It’s a Sin.
Ben Blackall/HBO Max
AIDS will kill you. I was taught this in grade school as part of a curriculum that used extreme fear as sex education. I grew up terrified, thinking gay sex meant death. And as a teen who knew he was flagrantly gay, I remember rationalizing the ways I could still lead a happy life (“just mouth stuff and porn”) without dying from having sex with men.
Teenage me was a fantastic idiot.
But the infuriating thing about this educational approach, and something I became angrier and angrier about as I got older, is that I eventually realized the people I was supposed to trust whose advice I was supposed to listen to as a malleable youth always talked about the death and terror of the AIDS crisis but never once discussed the lives of the gay men who were dying. Several hours spent on death, and not even one second about who they were. I wasn’t supposed to even be curious about the intricacies of those lives as their obituaries, riddled with jar
How a hit TV show exposed the failure to learn the lessons of the past on Covid-19
A man lies alone in a hospital bed, frightened and cut off from most of his family and friends, while the outside world grapples with the growing threat of an unfamiliar virus. As he lies stricken, he is cared for by doctors and nurses dressed head to toe in PPE. Eventually he begs for his mother to make him better and asks her through tears if everyone who has contracted this disease has died.
But this isn’t a sequence in a news report from an overwhelmed Covid ward. The year is 1985 and this is a scene from “It’s a Sin,” a searing British television miniseries that explores the AIDS crisis over a ten-year period through the lens of those that lived it.
Listening for the Caribbean on The Crown
APPROXIMATELY HALFWAY through the latest season of
The Crown, the series tackles a most peculiar incident that occurred during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign: the night a British man named Michael Fagan broke into Buckingham Palace. Since the 1982 event, multiple others have tried to scale the Palace fence and gain an audience with the Queen, including one just last year on the anniversary of Fagan’s original break-in. But Fagan didn’t just make it past the perimeters; he had a 10-minute chat with the Queen herself. You would think, then, that it’s the conversation between the two that would take centerstage in the episode entitled “Fagan.” And, to be fair, it’s what the show builds up to, vividly detailing Fagan’s daily life of estrangement and isolation in Margaret Thatcher’s and the Queen’s London before he scales the walls. Yet there is another, far briefer, exchange that’s just as intriguing, and just as pointed
THE EX-FILES
The Crown’s Gillian Anderson ‘has won back her Netflix writer boyfriend after he ditched her for Jemima Khan’
Lisa McLoughlin
Updated: 16 Feb 2021, 9:54
THE Crown s Gillian Anderson has won back her boyfriend Peter Morgan , it has been reported.
The actress, 52, split from British screenwriter and playwright Peter, 57, after four years together in December.
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Gillian Anderson has reunited with ex Peter Morgan, according to new reportsCredit: Getty - Contributor
At the time, one publication reported that their relationship had run its course after busy working schedules and family logistics.
Despite the seemingly amicable breakup, Gillian was said to be shocked at the speed at which Peter had moved on and in with socialite Jemima Khan last month.