Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Queer today, gone tomorrow
QUEER! Sad To Be Gay, BBC2, 9.00pm
Don't ask us why, but whenever there's a show in the schedules that has some kind of homosexual theme, we tend to think it might be of interest to the lowculture readership. Absolutely no idea why we think that; it's a complete mystery. Anyway, to balance out the many gay-pride themed programmes out there, this one focuses more on the aspect of gay shame. For the uninitiated, that's the feeling you get on the dancefloor at G-A-Y at 3am when you haven't pulled and you're starting to sober up and you realise that not only do you look like a twat when you're covered in glitter, but that you just danced to a Lisa Scott-Lee track without the faintest sense of irony. Not that we'd know anything about that, of course. This documentary (no, wait, come back, etc.) follows David Akinsanya as he comes to the decision that he's had enough of being gay, and wonders how he might go about becoming straight. (À propos of nothing, a quick googling of David Akinsanya's name shows that he's no stranger to TV and radio. We're not going to comment on that, we just found it interesting.) There would appear to be a lot of simple ways of exploring this (seeing a counsellor, perhaps attempting to date some women and seeing what happens), but evidently unable to divorce himself from the gay man's love of high drama, David ends up heading for a "treatment centre" in Tennessee run by fundamentalist Christians who believe that homosexuality is evil and sinful and can be cured only by devoting oneself to God. How convenient for them, says your cynical previewer. We doubt this is going to make for easy viewing, and it's certainly a million miles away from Footballers' Wives (although they did, of course, run a curing-of-homosexuality plotline in the last series), but it looks like it may make more fertile discussion on our messageboards come Wednesday.
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