This week’s The truth about everything* is a FLASHBULB. According to the dictionary, a flashbulb memory is ‘an unusually vivid, richly detailed, and long-lasting memory for the circumstances surrounding a dramatic event’. Like a JFK/Princess Diana moment, I guess, but my Flashbulbs are pop culture highlights that got us talking way back when, reappraised with hindsight and better skincare.
It seems quaint now, when soaps feature gay weddings as standard alongside the usual roster of death, treachery, bunk-ups and explosions, but once upon a time, a gay kiss on primetime TV made headlines. Coronation Street, the UK’s oldest soap, was very late to the party when, in 2003, it finally allowed one man’s lips to graze another’s. EastEnders had been reviled well over a decade earlier for showing one man kiss another goodnight, while pearl necklaces up and down the country had trembled in fear way back in the nineties when Brookside showed Beth Jordache getting hot and heavy with the nanny next door. Coronation Street had been experimenting with edgier storylines – serial killers, teenage pregnancies, and gambling addictions – but when it came to rainbow representation, it came up short, other than trans character Hayley, who was played by a cis woman. The lack of queer romance was no surprise, really; back then, Coronation Street was the soap your mum and your gran watched, steeped in history, and its (long over) golden era still revered. Melodrama and violence were part of the package, but homosexuality? That would be a bridge too far.
Any soap covering an ‘issue’ struggles to balance accurate representation and service of the drama. There may be every intention of sensitively developing a gay character and witnessing their self-discovery as a precious and positive event, but a big storyline craves dynamite. Leading character and extremely of-his-time teen heartthrob Todd Grimshaw was created, by gay writer Daran Little, to be sensitive and optimistic, brighter than the others, destined for opportunities beyond the cobbles. Heavily gay-coded, I see now, but at the time, there were only subtle signs, at first, of rumblings underneath the surface, beginning when Todd resisted the sexual advances of his first girlfriend Candice. Once sexually active with his neighbour Sarah, however, he was energised by it, enthused by the loss of his virginity and eager to accelerate his relationship from teenage sweetheart scenario into ‘him indoors’, living together in a grotty flat, co-parenting Sarah’s toddler. Viewers were still in the dark, but watching again from the future, Todd’s gung-ho leap into love is recognisable as relief that he was ‘normal’, using Sarah as a cheat code to distance himself from his feelings. It was very well handled.
But storylines wait for no man. Todd’s gay volcano erupted with such force he was compelled to… well, what would you expect a closeted teenager to do in 2003? Try your luck with p•rn on crushingly slow dial-up, perhaps? Buy a jazz mag from any newsagent who wasn’t Rita? Maybe even wear a balaclava to a gay bar, or phone a helpline? Good guesses, but bad TV. No, a tipsy Todd forced himself on a sleeping, ostensibly straight man next to him on the sofa, Sarah’s sulky beach blond himbo brother Nick. It was heralded as the soap’s first gay kiss but… is it actually a kiss if one of the participants is unwilling and, worst of all, asleep? Isn’t that just sexual assault? ‘Some people thought it was predatory to have Todd try to kiss a straight boy,’ said Daran Little, in a Guardian interview some months later, ‘but to me that was all part of his confusion.’
He has a point, but it is still incredible, really, that this was presented as a watershed moment, as Coronation Street finally moving with the times and embracing the rise of LGBTQ+ culture, sped up by another Manchester-set show Queer As Folk, some four years earlier. If anything, it was pandering to the bulk of its audience’s preconceptions of gay men especially, namely that they’d anaesthetise your angelic, quasi-nordic son and pounce, corrupting them for ever. Ensuing episodes showed young and confused Todd being pilloried by his neighbours, with hateful invocations of ‘gay’ peppering the script like hidden Habanero chilli seeds on an otherwise tame pizza. It was realistic enough – as enlightened as the times felt, people still relished saying very nasty sh•t about queer people, with their chest, everywhere. Fairly freshly out of the closet at the time, not a regular viewer but watching to see how it would be done, I remember mulling over the impact on any gay teenager watching this with their family. In the end, Todd managed to half-convince everyone it was a moment of madness, that he was straight, and committed to his teenage future bride Sarah and her toddler daughter. So far, so recognisable, the (sometimes unintentional) manipulative smoke screen that closeted people find themselves creating. But just as the truth will out, so must young Todd.
