Ahead of the publication of Rainbow Wales: Queer Icons Past and Present, author Emily Garside shares an exclusive extract with The Queer Review along with her approach to writing the book.
Some books come from an “I need the world to know my nerdy opinions” urge (at least that’s how I’ve written books in the past), while others come from a “has anyone done this before?” idea. Rainbow Wales came from the latter. I was aware there were Queer History of Wales books. There were Queer political books, and points where the two overlapped. But there wasn’t really anything that looked at the impact Queer Welsh folks have had on the world. Or even the sheer array of Queer folks we’d collected over the years, out flying both the rainbow and the Welsh flags (the campest of the British Isles, with its dragon and all!)
By its nature, putting a book like this together becomes a juggling act of ‘but who gets in?’ Was I like a club bouncer at Heaven in the 90s, judging the coolest Queer Folks from Wales? Or was there a criteria of contribution? Originally, I was far too ambitious and tried to cover every eventuality of Queerness. Historical Queers, contemporary Queers, people who maybe once had stepped foot in Wales. It was too much. There was also a fear of offending, missing out a living person of note, or offending readers because their favourite wasn’t included. And of course, there are so many folks doing amazing work in the community who are of huge significance, but not ‘famous’. Ultimately, I had to be guided by instinct. What would help people find out about Queer Wales, while I put together a group of people who somehow told that story.
So a few people, I won’t name names, got cut. Many who made art in the 19th century who happened to be from Wales (and mostly moved to Italy) who in truth, weren’t that interesting. Also out were a few folks whose story is covered better by experts on their historical period. And finally, a few, who by the nature of writing about living folks, got cut for being “cancelled” in the process of writing this book (there’s always one, several if you choose to include politicians…).
So who was in? People who told stories about Wales. Or many stories of Wales. There are a few obvious ones. You can’t talk sport, queerness and Wales without Gareth Thomas. You can’t talk writers without Russell T Davies. But there are also those who fly more under the mainstream radar, like electronic pop musician Bright Light Bright Light, or Daniel Evans, known well to theatre nerds, but not so much outside that. Of course, we also have our Queer figures of times past, like Ivor Novello and Kenneth Williams. I also tried to highlight some more unsung heroes of Queer Wales; the community folks, the up-and-comers, the people who might not be noticed. I felt it was good to shine a light on community members who are well known in their locality but not always beyond. It felt right to give a bigger platform to someone like Reverend Sarah Jones, for instance, a trans woman in the church who is known for her support of the community in Cardiff.
The idea of this book was to celebrate where those two flags, the rainbow and the dragon, overlap. Some of the folks written about talk a lot about their Welshness, others less so. Similarly, for some, Queerness is at the centre of what they do, whereas for others it might be a part of what they do but not the centre of their world. But all share those dual identities. When I was a kid, we didn’t really have any Queer Welsh Icons to look up to; the two parts of my identity felt very separate. This book hopefully shows that they no longer have to be.
The book covers sections on musicians (yes, including H from Steps); actors; drag artists; activists; allies (because they matter too); sportspeople; and, of course, our writers. And Who better (see what I did there) to lead that than Doctor Who showrunner and Queer as Folk creator, Russell T Davies.
Extract from Rainbow Wales: Queer Icons Past and Present:
Russell T Davies
Queerness and Welshness have been at the heart of the work of Swansea-born writer Russell T Davies (1963– ) since his time on children’s TV in the early 1990s. His adult shows broke out in the later 1990s, with the iconic Queer as Folk (1999–2000) leading the way, and Davies was one of the first waves of post-Stonewall, post the height of the HIV/AIDS crsis, gay writers to gain enough influence to put Queer TV truly on British screens. It’s not an understatement to say that without Queer as Folk, we wouldn’t have much of the Queer TV we have today. And on the Welsh side, Wales likely wouldn’t have the Welsh film industry it has today without Doctor Who.
Stephen Russell Davies was born in Swansea in 1963. Although the ‘T’ in Russell T Davies now differentiates him from other Russell Davieses, he has been called by his middle name since childhood. In various interviews, he’s talked of never being great at school (despite his parents being teachers). With his passion for drama, he joined the West Glamorgan Youth Theatre as a teenager. Despite his protestations on not being good at school, his university choice seems to contradict this, as he studied at Oxford (Worcester College). And yes, it would be a fair assumption that a correlation exists between leaving Wales for Oxford and doing well in theatre or TV. We may celebrate Queerness and success while also acknowledging networks and privilege. However, Davies’s roots were always in Wales, so he only made one TV show in London throughout his entire career (A Very English Scandal in 2018, which required on-location filming in London in and around parliament). Davies continued his education by earning a Master’s Degree in theatre studies from Cardiff University. During this time, like many creatives in Cardiff in the early 1980s, he worked as a volunteer at the Sherman Theatre.
In 1985, he started working for BBC Wales on a series of short-form contracts that included work as an illustrator for the show Why Don’t You? For children’s television on the BBC, too, he made his only TV presenter appearance on 1 June 1987, in an episode of Playschool, after which he reportedly declared he was ‘not doing that again’. However, during his time at Why Don’t You?, Davies held several roles that would serve him well in future work – particularly as Doctor Who show-runner. His roles (official and unofficial) included researcher, director, illustrator, assistant floor manager and unofficial publicist for fan mail.
