Gabriel Clark knows the weight of homophobia firsthand. In late 2025, he and fellow Tip Toe star Dominic Holmes were walking down Canal Street in Manchester when men in a car yelled a slur at them and drove off laughing. It was an incident that shocked few, even the bystanders. Now, as the release of Russell T Davies' new LGBTQIA+ drama Tip Toe looms, Clark is reflecting on what that moment means.
The Show's Dark Journey
In Tip Toe, Clark plays Mikey Driscoll, a bartender at the Spit & Polish nightclub owned by Leo Struthers, an out and proud gay man living on Canal Street. From the opening scene, viewers know Leo will be murdered, lynched to a lamppost outside his home by his straight, conspiracy-theorist neighbour Clive Goss (played by David Morrissey). The series becomes a Greek tragedy, with the audience watching inevitable doom unfold. Clark compares the experience to reading Medea, wishing with every page that the murder won't happen, knowing all the while that it will.
Why Shock Matters
Clark defends the show's extreme violence as necessary. He notes that the UK's homophobia has worsened: the country dropped to 22nd place in ILGA Europe's Rainbow Map, while Galop, the LGBTQIA+ anti-abuse charity, recorded a 27 percent increase in hate crime calls in the last reporting year. Traditional approaches haven't worked. "We've tried campaigning, we've tried writing letters, we've tried gently having conversations," Clark says. In a world of short attention spans and extremist content thriving on shock value, sometimes you need to stand up and shout back. The finale's brutality is that shout, designed to wake people up to a reality many would rather ignore.
Source: Gay Times
Poster via The Movie Database (TMDB)
