Tip Toe, the latest TV drama from It’s a Sin’s Russell T Davies, is, like all state-of-the-nation programming, designed to start a conversation. Following the events leading up to a homophobic hanging – a crime presaged in the show’s very first scene – the series succeeds at sparking discourse, almost by way of inevitability. But what that conversation is, and just who’s having it, is now out of Davies’ hands.
Like much of the showrunner’s work, Tip Toe occupies a sort of large rhetorical multi-quadrant. This is neither a “gay story made for straight people” – in the vein of Pride (2014) or, heaven forbid, Love, Simon (2018) – nor one coded staunchly for a queer audience, in the way that something like HBO’s Looking (2014-15) so brilliantly was. It is a series aimed at everyone, straight and queer alike (released during Pride Month, itself an event increasingly catering to all sexualities, genders, and corporations) and, as such, its arguments are also multivalent.
