Yes; that'll make me a lot happier about seeing it when it comes on TV. I can sort of see why it might have been promoted in the UK with a sort of whiff of "middle-class kids on a gap year in the Third World, Wales" but it put my back up.
The Labour Party in the early 1980s really were risking losing a lot of votes by putting gay issues front and centre -- one of the faint gleams in a terrible election was that the electors of Bermondsey finally kicked Simon 'The Straight Alternative' Hughes out, 32 years too late -- and I think the AIDS crisis also made that blow up badly in their faces, too; on the one hand, at least they'd created the conditions where safe sex and not having people arrested on suspicion of street prostitution if they had condoms on their person could at least be discussed (and the awful tombstone ads, oh God!) but on the other hand not only did it make it even more of a vote-loser it did, as you say, pull the queer community's attention towards tackling the specific not the general issues of what was wrong with the 80s.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
Re: I'm not sure
Date: 2015-05-18 06:11 am (UTC)The Labour Party in the early 1980s really were risking losing a lot of votes by putting gay issues front and centre -- one of the faint gleams in a terrible election was that the electors of Bermondsey finally kicked Simon 'The Straight Alternative' Hughes out, 32 years too late -- and I think the AIDS crisis also made that blow up badly in their faces, too; on the one hand, at least they'd created the conditions where safe sex and not having people arrested on suspicion of street prostitution if they had condoms on their person could at least be discussed (and the awful tombstone ads, oh God!) but on the other hand not only did it make it even more of a vote-loser it did, as you say, pull the queer community's attention towards tackling the specific not the general issues of what was wrong with the 80s.