We don’t have to tip toe

As Pride Month draws to a close, I have been reflecting on two new pieces of brilliant story-telling involving LGBTQ+ characters: Russell T Davies’ Channel 4 mini-series Tip Toe and Herman Yau’s film We’re Nothing At All. On the surface they could hardly be more different. One is about misunderstandings between two neighbours in Manchester with at times comedic but ultimately catastrophic implications, the other a police investigation into a bus explosion on one Valentine’s Day in Hong Kong. Yet both are devastating state-of-the-nation portraits of societies where people fail to communicate and empathise with one another, where authentic lives and courageous, costly love struggle to be accommodated because people fear difference. Both ask questions about social boundaries, about dignity and desperation, about (in)justice and radicalisation.

Sometimes I feel ‘millennial existential angst’. We are told that our standard of living will be worse than previous generations, AI will replace our jobs, climate change will make many parts of our planet uninhabitable, civil liberties such as LGBTQ+ and asylum rights are being rolled back and populism, polarisation and post-truth are the order of the day. As a character in Tip Toe says, ‘I used to walk into a room and just go “Ta-da”! Now I tip toe, just in case.’ It can be hard to feel hopeful, especially if you’re in the minority.

But like Tip Toe and We’re Nothing At All which tell their stories backwards, as Christians we know how our story ends. We know the story about a disruptive love that society struggled to appreciate and accommodate, that crossed social boundaries to be with those pushed to the margins, that did not let sin and death have the last word.

Desmond Tutu said that ‘hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness’. Because love has already won, we don’t have to tip toe. We can respond to the challenges of our time by committing to compassion over condemnation, empathy over echo chambers, honesty over hypocrisy, celebrating diversity over fearing difference. We can love courageously; we can dare to hope.

Ivan Yuen