All of Us Strangers: heartbreaking film speaks to real experiences of gay men in UK and Ireland

By Diarmuid Scully, University College Cork

Warning: this article contains spoilers.

A lonely 40-something screenwriter living in an almost-empty London apartment block, Adam (Andrew Scott) is alienated, exhausted and struggling to write about his past, but can’t get beyond the opening line.

One evening, Harry (Paul Mescal), a younger man from downstairs, appears at his door. He’s tipsy, vulnerable, flirty and charming. “There’s vampires at my door,” he says. Adam doesn’t let him in and later reveals that fear had stopped him.

This rings true, especially for a 40-something gay man like Adam: someone who grew up in the 1980s, during a period of rampant and violent homophobia and the AIDS crisis. England and Wales had partially decriminalised homosexuality in 1967, but Thatcher’s Britain was an ugly place for LGBTQ+ people.

The screenplay Adam is writing is set in 1987, the year that Section 28 was introduced, banning the “promotion” of homosexuality. At that time, the tabloids demonised AIDS victims as deviant plague-carriers and there were terrifying government health warnings on national television.

Homosexuality remained illegal in Ireland and the 1980s witnessed notorious hate-crimes, including the murder of Charles Self by a stranger when they hooked up. These crimes don’t belong to the past: in 2022, two gay men in Sligo were murdered by a man they met through a dating app. Small wonder that a fortysomething gay man like Adam would shut Harry out.

But it wouldn’t be much of a story if it ended there.

As an academic of LGBTQ+ history, I hugely enjoyed this delicate, melancholy and life-affirming film. It speaks to many of the real and heartbreaking experiences gay men in the UK and Ireland have had to navigate. It also highlights the progress and more hopeful world that has been carved for younger generations of queer men. But most of all, its a testament to the power of love.

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