15-year-old Nathan Maloney ( Charlie Hunnam) is new to the gay scene but is not lacking in self-confidence. His long-time friend Vince Tyler ( Craig Kelly), who has a crush on Stuart, has less luck with men. The main characters are Stuart Allen Jones ( Aidan Gillen), who is highly sexually active, and successfully so. The script had originally started life with the title Queer as Fuck but Queer as Folk was considered more suitable.
The title of the programme comes from a dialect expression from some parts of Northern England, 'there's nowt so queer as folk', meaning 'there's nothing as strange as people' which is a word play on the modern-day English sense of ' queer', as homosexual.
