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Doctor Who is back, and it is queerer than ever . Flush with the House of Mouse’s cash it is also flashier, more glamorous, and by the look of the viral New York subway car that’s been transformed into an advert for the show, it’s got a marketing spend to rival Succession . Not to mention the fact that OG reboot showrunner Russell T Davies is back at the helm.

It’s a bit like 2005 all over again. Except in 2005, I was desperately sad. Growing up at the tail-end of Section 28 , I was regularly called homophobic slurs in school and ignored by teachers when I expressed my sadness.



We sometimes forget that the law which banned the “promotion of homosexuality” was only repealed in 2003, when I was 14. It just so happens that 2003 was also the year Doctor Who was announced as returning from its decades of dormancy. Some things don’t change .

Back then I was broken, I was gay, and I was living in the armpit of the country. Now, decades later I find myself washed up here, after surviving a suicide attempt in London, still gay, and broken again in more ways than one. And once more Doctor Who is healing me .

It is at its heart a TV show about a time-travelling gender-bending alien with two hearts who is older than time, has worn more faces than Joan Collins, and has slept with everyone from Houdini to Elizabeth the First. The latest incarnation is played by Ncuti Gatwa of Sex Education fame, and is played as definitively queer . “Ncuti is the perfect hero for these trou.

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