'It’s a Sin': a TV show providing insight into internalised homophobia

Prompted by the newly-released British TV series “It’s a Sin,” Ilya Welsh reflects on the ways in which gay men can themselves come to internalise homophobia.

Illustration: Flynn Klein

I have always known that I was somewhat unhappy with my physical presentation, a nagging sense of never being true to myself. The realisation that this dissatisfaction was in fact shame that I had been suppressing only became apparent this January when I watched “It’s A Sin.”

I was not expecting to respond to “It’s A Sin” – the new drama from Russell T Davies that tracks the lives of five friends during the AIDS crisis – the way I did. It’s a show that represents me, it is joyous and dramatic. It drives home the impact of a disease that became the perfect weapon of homophobia. One cannot help but see the resemblance with how the world reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, that is the most boring reading of the show you could have. Instead, I got a sense of how the world’s view of gay men impacts them. The disgust and the fear. The experiences that our characters have humanises them and the gay experience for audiences that may not understand.

“I do know that Ritchie felt shame, in that moment he felt like he was offering something that was exactly what he had been taught straight men wanted and gay men were good for. ”

Our characters deal with HIV personally. Our main character, Ritchie, goes home to spend time with his parents after his positive diagnosis. He quickly finds it too heated with his dad and escapes to the local pub. He ends the night breaking down in front of an old school friend and offering to give him a blowjob. So much of this scene plays into the psychology of gay men. And I am afraid to try and decipher it, but maybe there is something about never being accepted by a group that we offer ourselves to in other ways, which is a form of acceptance. Or we are just very horny. I don’t know but I do know that Ritchie felt shame, in that moment he felt like he was offering something that was exactly what he had been taught straight men wanted and gay men were good for. 

“I had never considered myself as possessing shame before. Now, I bloody well do.”

It was at the end of this penultimate episode I started to sob: Ritchie makes a declaration against the narrative the disease has written for him. During the last episode, I did not stop crying as the show explains the origins of Ritchie’s shame. Ritchie’s parents have to confront his diagnosis and his sexuality, and their reactions are not expected, but they ring true. The warm mother was presenting a façade, she is truly as cold as the dad had always seemed and now it’s the dad that can’t control his emotions. Neither can grasp the reality of the situation. The mum is unable to accept the diagnosis let alone the sexuality, there is a mental block that prevents her from understanding anything Ritchie goes through. Ritchie pleads, and says “I am sorry” and the mum breaks down in front of her son, she cries for her son but remains as callous to Ritchie, the person.

Jill, Ritchie’s best friend, in this final episode explains to Ritchie’s mum that she caused him shame, she and everyone made him feel like he had to hide who he was, and her response is telling: “I didn’t know!” This is how all of us gay men still experience shame today – from such a young age we learn that our sexuality is undesirable. You try being what your parents and society want you to be and this comes at the cost of suppressing who you are. I knew, still sobbing after the episode that I was not crying because what was happening on screen warranted it – I was crying because I was ashamed and I saw that mirrored in Ritchie. I knew it was shame before Jill explained it and I had never considered myself as possessing shame before. Now, I bloody well do.

Learning homophobia

When I was a kid, I saw the looks I received when I put makeup on and I never put it on again. I cannot explicitly remember what was said during my childhood that stopped me from expressing myself, but it was probably more than just looks. I held onto the feminine clothes for as long as I could, but eventually, I overcorrected. I acted as if I did not care about my appearance but instead I just was not allowed to look how I wanted.

I remember what people said later in life though.

“Ilya, you’re not like other gays.”

“Vain men are so unattractive.”

“You wouldn’t be into [insert camp gay guy’s name], you’d be into more manly men.”

“He may have experimented, but he ended up with a woman so he wasn’t Bi.”

It is weird, I am not even Bi and yet I am afraid that if I date a woman people will not believe me to be queer anymore. I fear how I will be perceived if I stop meeting people’s expectations. All this fear, all this shame was internalised, it wasn’t my fear or my shame originally. I remember how I was just last year and I know that it was my shame manifesting as homophobia.

At 20, I said “I don’t like feminine men.”

At 21, I broke up with a gay friend whose personality I had never accepted.

At 22, I said “I have never met a gay guy I liked.”

At 23, my friends realised that LGBT rights were the only ones I didn’t speak up for, I didn’t think anything of this and laughed it off.

At 24, I said “I’m not into Rupaul, I like drag queens but it’s too bitchy.”

At 25, I thought that men could not wear female clothes and exhibit masculine traits at the same time.

At 26, I matched with a guy and lost interest when he was “too camp” for me to date, because I knew there were people who would see me differently if I dated him.  