That early career spent in children’s TV would develop his creativity and mark out some of the innovative and Queer stories he’d tell later. Much of what we consider ‘Russell T Davies-style’ works came from this early period. Some of Dark Season (1991), a BBC children’s sci-fi show, has a definite air of ‘2005 Doctor Who’ about it, and Century Falls (1993), which feels like The X-Files meets teen drama, also has the feeling of his ‘grown up’ sci-fi Years and Years (2019). Meanwhile, the first time Davies would write about AIDS and reference the impact AIDS had on gay men was in Children’s Ward (a popular drama, running from 1989 to 2000, which, as the title suggests, is set in a children’s ward of a hospital). In the episode, a young man contracts HIV from a blood transfusion, allowing Davies to write a confrontation between him and a friend about ‘only gays getting AIDS’. It would take nearly twenty years for Davies to write his full ‘AIDS drama’ It’s a Sin (2021), but in between, he would reshape stories for Queer people – and in particular, gay men – on British TV. He also brought back the beloved Doctor Who (2005– ), making it the BBC flagship show of the 2000s. In addition, he filmed it in Wales, putting Wales, along with an array of casually Queer Doctor Who characters, on the map.
As noted, Queer as Folk was a breakout show for Russell T Davies and for Queer stories on TV in general. It offered a farewell to the hedonistic 1990s and a glimpse of what could be in the future. Following the (mis)adventures of Stuart and Vince was hugely formative for many young Queer people both at the time of broadcast and later. Ask a Queer millennial, and they likely watched the show in secret at home, late at night on TV in their bedroom. Or they came across it illicitly on VHS at university, or in the early years of on-demand television, discovering it in the depths of 4OD with housemates or in secret in their rooms. At that time, talking about Queer as Folk or hearing someone in the office talking about it was an easy shorthand to find out if someone was ‘your kind of person’ and a way to make friends or mark out potential enemies. It also felt like (finally) there was something for Queer people, the kind of aspirational programming that straight people had had for years in shows like Sex and the City (1998–2004). In Queer as Folk, as with Sex and the City, most people knew they weren’t going to live the lives of the main characters, in this case, Stuart and Vince, in Manchester’s gay village Canal Street (though many certainly would). For many, it showed the aspirational lifestyle that straight folks had when watching Carrie’s conquests in Sex and the City or that they saw in the size of the apartments in Friends (1994–2004), just with added explicit gay sex. Again, in a world watching straight people having a lot of sex on TV in the 1990s, the appearance of Queer as Folk felt like a ‘finally’ moment for gay men. (Incidentally, while not Welsh, Queer women would get their sex on TV, combined with ridiculous plotlines, in The L Word (2004–09) a few years later.)
Davies has also contributed to various non-Queer dramas (though usually with a hint of Queerness): Cassanova (2005), The Grand (1997–8), Mine All Mine (2004), The Second Coming (2003). Russell T Davies’s works are too numerous to cover individually in great detail here. However, Queer stories have remained at the heart of his work. Davies might be known for writing Queer as Folk, the Queer story that broke the mould, but he carried the Queer mantra across his work. In Bob and Rose (2001) and Cucumber, Banana and Tofu (2015), he manages to weave a set of stories – some connected, some not – about the similarities and differences in approaching Queer narratives decades apart. In his recent works, Years and Years (2019), A Very English Scandal (2018) and It’s a Sin (2021), we see more of his take on various Queer issues and characters and how he challenges audiences (straight and Queer) through his writing. In Years and Years, he does more beyond that, looking at a terrifying version of the near future that is perhaps the darker side of Who that he never got to explore, asking ‘what if’ of humanity. However, putting a Queer storyline as the central element, he also reminds us that the fight is not won for equality and that the future might look increasingly dark for Queer folks.
And, of course, there’s Doctor Who… again. Davies returned in 2023 to be reunited with Tenth Doctor, David Tennant, who headed up the sixtieth anniversary episode. He also steered the show into its next generation with the Fourteenth Doctor, Ncuti Gutwa. Casting a Black Queer actor as the Doctor and a Black trans actor (Yasmin Finney) as a companion, along with an array of other Queer actors and themes, Davies asserted that the TARDIS remains a Queer space. And, of course, the home of Who remains in Wales, with production taking place in and around Cardiff, which has formed the setting of one episode (‘Boom Town’ in the first series) as well as the spin-off show Torchwood (2006– 11), which was set in Cardiff, using many local landmarks in its storylines, including the Wales Millennium Centre. Davies even injected some Welsh humour and observation in the 2024 episode ‘73 Yards’, giving a nod to commentary about English invaders to Wales and old jokes about rural Wales being hostile to outsiders (with an added sci-fi twist, obviously). It’s clear that Davies will continue to weave Wales and Queerness into the ‘Whoniverse’.
Davies has curated both a niche and work that defies categorization, from, yes, overtly ‘Queer’ dramas to kids’ TV, across Shakespeare, historical drama and Welsh comedy. For many Queer people, Russell T Davies raised them via Queer TV. For all the kids who couldn’t get to Canal Street, they could dream. Russell T Davies’s Queer TV was, for so many, the community. It was a VHS of Queer as Folk before you had friends to discuss it with. It was imagining what that community could be. It saw different versions of that community. It was knowing that other Queer people existed. It was knowing you weren’t alone. Television has power, and Russell T Davies used it to connect people, even if they didn’t know he was doing it. He might not love the analogy, but in a community that lost so many elders, he became something of a leader. He became, by proxy, a Queer elder to a lot of Queer millennials, and that he has achieved through the stories he told and continues to tell.
Rainbow Wales, Queer Icons Past and Present is published by Calon Books on May 7th, 2026 and available here.
UK readers can catch author Emily Garside at the following events:
For more on Russell T Davies read Emily Garside’s Gay Aliens and Queer Folk: How Russell T Davies Changed TV – available here.
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