The program’s title plays on the northern English aphorism that “there’s nowt [nothing] as queer as folk,” innocently meaning that there is no accounting for the behavioral surprises that people will spring on you. But it also suggests a politicized use of the word: the provocatively postgay slogan “Queer as Fuck” associated with radical activist groups that emerged in the late 1980s. “Queer” activists sought to reappropriate the abusive term queer for subversive uses: to counter prejudices against HIV, and to protest against the culture of arcane legislative iniquities in Britain (namely, but not solely, Section 28, which prohibits local authorities from the “promotion of homosexuality” and forbids presenting homosexuality in government-funded schools as an acceptable or appropriate aspect of family life). But more significantly, “queer politics” tried to forge a sexual politics beyond the simple binary of gay/straight, and to disrupt the liberal progressive identity politics associated with gay reform groups Stonewall or GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation). Davies wrote Queer as Folk as a counter to most mainstream TV portrayals of homosexual characters as incidental or associated with misery or villains. All the main characters in Queer as Folk are gay, but instead of attempting to create an imagined gay world that represented a politically correct diversity, Davies focused his setting on Manchester’s Canal Street gay scene. It was filmed on location in a colorful, vibrant style with an upbeat, partying theme and club music sound track.

The three main characters were hardly all likable. They had faults and behaved foolishly, selfishly, or naively. The most striking, Stuart (Aiden Gillen), a late-20s advertising executive, is a pill-popping sexually voracious “scene queen”; for most of the series, he is not “out” to his family. Vince (Craig Kelly), his long-suffering best friend and secret admirer, is the manager of a supermarket. Finally, Nathan (Charlie Hunnam), a 15-year-old boy, is seduced on his first time out in Canal Street by the predatory Stuart and proceeds to fall in love with him. The sequel, Queer as Folk 2, ended by whisking the boys off in their jeep in a magical, surrealistic finale, the audiovisual excess of which broke any links that the series had tentatively kept with the long tradition of British TV social realism.

The strength of Queer as Folk was that it created an entirely credible world for the characters, with their priorities and emotional landscape brilliantly captured in the dialogue and the scenarios depicted. Life in this gay scene was exhilarating, highly pleasurable, and marked by excessive alcohol consumption and drug-fueled sex. It was also misogynistic, exploitative, and deeply materialistic. It unashamedly showed the intimate lives of a few affluent gay men in the 1990s enjoying a consumer-led hedonism that captured the spirit of “scene gays,” and also of many young heterosexual adults living in Britain.

The worth of the series is signified both by its initial disruptive impact, its enduring “after-life” qualities, and its commercial abilities to travel well across the world. Banned from Australian public TV, it spawned the U.S. adaptation, another series, called Metrosexuality (Channel 4, 2001), that featured black gay characters, DVD and music collections, and academic writing and conferences devoted to it. Queer as Folk has become a media phenomenon, sustaining itself as a product of the consumerism that it represented on-screen. The program was critically divisive within a majority, heterosexual society, some hating it, some loving it. Interestingly, it divided gay people and their community representatives in Britain.

Press releases, media commentary, and trailers ensured that viewers expected taboos to be broken: over 4 million of them were not disappointed. The opening ten minutes of the first episode showed 15-year-old Nathan (under the legal age for sex) and Stuart engaged in graphically depicted oral-anal and anal sex. This set a record number of complaints to the ITC, independent television’s regulatory body. These official complaints were not upheld, but the ITC did disapprove of the program’s “celebratory tone” and castigated it for its lack of a moral framework or posttransmission advice about safer sex. Angela Mason of Stonewall, the gay reform group, condemned the program and distanced her organization from the series because it propagated the idea that gay people were sexually promiscuous; Stonewall believed that the program would damage its campaign to lobby the new Labour government (1997) to push its equality and decriminalization laws through Parliament. The program’s sponsor (Beck’s beer) withdrew its support.

The U.S. version is a polished, well-acted, and credible transatlantic version that has worked very successfully for its own constituency, although its wider social impact is restricted since Showtime is a pay-to-view channel. Post-Ellen, it provides a much-needed anti-dote to the wisecracking but anodyne and inoffensive U.S. sitcom Will & Grace.