and spends their time pouting, eyeing each other's backsides or standing droopily around like Michelan- gelo's 'David', existing only to be admired. Nor do they go home to small lonely hous- es in Burnage; instead they have breathtak- ing loft conversions and live as stylishly as any Wall Street bond trader.
Everywhere in gay Manchester is gor- geous. The streets are hung with glistening lights to celebrate the permanent carnival. Even the supermarket where one character works is bursting with light and colour. Not one of them steps outdoors until he is dressed like a male model. When they check into a hotel for a night together the walls are covered in carmine rag-rolling. And they're never so passionate that they don't have time to fold their trousers carefully before draping them over the chair. These guys are confronting the reality of homo- phobia in modern society by means of Paul Smith suits, exotic cocktails and sauna baths decorated like a Las Vagas hotel lobby.
After a while I realised that we were meant to be envious. It is a comedy drama, like the other Mancunian show, Cold Feet, but we're not supposed to yearn to be like that lot. The producers of Queer as Folk say they don't want to deal in issues, so there are no tragic Aids victims or gay couples trying to adopt. But there is certainly a message: we have richer, fuller, more satis- fying lives than you. So the opening scene, in which a threesome gets going in yet another beautiful loft, is certainly meant to shock with its crotch-grabbing, but it's also saying, look, if we fancy someone, we just tug at their genitals, as if summoning the butler for another drink. Don't you wish you could do that? Hey, guys, you'd love to be promiscuous, if your boring wives and girlfriends would let you. But we are. At a wedding, the dreary high-point of any straight's love-life, one of the gay charac- ters begs his friend: 'Don't shag the bride- groom, please,' — why? Because the lucky fellow might, I suppose.
(At the same wedding someone makes what the Radio Times terms 'a "joke" in breathtakingly bad taste'. It's about a mixed drink called the Jill Dando: 'one shot goes straight to your head'. I liked that line, not because it's funny or original, but because it's the way young men actually talk. And it's only 'breathtakingly' bad taste because it was about someone from the sanitised, privileged Land of Television. Always nice to get a vacation from there, especially while you're watching television. The same Radio Times is packed with pic- tures of Charlie Dimmock and the chap from Changing Rooms, who switched roles for a programme which I made- a point of missing. I find the implication that we are deeply fascinated by these people more offensive than the Dando joke.) The programme's political message is driven home in many ways. The only time we see a real city — cramped, suburban homes with ramshackle fencing and rub- bish-strewn streets — is when we're with the straights, who live in squalor. The three heroes' mums have a chat about anal sex. One of them said she 'screamed the place down,' but another quite enjoyed it: 'You can read a book at the same time.' Again, the message: all men prefer anal sex, but our partners are willing.
At times I was reminded of children who can't imagine that their parents have had sex more times than they have children. Watching the face of yet another under-age youth being shagged on screen, I thought, look guys, straights do it too. And hard though it is to believe, we also enjoy it. But of course we're meant to enjoy furtively the idea of gay sex. Channel 4's huge posters for the two-part series declare that it's 'back with a bang', which just might be a pun.
I don't mind any of this. Whenever mem- bers of an oppressed group, like my sad col- league in Manchester, begin to realise that they can lead full and open lives, they want to celebrate themselves. For instance, Good- ness Gracious Me is based on the central idea that Asians are smarter than whites. Queer as Folk says look at us, aren't we ter- rific? It's no more a plea for understanding than Dallas was meant to generate sympathy for oil millionaires. We are invited to gawp through the window and envy them.
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