on voids

I've been enjoying revisiting some old TV I'd forgotten, courtesy of the net... amongst it Russell T. Davies' excellent Queer as Folk thank you 4OD :)

Something said in the opening episode has kind of stuck with me and rattled around in my metaphor centre for a while. 's a bit... blue*, and I'm unsure if I'll post this but I feel like writing it down all the same.

The opening episode of QaF was well publicised at the time for containing a gay sex scene in the opening 10-15 minutes, Stuart (the anti-hero) is fucking Nathan (the über-twink) and it's visceral, passionate, and totally without feeling. Looking at it now I can see what I think Davies was getting at with this scene: I mean I knew all along that it sets up the character dynamic for the rest of the show. But that contrast: the passion and the lack of emotion. That's key.

Later Nathan's describing this encounter (from his perspective) to his friend (who is in all fairness a thin narrative device which Davies acknowledges when he drops her from later scripts...) and he describes how he can still feel Stuart inside. As if he's left a space... Nathan (15) thinks he's in love because it's been such an overwhelming experience. He's not of course. He doesn't know yet what love is**, but he has been powerfully affected...

... and I'm watching this through new eyes, over a decade later. I'm remembering how I felt the first time***, and I'm also transposing that sensation onto later, more developed, more complex feelings.

One of the things you learn in art classes is that we human beings relate best to the shape of a thing through an apprehension of the spaces around it. That we best know a shape by the space it makes. Somehow that and this resonate for me at the moment.

* in both senses! I didn't post this for a couple of months but I think now that I will. It won't appear "front and centre" where it might upset or offend, but it will be here when I (or anyone else) look back, and I think it should be.

** My reading. But then perhaps I don't know what love is either.

*** ...that I watched the show I mean. Not saying how long it's been since "the first time". All footnotes August 25th 2011