Tough Tip Toe Never Flinches
in Exploring the State of Queer Life

The prolific Russell T. Davies turns prescient as well with his latest series Tip Toe.airing in the United States on Starz.

By Kilian Melloy

Russell T. Davies, the prolific television writer and showrunner who brought us LGBTQ+-inclusive fare that includes the original Queer As Folk, the triptych of Cucumber, Banana, and Tofu, the Dr. Who spinoff Torchwood, and the Olly Alexander-starring It’s a Sin, offers what might be his bleakest, hardest-hitting series yet with Tip Toe, which originally ran on Britain’s Channel Four last spring and now comes to the U.S. with an October 2 premiere, courtesy of Starz.

Tip Toe begins with an image straight out of dystopian horrors like The Handmaid’s Tale: A hanged man swings from a streetlamp in a residential neighborhood of Manchester, England. The murdered man’s name is Leo (Alan Cumming); he’s the owner of a gay bar, and he’s lived for a decade and a half next door to a family headed by an electrician named Clive (David Morrisey). Assorted neighbors look on through their windows as sirens wail in the distance and a woman on the pavement below Leo’s body screams in anguish. It’s a scenario not too far removed from religious depictions of Christ’s crucifixion.

That parallel seems deliberate, with Leo being guilty of little more than embellishing his sexual misadventures (a hookup steals his laptop early in the series, resulting in Leo being locked out of his house while clad only in his undergarments) and attempting to extend a helping hand to England’s ostracized queer youth, some of which he employs at his bar. (One such is Mikey, played by Gabriel Clark.)

But things are tough for everyone. Facing financial strain, locked in continual marital strife, and sucked into a toxic online world of straight white male victimization narratives, wild hyperbole, and baseless anti-queer accusations, Clive fears for the future, and the safety, of his sons, especially 16-year-old George (Jackson Connor), whom Clive is worried might be seduced or even assaulted by the queer demimonde. Clive’s resulting hypervigilance morphs into a troubling obsession with queer sexuality, so much so that you might start to get an American Beauty vibe from him. Much of Clive’s ire ends up directed at Leo, simply because Leo is openly gay, but Clive is not without a few heterosexual peccadilloes with which he still needs to make peace. It doesn’t help that Clive’s sons are up to their own hijinks, with elder child Saul (Joseph Evans) still living at home at age 25 and running an OnlyFans page for money.

Throughout its five episodes, Tip Toe (named for a growing sense that it’s more dangerous than it used to be to be out and proud) explores a running dialectic between Leo and Clive, with Clive zeroing in on facets of Leo’s life (an ex-husband who left him for a woman; his HIV status) as rationales for blanket bias, and Leo pushing back, sometimes with personal attacks of his own.

Each episode starts off by reminding us of the tragedy to come before delving into details of the days (and even years) leading up Leo’s death, and the gallery of suspects grows and shifts as the story continues. There’s a brutal gang of homophobic Polish immigrants terrorizing Leo’s transgender employee Zee (Iz Hesketh); there’s the high schooler whose response to spotting a teacher in drag at Leo’s bar is a frenzied attack. There’s Clive himself, whose unravelling grows more pronounced as he makes tentative attempts to understand queer culture; and there’s the mysterious person or persons who make themselves at home in Leo’s flat when he’s away at work, drinking his wine and rifling his cupboards. The world, Davies is telling us, has never truly been a safe place for queer people, and if it seems as though the pendulum is swinging back, hard, to the bad old days, it’s worth asking just how far it swung in the direction of equality to begin with.

The show has plenty of humor, some of it fairly dark, but Tip Toe reflects a different mindset than shows like Queer As Folk, which featured the insouciant and unapologetic Stuart (Aiden Gillen) and celebrated LGTBQ+ youth (personified by Charlie Hunnam’s Nathan) being given the same latitude to explore their nascent sexualities as are their heterosexual and cisgender peers. Tip Toe’s Leo — along with bitter barfly Melba (Paul Rhys) — are survivors of the AIDS epidemic, and their scars are still raw. Change a character name or two, and this could be a decades-later sequel to the 80s-set It’s a Sin.

Tip Toe is tough, and not very tender, forcing its audience (queer and straight alike) to face their fears and examine their choices and their assumptions. All of that, however — along with riveting performances, particularly from Cummings and Morrisey — is what makes it top-tier, must-watch television.

“Tip Toe” premieres in the U.S. on all Starz platforms on October 2, with subsequent episodes dropping weekly.