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Russell Tovey has said he is envious of young queer people because they do not associate sex with death as previous generations had done.
The actor, 43, found fame in Alan Bennett’s 2004 hit play The History Boys, reprising his role in the film adaptation two years later. He came out as gay in the Nineties as the AIDS pandemic drew to a close.
In 1988 Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government introduced its highly controversial Section 28 legislation, which banned discussion of same-sex relationships in schools and stopped councils from stocking libraries with literature or films featuring gay or lesbian themes.
Speaking to The i Paper in a recent interview, Tovey spoke about how “lucky” queer people are today.
“How lucky they are! How wonderful that is! Section 28 f****d me up,” he said.
Tovey continued: “Coming of age, realising that I liked men at the same time as Aids, I would constantly mix sex and death. To have a generation that doesn’t even consider death around sex blows my mind.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Tovey acknowledged that prejudice in the UK has evolved as opposed to vanished, and condemned the country’s “horrific” transphobia.
Last month, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that trans women are not legally women under the Equality Act – a decision Amnesty International UK has called “disappointing” and “concerning”.
Tovey told the publication: “Derek Jarman said in the late Eighties that if you wait long enough the world moves in circles. There was blatant homophobia in the red-tops and the government. It was horrific. Then we had this great moment of openness. Now the transphobia is horrific.”
“No feeling is finite. The world keeps spinning. You have to hope that it will turn around again,” he said. “It’s f*****g horrible at the minute. It’s just horrible.”
The actor’s comments come after remarks made by screenwriter Russell T Davies, with whom Tovey worked in 2019 on the dystopian drama Years and Years.
Speaking at the Gaydio Pride awards in March, Davies said that gay society is in the “greatest danger” he has “ever seen” following the election of Donald Trump as the 47th US president last year.
“As a gay man, I feel like a wave of anger and violence and resentment is heading towards us on a vast scale,” he said. “I’m not being alarmist. I’m 61. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we’re in the greatest danger I have ever seen.
“I think times are darkening beyond all measure and beyond anything I have seen in my lifetime.”
English (US) ·