It was a familiar scenario, replayed again and again since in those wooden, low-budget coming out movies that bulk out the the LGBTQ+ film section on Amazon Prime. An innocent bromance between inexperienced Todd and a colleague at the hospital, a young gay nurse called Karl – the K letting us know he was a) a bit different and b) not hanging around for long. This bromance, and Karl’s light flirtation, reignited Todd’s curiosity and begat an infatuation and the inevitable affair, at its peak on British screens exactly twenty years ago. This was actually groundbreaking stuff and, at the time, fairly newly out and clinging to any emotional representation, I saw something romantic and heroic, even, in the juxtaposition of Todd’s desire, destiny and his obligations. Karl was hot (in 2004 terms) and he was out, together, more ‘sane and sorted’, you might say. He was charming. A rare gay beast on your telly at 7:30 pm on a weekday evening. I’d remembered it as a thwarted love story, Karl and Todd falling for each other, their clandestine relationship only a dirty secret to protect the hapless Sarah. But it was much more complicated than that. It was uglier.
As many modern viewers of creaking sitcom Friends discovered, the trouble with reappraising historical art – even relatively recent stuff – through modern eyes is that it becomes tarnished by your own life experiences and the tidal wave of social change. You’re consuming it through different filters. On a recent rewatch, I realised Todd’s self-discovery was painted as a hideous deception, while his sweet and oblivious girlfriend – now, for extra damsel points, pregnant with Todd’s child – wondered what she was doing wrong, why Todd was sharp with her, why he was staying out late. Before they’d so much as locked lips, the previously caring and considerate Todd was consumed by Karl and his mid-noughties frosted tips. Karl was not actually charming, or a dashing hero with a glitter cannon and a magic portal through to Homoville for poor Todd; he was often spiteful and predatory, and came with baggage of his own. Karl was at the tail-end of an abusive relationship, which the show dealt with brevity but considerable deftness, as he defended himself against the onslaught of ‘but why did he do that to you?’ accusations. ‘You should be asking him that, not me,’ he said, plainly furious at his friends’ victim-blaming. Perhaps a gay man falling in love with a straight man wouldn’t have been sympathetic – and hugely relatable – enough to service the drama. Watching it now, in my forties, I was shocked by the intense pressure Karl placed on Todd to come out, and to enter a sexual relationship, how he alternated between affectionate and withholding, berated Todd for being closeted, turned up at Todd’s house unannounced making salacious comments in front of Sarah, and sent Todd into a tailspin at regular intervals. Todd, in turn, also showed a venomous streak, slut-shaming Karl, and thumbing his nose at Manchester’s gay scene and the reprobates partying within. All too real and relatable for many. You can imagine gay viewers at the time watching with a puzzling mix of nostalgia for their own coming out and dread – what was this show saying about them, about the gay experience?
Daran Little’s Guardian interview, in March 2004, signposted ‘another gay kiss, this one with a happier ending’ but when Coronation Street’s first consensual gay kiss finally hit screens a month later, it was neither romantic nor empowering, and it was not to be found at the end of a rainbow. The clinch, in trademark Manchester drizzle, was the tart dessert after yet another argument, in the middle of Canal Street, while, a few feet away, a pregnant Sarah was clambering out of a cab on her way to meet them. I don’t remember seeing this original broadcast, but on rewatch, it was strangely disillusioning. Although there were vague reflections of my own first gay kiss, terrifying and exhilarating in a similar fine rain, my 2024 eyes noticed how the storyline didn't centre Todd’s big moment other than highlighting his deception, the show’s only out gay character was manipulative and coercive, and the viewers’ sympathies were engineered to align with the unfortunate Sarah.
There are two major tropes in stories like this: the homophobic version, dirty gays carrying on behind an innocent woman’s back; and the misogynistic version, gay soulmates foiled by whining shrew. And this plot had traces of both. Somehow I felt betrayed, a feeling I had no business entertaining two decades after transmission. Once the affair began, Todd took a demonic turn, dickmatised by Karl and resentful of Sarah, screwing in her bed while she was out and almost being caught. Again, the 2024 me wondered how this would be played now. Sexier, maybe. For laughs even. In 2004, it looked sad and seedy, the panicked and desperate Todd’s sexual liberation tightening his chains rather than unshackling. But that’s true of many of us when we first come out – we’re so used to the cage, we still behave like we’re imprisoned by it, hostile toward the sympathetic jailer who freed us. In the end the pressure got to Todd, Karl unceremoniously dumped him, and Todd confessed all to his mother, the Street’s pragmatic cab switch operator Eileen, offering a flash of true Corrie charm to this otherwise alien storyline. Once over the shock, Eileen urged her son to embrace his sexuality, reassured him that his unborn son would turn out just fine with a gay dad. There was something fragile and beautiful about their scenes, despite Eileen’s ulterior motive – she had never liked Sarah – in that maybe finally the teens and the parents at home watching would see that things could work out okay. It didn't have to be the end of the world.
