Russell T. Davies and gay sex...

[fajrdrako]

silverwhistle sent me a link to a very interesting interview with Russell T. Davies by Stuart Jeffries. I'm miffed with the man for what he did with Captain Jack in the last Doctor Who episode "The Last of the Time Lords", but reading the interview makes me love him all over again. It's just as well I don't demand perfect judgement in my authors - even if I reserve my right to complain loudly and hold a grudge. I suppose my real issue is that I don't trust him as I did.

My favourite bit is near the beginning:

Russell T Davies was at a wedding recently when a guest complained about what he'd done to Doctor Who, an otherwise wholesome family drama. "She told me she was shocked because Captain Jack is bisexual and wouldn't let her children watch it," says Davies. "I had such a go at her. I said: 'You're an unfit mother. You're ignorant. Your children are cleverer than you.' Then her husband came up and I thought there was going to be a fight, but they left."

Then he says:

"The only place I don't like the attention is in gay clubs." You don't strike me as the least Garboish. "Oh, but I am. I love to watch the ghetto come to life - all those people from Tesco and Barclays becoming themselves at night. But I do miss my privacy. God knows what it must be like for David Tennant."

This brought mental images from Queer as Folk to mind - "people from Tesco and Barclays." Do gay people change more than others from their daytime working persona to their recreational time? I don't think so, but the difference might be more striking to those who have made untrue assumptions about them. Either way. I suspect that for every gay man whose personal life is more outrageous and colourful than his coworkers imagine, there is another whose life is as traditional and staid as you can imagine. Dishwashing, watching TV, and walking the dog rather than gay clubs and outre sex.

"What I've often done is to construct invented families where the bonds are better than natural ones." Is that a gay writer's thing - it does sound a tad Armistead Maupin. "Probably. It's not often self-conscious; usually I just have an instinct that these invented families make better stories.

Isn't that just the sign of the times? It isn't only gay people who invent their families. Many of the straight people I know are divorced, or single, or in long-distance relationships, or otherwise living in ways people did not live a century ago.

."Now there are children called gay teenagers and I hate them." Why? "Pure jealousy. I never came out at school and so missed out on the snogging and dry-humping. I, like most of my gay contemporaries, had 10 damaging years where we didn't do all that adolescent fumbling - that's why there's still such a sexual frenzy for gay men in their 20s."

I can relate. I'm ten years older than Davies and when I was a teen - coming out wasn't even an issue. Wasn't even (as far as I knew) a phrase. I knew I was bisexual before I knew there was a word for it. (Was I naive?) What's a teen to do with that? Not much they can do, and I'm not talking about snogging opportunities¹, but identity issues. The teen years are notoriously difficult for everyone, but I look at the resources and support groups and public knowledge on the issue now, and yes, I'm jealous. It still isn't easy to 'be yourself' but now it's at least possible.

When I ask what he gets up to with his long-time partner, Andrew Smith, a customs officer, he says: "We watch TV and laugh loads. We don't live together, just see each other at weekends. I'm very lucky to have found someone who will tolerate that arrangement. If I'm writing, I would walk over his body if he had a heart attack."

This strikes me as incredibly endearing.

Davies is already planning a project to fill the Time Lord's 2009 gap year. It is a series codenamed MGM (More Gay Men). "It's going to be about fortysomething gay men and how jealous they are of gay teenagers."

Clearly the man is into autobiography!



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¹ Which, I admit, would have been nice.