Russell T Davies has said gay society is in the “greatest danger I have ever seen”, since the election of Donald Trump as US president in November.
Speaking to the Guardian at the Gaydio Pride awards in Manchester on Friday, the Doctor Who screenwriter said the rise in hostility was not limited to the US but “is here [in the UK] now”.
“As a gay man, I feel like a wave of anger, and violence, and resentment is heading towards us on a vast scale,” he said.
“I’ve literally seen a difference in the way I’m spoken to as a gay man since that November election, and that’s a few months of weaponising hate speech, and the hate speech creeps into the real world.”
“I’m not being alarmist,” he added. “I’m 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we’re in the greatest danger I have ever seen.”
Since his inauguration, Trump has ended policies giving LGBTQ+ Americans protection from discrimination. He has also restricted access to gender-affirming healthcare, said the US would only recognise two sexes, and barred transgender people from enlisting in the military.
Davies also used his keynote speech at the awards ceremony, which rewards the efforts made to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the UK, to criticise Trump, and the president’s ally Elon Musk.
“I think times are darkening beyond all measure and beyond anything I have seen in my lifetime,” he told the audience, which included the singers Louise Redknapp and Katy B, and the Traitors contestants Leanne Quigley and Minah Shannon.
Davies said he had turned 18 and left home in 1981, adding: “And that is exactly the year that rumours and whispers of a strange new virus came along, which came to haunt our community and to test us in so many ways.”
“The joyous thing about this is that we fought back,” he said. The community “militarised, campaigned, marched and demanded the medicine”.
He added: “We demanded the science. We demanded the access.”
When he wrote the TV series Queer As Folk in the late 1990s, he said, it was part of a movement, with writers “fomenting ideas” and putting gay and lesbian characters on screen.
Had he been asked to imagine then what life for LGBTQ+ people would be like in 2025, “I want to say it’s going to be all rainbows,” he said, “skipping down the street hand-in-hand, equality, equality, equality.”
But the peril the gay community now faced, he said, was even greater than that in the 1980s.
“The threat from America, it’s like something at The Lord of the Rings. It’s like an evil rising in the west, and it is evil,” Davies said.
“We’ve had bad prime ministers and we’ve had bad presidents before. What we’ve never had is a billionaire tech baron openly hating his trans daughter,” he added.
Musk, the de facto head of the “department of government efficiency”, bought the social networking site Twitter, which he renamed X. A study by the University of California, Berkeley found hate speech on the platform rose by 50% in the months after it was bought by the billionaire.
“We have never had this in the history of the world,” Davies said. “It is terrifying because he and the people like him are in control of the facts, they’re in control of information, they’re in control of what people think, and that is what we’re now facing.”
But Davies said the gay community would do “what we always do in times of peril, we gather at night”, and would once again come together, and fight against this latest wave of hostility and oppression.
“What we will do in Elon Musk’s world, that we’re heading towards, is what artists have always done,” he told the Guardian, “which is to meet in cellars, and plot, and sing, and compose, and paint, and make speeches, and march.”
“If we have to be those rebels in basements yet again,” he added, “which is when art thrives, then that’s what we’ll become.”
