‘I don’t take orders from a lad wearing make-up’

Abstract

This article examines Dominic Mitchell’s BBC Three’s supernatural drama series, In the Flesh (2013), as a metaphor for contemporary lesbian and gay politics, which in recent years has followed a reformist agenda on the basis that lesbians and gay men are, what Andrew Sullivan (1996) has called, ‘virtually normal’. However, it has been suggested by some queer theorists that being seen as virtually normal is not unproblematic, as it is predicated on a politics of toleration. Read as a metaphor for contemporary lesbian and gay politics, In the Flesh presents a warning of the uncritical acceptance of discourses of sexual progress.