“It’s back, you fucking idiot. We’re in the middle of it right now.”
That is how veteran character actor Paul Rhys, playing a flamboyant scenester named Melba, responds in the new British miniseries Tip Toe when asked whether the vintage homophobia of the 1990s has returned to the United Kingdom, newyorker.com reported. The five-episode drama, created by television auteur Russell T Davies, arrives as a rare and unsparing outcry from progressives witnessing the rapid erosion of cultural and political gains.
After airing over the summer on Channel 4 in Britain, the drama wraps up its American run this week on Starz. It presents a grimly plausible portrait of social revanchism in the 2020s—a decade where right-wing cultural triumphalism frequently dominates the mainstream, while television projects centered on queer protagonists face shrinking footprints.
From Liberation Temples to Fortified Retreats
A quarter-century ago, Davies redefined queer television with Queer as Folk, a 1999 ground-breaking series about ordinary gay Mancunians finding sex, drugs, and community inside vibrant nightclubs. In Tip Toe, that utopian energy has completely curdled. The central hub is now a Manchester bar owned by Leo Struthers, played by Alan Cumming. Rather than serving as an open temple to liberation, the establishment operates as a fortress under sporadic siege.
Drag performers follow strict emergency-exit protocols, and bartenders constantly scan the door for troublemakers amidst a steady stream of online hate directed at the business. The narrative opens with a chilling flash-forward: Leo is found hanged from a lamppost outside his home. His presumed killer is his next-door neighbor, Clive Goss, played by David Morrissey. Clive is a fitfully employed electrician consumed by the unshakable, paranoid suspicion that Leo harbors predatory designs on his sons, twenty-five-year-old Saul and sixteen-year-old George.
The Tragic Naïveté of Late Middle Age
The timeline jumps back ten days to chart the fatal collision between the two neighbors. After more than a decade of wordless coexistence on opposite sides of a shared wall, Leo accidentally locks himself out of his house and asks to use Clive’s phone. What follows is a slow-motion catastrophe as Leo attempts to soften Clive’s hardened bigotry, tragically miscalculating his own ability to reason with someone driven by blind prejudice.
The role affords Cumming a rare opportunity to shed the waspish camp that defined his hosting gig on the reality-competition series The Traitors. At fifty-nine, Leo is a man steeped in both hospitality and exhaustion. He treats his bar as an unofficial employment-training center for LGBTQ youth, even as he privately chafes at the political landscape. Still smarting from his ex-husband’s decision two years prior to leave him for a woman, Leo absorbs blow after blow.
In the show’s closing stretches, Cumming lays bare a lifetime of self-loathing. Leo finally explodes at Clive, bitterly lamenting that he has spent decades making himself palatable and even pitiful just to survive a hostile heterosexual world. Tip Toe captures a generation’s bitter realization that tolerance was never permanent—and that the walls are closing in once again.
