[dropcap]“Being[/dropcap] gay is not just about being equal. Once you begin to achieve equality, then you can start to ask, “Who are we?” Every other drama about straight people has been doing this for two thousand years. […] So gay drama can just start catching up with that now. We’ve got two thousand years to go.” For Russell T Davies, this question forms the fundamental basis of his television writing career, from his seminal Queer as Folk which hit our television screen sixteen years ago to his three new interlinked shows, Cucumber, Banana and Tofu. Indeed, the three shows are Davies’ attempt to accelerate this progress of representation as Cucumber and Banana depict the trials and tribulations of the middle-aged gay community and the youthful LGBT respectively, whilst Tofu (an online series) explores all facets of sexuality and sexual practice, regardless of sexual orientation. The shows, Davies explains, are about “who we are, about what we think, how we react, how we blunder through life, how we succeed, the aspirations we have, stuff that actually hasn’t been explored in drama at all,” a powerful statement considering precisely a year ago BBC Drama Boss Ben Stephenson stated that there was a dearth of gay characters on British television.

Never one to shy away from controversy or sexual explicitness, Davies’ show titles are taken from terms employed by sexologists to distinguish the various stages and strengths of penile erection, and the shows engage unapologetically with issues varying from penetrative anal sex, premature ejaculation as well as full frontal nudity. The piece de resistance of this trilogy is Cucumber which Davies states is “sort of the TV equivalent of a novel”, and focuses primarily on the gay middle-aged male experience, embodied within the character of insurance broker Henry (Vincent Franklin). Henry is stifled by the sheer stagnation of his life and his relationship with his long-term partner Lance — with whom he is reluctant to have penetrative sex — eventually causing a deeper rift within their relationship provoking Lance to propose to him one night. Cue the devolution of Henry’s sexual and mental stability as the night progresses from a marriage proposal, to a botched threesome, a colleague’s death, Lance’s arrest and Henry’s eventual flight from his suburban home. Enamoured by Freddie, a blonde Adonis who works in the cafeteria of his office, and having befriended his roommate, nineteen-year-old Dean, Henry begins to relive his youth in the age of instant communication and a more tolerant atmosphere, preparing to embrace the whimsy and laissez-faire attitudes of his youthful cohorts. Whilst Henry’s actions are deemed selfish by both other characters and the audience, Davies argues that Henry’s character is admirable in his willingness to embrace change even to the point of antagonism, “I love him for saying and doing the things that we all wish we said and did and are all slightly too boring to actually do. We all spend a lot of the time behaving… He’s a fire starter. He can’t stop himself from starting little fires and challenging things, and challenging himself, in fairness.”

With the location in Manchester and the same subject matter of Queer as Folk, albeit slightly older characters, what does Davies think of the inevitable comparisons to his former award-winning series, “It’s me, writing about gay men in Manchester, so it’s unashamedly connected… If you’re going to have a legacy, Queer as Folk is a lovely one.” However, one crucial difference between the two shows is the advent of dating apps and websites such as Grindr which have irrevocably changed the gay dating scene. Davie confesses that Cucumber is an opportunity for middle-aged retrospection within the LGBT community, to “look at the life other people are having that you never could have had, and weighing yourself against that.”

 

It is this period of technological and cultural progression and tolerance within modern day society which forms the basis of Banana, a series of eight stand-alone vignettes exploring the lives of peripheral characters whom Henry, and indeed his sister, have met, namely twenty-somethings who depict the multifaceted lives of those within the LGBT community. Davies, however, is quick to dispel the notion that being young and gay is unproblematic in today’s society, “There’s this terrific assumption now that if you’re sixteen and gay, then you have no problems. Every sixteen-year-old has problems…So it is ridiculous to assume that young, gay people are fine.” Refreshingly Banana does not limit the experiences of young gays, bisexuals and lesbians to their coming out experience and highlights the neuroses and struggles that they experience in the sexual minefield of modern life, be it unrequited love, fear of commitment and online hookups. Although Banana can be viewed as a stand-alone series, the scenes from Cucumber are seen from an alternative perspective which highlights both the differences and similarities of being a gay man or woman, be it as a middle-aged man or a millennial. Whilst hooking up has become much easier, Davies argues that these differences from a technological viewpoint are merely superficial, “You can do in two minutes now what used to take a whole night to do in a club. Nonetheless it’s the same thing […] Human emotions haven’t changed, love hasn’t changed, men haven’t changed, lust hasn’t changed, sex hasn’t changed.”

Whilst the shows are light-hearted, and at times border on the absurd, many critics have argued that such portrayals of the LGBT community are detrimental to its representation to the wider community. In 2010 a survey by Stonewall recorded that there was 0% representation of the LGBT community in the overall run time of UK dramas and their portrayal in just forty-six minutes of 126 hour of television took the form of predatory, promiscuous or comical stereotypes. The debate between increasing visibility versus accuracy is one that returns to the Davies’ statement about catching up with “every other drama about straight people”, in which representations of straight characters are never held up as the quintessential representative of the heterosexual norm. For Davies, his programmes, especially Queer as Folk, were not intentionally groundbreaking, “we made it with a very good heart, and with every intention to be honest and true and to say what I thought were interesting things about gay life […] The appetite for that programme, and the joy with which it was welcomed in, which therefore signaled how much we’d been lacking that sort of programme, that’s what made it a success.”