“[...] as a gay man “masculine” is the gold f*cking standard”

These things are not me, I am not a bad person, but I had internalised homophobia because I aligned closely with what everyone else wanted me to be. No group is safe from fear of itself: women can be misogynistic, POC can be racist (and I don’t mean reverse racism, that is not a thing) and it is very telling when you use our internalised hatred to further entrench our shame, to pretend like nothing’s wrong because “[gay figure] doesn’t feel like society is homophobic.”

The only thing I can do now is be as unapologetically me as I can, but who am I? Society had me thinking I was some intellectual laidback guy who played indie folk at the beach, because these traits were rewarded. My beard was rewarded -  “you look so masculine,” my oversized shirts were rewarded because my silhouette was more masculine in them and as a gay man “masculine” is the gold f*cking standard. The amount of gay men who state in their dating app bios that they are “masc4masc”, denoting that they are masculine and will only date masculine men, is frightening. How much shame these men have for themselves, and they are not addressing it, it has taken me 26 years to realise.

When I was a kid I loved Britney Spears. My aunt’s love for Britney reassured me that I could love her music and my uncle even got me her Prerogative album. This unabashed joy for pop music did not last long, it was soon shamed out of me by the disgust that society had for Britney and for men who liked pop music, gay men... And I was not ready for people to know I was gay.

Unlearning homophobia?

It is amazing how something so egregious can be accepted as a truth without any critical analysis. For example, in order to confront my internalised homophobia I am unlearning all the social constructs I have held to be universal. I have held onto the gender binary for far too many years. While intellectually I have known it's socially constructed, I have always had doubts, I have tried to find evidence for the gender binary. But, eventually you have to just accept that it is not real. There is nothing feminine about a dress, it is just a cloth covering the body and the way society wishes to view the body dictates whether the cloth is deemed masculine or feminine. We do not find men in dresses attractive because we are not used to it.

I used to agree that women should shave, that’s called misogyny, and that men shouldn’t wear makeup or dresses and if they did they better try and look as feminine as possible. If men were to wear makeup or dresses, they had to play up to the “male gaze” and imitate a form of femininity built upon -- again, misogyny. The same voice that tells you a man should not wear a dress is the same voice that tells women they need to shave. We need to stop telling people how they should look because in the end it’s all a social construction, and what we individually find attractive is not based on biology but on society. This is the curse of the gender binary, it’s a result of misogyny, homophobia and racism, yes all three, because true femininity is reserved only for white women and is a tool of suppression. If my course has taught me anything, it’s that almost everything can be blamed on colonialism. 

The shame I mentioned manifests itself with a diagnosable term, Toxic Shame. I am not one to self-diagnose and I tend to feel like what I am experiencing isn’t bad enough, “my life is so easy”; “I have such loving parents” -- so why do I feel this way, I’m not worthy of it. It’s quite obvious how people can come to internalise shame, parents tell their kids they aren’t smart enough, or pretty enough or brave enough and over time the feelings become true inside. This isn’t the same as the shame you feel when you teased a kid in school. That shame is warranted, it makes you do the right thing and apologise. The shame you feel when someone else tells you you aren’t good enough is taken in and believed and over time, becomes toxic.

There are many symptoms of Toxic Shame, low self-esteem/worth, inability expressing anger, codependence, self-sabotage, have paralysing anxiety about experiencing embarrassment, feel like a fraud, and self-victimise, perfectionism and irrational guilt. When packaged together you most likely develop depression and anxiety. But as I said, I had loving parents that were aware that children needed to be built up, that they needed to believe in themselves and you should never tell a kid what they can and can’t do. But they also didn’t know I was gay and never even entertained this possibility. So things were said which, while well-intended, led me to feel shame. And a great deal of that led me to develop some of the symptoms mentioned above.  Throughout my childhood, I came to understand that being gay was not desired, it was subtly wrong and so I became shameful of it because I always knew. After coming out, I told people I didn’t know till I was 16 because I felt ashamed of having kept it a secret so long.

All the homophobia I have in me is a direct result of the environment I grew up in. If I can admit that I was homophobic, I think we all need to start looking within at our preconceived ideas of gender and ask ourselves if they are objectively true? Because my homophobia came from all of you. And with that, I conclude this manifesto with this: we need to stop presuming our kids are straight. We need to stop believing that there is any “correct” way of being. If you currently have young kids then you are going to have to confront this in a way my parents' generation has not had to, fluid gender identities and sexualities are becoming more and more prevalent and these next generations aren’t going to take our bullshit anymore, they’re ending the trauma cycle. 

So when you see me next, don’t be surprised if I’m in tacky heels, a mini dress and lip gloss because while I do care about what you think, I care more about being true to myself, and it’s damn time that I did.

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