Product: Queer as Folk 2 [Region 2] (2000)
Rating: 5.0
There is no fun in bigotry
You have to be British to imagine such a soap opera, what do I say, A Coronation Street centered on gay people moved from the London East End to Manchester's Canal Street. But at a time when the Germans in Berlin are inaugurating a monument in honor of the pink triangles of the Nazi concentration camps, it feels good somewhere in your heart or soul. Are we finally opening the doors of all our cabinets and letting them come out and live just like anyone else? Are we finally starting the real aggiornamento that will bring everyone out and equal on the same main street, on the same bulwark to freedom, a destination that will always be a destination because there will always be some more freedom to conquer, some more way to go. But this series has gone a long way indeed. But the best part of it is how the series shows all the warped visions of the world, and there are many, the various generations of gay people, and there too there are many with many shades and hues, have grown, cultivated, bred and even amplified into some kind of both forbidding and apocalyptic myth, one of these misty myth some consider the acme of truth like the a*** being for s***, forgetting that the p*** must also be for p*** and the mouth for spit. The whole palette of gay bashing individuals is exposed though most of the time in passing notes, except at the end when 15 year old Nathan has the courage to expose a straight high school tourist who has come with his girl friend to that gay bar though he spends his time at school bashing the boys that are weaker than him and look slightly different from him, which is easy since he is a bigot. At the same time the series shows how having been forced to remain clandestine for so long, these young or not so young gay men have become unable to accept the simplest human relation that has ever existed between two or even more than two individuals, love, the famous libido, that attraction for the other, that appeal that only looks for tenderness and togetherness. And there the distortions are numerous: the butterfly that compensates his fate by fluttering from one bloom to the next and becoming a predator; the shy guy who is and has been in love with his school friend for more than fifteen years and cannot just accept it because the other is the one playing the butterfly-predator and has been since the very moment the two met; and the fifteen year old who just feels lust but discovers that lust is fun but it is always short lived and it requires running as fast as the wind from one desert to the next, from one erg to the next in the never ending sands of a lust-filled life. The film though shows him as a kid who makes his point and remains a kid and runs away from his anti-gay father, from his tolerant mother, from all his friends to go to London and what, tell me please, what on earth that he does not have there in Manchester? And yet all around these three there are plenty more who are just crossing the screen without any detailed resumes but we can imagine it is the same for them, be they playing now and then the drag queen, the sad discreet boy or man who is in love but does not have the guts to fight for it, or thinks that money can buy anything. Wrong. It is a lot more important to know all the actors who impersonated Doctor Who, a cult series but only, or should I say mainly, in GB. Of course since it is a British series the acting is a lot better than the various US soap operas because in Great Britain it is an honor for an actor to be on a TV series, in a film and on a theater stage simultaneously. Television series are not in any way a sloppy disgrace. British TV series are gems of their own merit.[...]