FLIPPING THE SCRIPT
“Punish my white ass! My ass takes up so much space! It’s so fucking privileged!”
These are the hilariously uncomfortable words that launch Peacock’s hotly anticipated Queer as Folk TV revival. Followed by: “Let me pay reparations with my tight hole!” Moments later, lead character Brodie bails on his hook-up after removing his lover’s jockstrap to find… a Black Lives Matter tattoo. Then, after the white saviour declines Brodie’s parting request for Venmo payment for a hotel, Brodie retorts: “And here I thought you were an ally!”
And with that, this writer picked his jaw up off the floor, Karen from Mean Girls-style. A fiscally tight hole, maybe.
“It’s one of my favourite scenes,” laughs actor Devin Way, who plays Brodie. “It speaks so clearly to the tone we’re setting for heavy issues moving forward: so racially charged, right at the top, speaking not only to the hypersexualisation of Black people by white people, but performative allyship. We let people put BLM in their bios, and they don’t actually exert any allyship! We got to speak on this topic, and it got to be sexy, smart, fun and drive a point forward.”
Origin Story
Charli XCX and Troye Sivan might want to go back to 1999 — an era when a story about a trio of white, cis gay men was genuinely innovative, to be clear — but Queer As Folk circa 2022, evidently, does not. In the words of Kandy Muse, it feels… correct. Where it does overlap with the past, however, is in its unapologetic depiction of queer sex.
“I’m ready to talk about ass-eating — bring it on!” laughs actor Fin Argus (they/them), who plays teenager Mingus (they/them/he/him), when Attitude asks if they’re aware of the hyperventilating cultural conversation around the original’s rimming scene. (They certainly don’t remember it. They were five months old at the time!) History may be about to repeat itself: as per Charlie Hunnam’s impressionable schoolboy in 1999, and Randy Harrison’s angelic Justin in the American version in 2000, Mingus enjoys a sensuous serving of tuchis lingus in 2022.
“It was my first scene,” remembers Fin, who identifies as queer. “It was so much…” they guffaw. “I was in almost full drag, had to do a tuck situation, go into a bathroom stall, get my ass ate… It was hilarious! I’d never done a scene like that prior. Now I feel.”