Buoyed, perhaps, by his mother’s (misplaced) confidence, Todd confessed all to the mother of his unborn baby. She didn't take it well, understandably. Sarah Platt, at the tender age of sixteen, had been dealt some tough cards in life, bruised and battered by the age-old soap tropes of diminishing spirited female characters. Pregnant at 13, almost killed by her serial killer stepdad, kidnapped by an online stalker, and now the spare salmon mousse at Todd and Karl’s sword fight buffet. Other characters, and thus the viewers, were understandably on Sarah’s side. Sarah took herself off to the doctor for an HIV test as quickly as she could (seriously) and Todd was viciously abused, disowned briefly by his own brother – dispensing slurs like a bad night on Twitter – and made a laughing stock. Dramatically, it worked and, for the time, it felt authentic enough; these reactions would’ve matched those in living rooms up and down the country. It wasn’t exactly the gay representation armchair critics had craved, but it had its roots in truth, no matter how hard a watch it was. That promised happy ending, though, was never to come.
Perhaps the truly unforgivable part of this story, necessitated perhaps by the actor who played Todd deciding to leave the soap, was the decision to have Sarah go into early labour shortly after Todd’s confession. The baby, Billy, died at three days old, Todd never seeing his son alive, banished by Sarah’s family from the ICU and then the funeral too. It felt like a cheap trick, to attach trauma and shame to Todd’s already difficult coming-out, and watching as an older man I felt the ghost of missed opportunities. As much as kindly aunties and confirmed bachelor uncles may have felt for Todd and rooted for him to find happiness, Coronation Street’s first gay character certainly brought the drama but did little to dispel some harmful myths. He was, in a way, being punished. It’s strange, all the way in the future in 2024, how the story has both aged badly and yet feels like it could play out exactly the same today. Maybe it needed to be told that way (aside from the suggested indirect infanticide – that should definitely have stayed as a post-it on the cork board).
One ray of light, from a representation point of view at least, was the introduction of a new gay character, Karl’s friend Sean – played by Queer As Folk alumnus Antony Cotton. Sean was bitchy, camp and, for a while at least, largely sexless, but this depiction of a gay man was extremely rare on primetime TV. Gay characters, especially those destined for romantic storylines, tended to be straight-acting boys next door. Sean, love him or loathe him, represents a gay man who does actually exist, everywhere, stereotype or not. He is still in the show two decades later and has lived as full and dramatic a life as any other character. Coronation Street now boasts four gay men – including a recast Todd – three women who have had gay relationships (but do not label themselves as far as I know) and a new lesbian character, and there have been over 20 queer characters introduced since Todd planted that first true gay peck back, on a drizzly Canal Street, in 2004. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Todd’s story, it set Coronation Street on a new path, and made the road to self-realisation less rocky for some. Eventually.
We’ve come a long way. Still some way to go, too.
MORE FROM ME: Five weeks to go until the release of my next novel, LEADING MAN. It’s about Leo, a thirty-something gay people-pleaser content to be in the background, letting his louder, more charismatic best friends shine. Then, a handsome face from the past re-emerges, an enthusiastic new boss pushes him to his limits and Leo begins to question whether the friends he loves so dearly have been holding him back. For the first time ever, the spotlight is on Leo and all the things Leo has hidden away in darkness are in full focus. If he's to get everything he's ever wanted, Leo will need to face his past, and the future, head on. It’s funny, with dark traces, and I think you might love it. Pre-orders make a huge difference to how a book is promoted, if you fancy it. PRE-ORDER NOW
God, I didn’t realise what a strong memory I had of this whole storyline until I read this! At the time I remember feeling uncomfortable about the kissing non-consenting Adam Rickitt scene though TBH I think that was more “oh no, Todd! This is stupid!” rather than “this is assault”. I can only imagine what it would feel like to watch the whole thing now. I also remember the scene where Todd got to say goodbye to his dead baby was VERY sad and quite tenderly done. But god, as this post expertly shows, the whole thing was grim, wasn’t it? No gay characters could live happily even by soap standards (constant dramas and breakups) in those days. Poor Beth Jordache died behind bars OFF SCREEN (I was living in Berlin that summer trying to find a job and practice German - I was half way through my German degree - and one of my best friends wrote me a letter to inform me of this dramatic and important news). What an insult!