It’s been sixteen years since Russell T Davies’ Queer As Folk hit UK TV screens on Channel Four. Set in Manchester and covering the intertwining lives of its three main characters it caused outrage and controversy for its explicit display of gay sex, particularly that of under age teenager Nathan with cherry popping Stuart (played by Aidan Gillen seen more recently in Game of Thrones) as the archetypal sexual predator. Wind the clock forward and the age of consent has been equalised, marriage legalised, and gay rights enshrined within the Equality Act of 2010 yet little has changed in the world of Russell T Davies. Cucumber, it’s baby brother show Banana, and web based Tofu (all references to erectile hardness no less) have aired and whilst at least some of its characters were rather older they remained equally sexually obsessed. Similarly the show’s main entertainment value centred on its “in your face” and one might say “down your throat” relentless explicitness and near disco soundtrack. One particular early scene had lead character Henry waxing lyrically to a full taxi waiting room about how actor Ryan Reynolds loves cock. After its initial shock tactics Queer as Folk soon dissipated into a gay soap opera that ended happily ever after with two of its lead characters driving off into the sunset together. A similar tactic was later played out in EastEnders when voracious Christian (played by real life “muscle Mary” John Partridge) was tamed by the love of a good man Syed (Marc Elliott). On the basis of the first few episodes Cucumber seemed set to do much the same and the only true meat to its bones came in the form of grumpy – and apparently anal sex fearing – Henry’s relationship with long time partner – and it seemed ever anally hungry – Lance. Feeling the need to inject some life into things, Lance arm twisted Henry into going on a date where he proposed marriage, got rejected, and then manipulated them into having a deeply disastrous threesome. The scenes of them (and many of the other characters) retreating into the Internet and observations of grindr culture were as wry as they were funny yet Henry’s hopeless infatuation with the near teenage Freddie did little to challenge the notion that gay men, if not a bunch of borderline pederasts, are certainly still youth obsessed. Of course the narrative did however twist shockingly away from the happy ever after of sixteen years earlier into a story of homophobic murder. Perhaps this is where the world Davies has grown up? Except one’s lovers usually die from non-sexual causes like accidents or cancer not death by repressed homosexual. So it’s still all sex, sex, sex. Thus the difficulty here is how exactly does one present gay sex on TV? Unlike other oppressions, sexuality is not visible other than through somehow making it “blatant” whether verbally or in other ways. It is also arguably true that the sexually explicit modus vivendi perfected by the shows of Davies (or in more heterosexual female form in Sex & The City) is a good deal better than the misery (Dirk Bogarde on a beach in Death in Venice), camp effeminacy (John Inman in Are You Being Served?), or simple invisibility that plagued representations of gay sexuality prior to the 1990s. Yet gay sexuality remains stuck as some exotic flower in a tea garden – beautiful, wild, and colourful – yet still otherworldly and totally controlled.