It’s a Sin yanked my heart out of my chest – it was at gay clubs that I finally felt accepted as a teenager

The series documents the tragedy of the beautiful lives lost to the Aids epidemic. But for me, the character of Jill is a reminder of how critical the gay community was for cis women like me

Ritchie (Olly Alexander) and Jill (Lydia West) in ‘It’s a Sin’ (Channel 4)

It’s a Sin, Russell T Davies’s funny, warm and devastating drama, which begins in 1981 and the coming together of a tight friendship group of four young gay men and their friend Jill, has yanked my heart out of my chest and drop-kicked it into the fire.

Last night, my son had to pause it when my tears exceeded the acceptable single-tear-while-watching-something-sad and turned into full-on-hiccupping-sobs. Watching sex scenes with your mother is awkward enough. So too, I imagine, is waiting patiently for her weeping to subside before you can press “play” again. Bless my teenage boy. His own feelings are hard enough to navigate at the moment and his gentle, wordless pad to the kitchen to fetch tissues and water was incredibly touching.

I was a child in the 1980s. If any younger people are still in the dark about just how ignorant we were in those days about HIV, I called the “Aids helpline” when I was 15 because my rabbit bit me and I wanted to know if I was at risk of getting HIV. Yes, I did. The “Jill” on the phone could not have been more patient. I imagine she answered a lot of calls like that. People fretting they might have caught HIV from their pet, or by sitting on the tube next to someone with pink hair or by eating some out-of-date cream cheese.

I had my first kiss that year, too, and immediately ran off to the bathroom to gargle with TCP. Now I can’t smell the stuff without feeling like I’m 15 again and at a house party, demented with fear because I’d let a tongue into my mouth that wasn’t my own and Tracey Hansworth at school had said that’s how you catch Aids.

The paranoia was intense and sensible information was nowhere to be found. The walls of our high school were adorned with the ghastly “DON’T DIE OF IGNORANCE” posters, while keeping us all pretty ignorant. It was left to EastEnders storylines and Princess Diana to properly educate us.

It’s a Sin is, of course, a document of how hideously the Aids epidemic was handled and the tragedy of the beautiful lives lost. But for me, the character of Jill is a reminder of how critical the gay community (as it was called back then) was for cis women like me. At university, I found my “tribe” in Gay Soc (which would now be called the LGBTQ+ Society). The term used for women like us was “f** hag”, which has been pushed out of common parlance for being the insult it is.

Speaking of insults, a few years after university, I became entrenched in the comedy circuit. There were women who were not comics, but loved the “scene”, hung out at comedy clubs and dated male comedians. We unkindly called them “gag hags”. Thankfully, we have moved forward from calling a woman who has the temerity to feel at home in a subculture she is not a full participant of a hag.

But when I started university in the 1990s, “f** hag” was a label I loved, along with “lipstick lesbian”, without ever considering how damaging they were.

There has been the tiniest criticism of It’s a Sin – that Jill’s character is two dimensional and that we don’t learn who she is outside of her role as carer, activist and friend. But I felt like I knew her already and could build my own dimensions to her without too much of Russell T Davies’s help.

The gay community, particularly the clubbing scene, was where many cis women who didn’t feel like we “fit in” hid. I found the whole “pulling” thing among straight people in straight bars and clubs unfriendly and unfathomable. How did my friends chat to these rugby playing, ruddy cheeked guys who talked over them, laughed at their own jokes and didn’t show a chink of vulnerability?

I was frequently dismissed by straight guys for being too “loud”, too “in your face”. Gay guys never seemed to find me “too” anything and welcomed me into their world. We were misfits together. Often they came from homes where they couldn’t be honest about who they were with the very people who brought them into the world and so formed new little family units made of friends. That’s where an Iranian girl with big curly hair and a vast collection of feather boas, deeply embedded in the bisexual closet, fitted right in.  

I went on countless “gay rights” marches, prowled around looking for any hint of homophobia from anyone, so I could stand up for my tribe (thank goodness Twitter wasn’t around then, I literally would not have seen the light of day until I was 30).  

Jill was based on a real woman called Jill, who was white. Casting a mixed race woman to play her (the completely wonderful Lydia West) gave me a moment to remember how, in those days, casual racism was so utterly ordinary. I once briefly dated one of those ruddy-faced lads who, when he went on a weekend home said, “Can I have a photo of you to take with me? No one believes I’m going out with a Paki.” And so we cocooned ourselves into the world of those for whom difference meant that we belonged.