HIV/AIDS…….Lest We Forget…

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Part I……A plague of blood sweeps over the land….

November, like rosemary, is for remembrance….

Long before the commemoration of the war dead, each and every year, the dead of all lifetimes have been remembered on 2nd November…the day ‘Of All Souls’…..

But remembrance isn’t merely about the dead past and the dead, it’s also about remembering the obligations we’ve inherited from those who have gone before us…and in fidelity to them I dedicate my November anamnesis…

It’s hard from where we are today to remember that there was a life before AIDS. For my generation our gilded youth was innocently spent in a paradise where gay liberation was a radical political cause but nothing as radical as the determined confidence with which we gay men and women decided to live our lives.

We came out of the closet…the first generation empowered to demand the equality to so do.

This was to be our fight and this was the battle for which we were prepared…. and which we expected to win. We began by telling our families, telling our friends, telling our employers… and in the process we were challenging discrimination and changing attitudes…the heady beer of our brewing social revolution was washed down with plenty of larger and laughter….and a certain degree of wayward love…

But the serpent was already in Eden.

From the late 1970s there were unexplained cases of young, otherwise fit and predominately gay men, succumbing to diseases associated with the old and frail. As yet there was no word for the phenomenon…as yet no disease…but a drip, drip of rumour…particularly in the gay press in San Francisco, New York, London, Paris and Amsterdam…we had no Internet then…

So, like bubonic plague, the first victim of this unnamed unknown disease has no name. By the time the cluster of diseases acquire their general name…AIDS…acquired immune deficiency syndrome…it has already acquired a more popular title…The Gay Plague…at first none of us quite believe what’s whispered…but the numbers are gradually rising…and friends in America are already getting sick or know someone who is getting sick…we hold our breath…it cannot be…but it is. AIDS is real.

It’s not until 1986 that there is even a test…the HIV test…which quickly becomes generally available and as quickly floods STD clinics with new patients many of whom are already showing early symptoms of disease progression.

By then every time we get together ‘it’ is the inevitable subject of conversation. Every dinner party, every drink in every pub; every chance meeting with old friends, old lovers; every ‘how are you?’…carries the terrible weight of this new reality. And we read…medical papers, reports, news, everything we can lay our hands upon…quickly we are very well informed…I even take to reading Nature and other journals in my office…our doctors are often surprised by the detail of our knowledge…

And meeting new friends and new lovers is completely focused either upon HIV status and whether or not you know. If there had been a paradise by now it’s well and truly lost.

And there are those given time on television and in their pulpits who say it’s nothing more than we people deserve. This is the wrath of God punishing the sins of Sodom. And the public information campaign about AIDS in one way reinforces the social isolation that closes around us. Now there are occasions when you are spat upon in the streets and chased by thugs shouting AIDS whore or some such and the police do nothing…well not quite nothing…they still raid gay bars but now they wear surgical masks and rubber gloves…they still arrest gay men for importuning for sex…a victimless crime for which there is no heterosexual equivalent…and street bullies harass gay men though they won’t beat them up any more because gay blood might give them AIDS… instead they use knives…

Then there are the hopes of an early cure…AZT in particular…all turn out to be false hopes.

Almost as light relief there is an eccentric campaign in the Media by those who deny HIV is the cause of anything…led by the Sunday Times under Andrew Neil’s editorship…maybe easily forgotten and lost to history…but hardly serious journalism’s finest hour…

The general public are terrified of touching someone with AIDS. Playground abuse now routinely includes ‘don’t touch him…he’s queer…he’s got AIDS…’ Even nice ladies who do the flowers in the church on Saturday night think that maybe people with AIDS should not take communion. Such attitudes are commonplace beyond comment.

The petty prejudices are justified by a disease that makes us live like lepers in our own land. And Gay Pride takes on for us a wholly new significance…and Gay Community is properly reborn in response to this chronic need. This time we will not go back into the closet. This time we will we go quietly into the night. This time will be different.

Then there is the Diana moment…the importance of what she did for the Gay Community by taking hold of that sick man’s hand should not be forgotten. It was no accident that one of the first to lay flowers at Kensington Palace, in the still dawn of the morning she died, was the owner of a well known Gay Bar in Vauxhall….

And then our friends start to get sick…One with pneumonia, and another and another…then Septrin wards off the pneumonia…then friends are marked with Kaposi’s sarcoma…lesions appear on faces, hands, lips, backs legs and feet. Then another friend goes blind…another suffers a strange dementia…many suffer permanent diarrhoea…one friend tells me he cannot go on any longer living in nappies and cries in my arms….and I help him wash his clothes and bedding pretending it will all be OK.

They all seem to waste away before your eyes…like those terrible pictures from the victims at Bergen-Belsen…you run into people at bars and don’t recognise them…and then you both pretend there’s nothing wrong…then you call your friends and to your roll call of the living-dead they add more names…

And now you are struck by the scale of the waste of human talent….doctors, nurses, teachers, dancers, designers, actors, lawyers, electricians, plumbers…bar men, waiters, air-stewards, lorry-drivers, shop assistants…Everyman…all gone…

You go to fund raisers to help support the victims who can’t get help from the state…you go marches…and you anxiously go to visit a close friend you’ve not seen for a while…knowing….even so you are shocked…and helpless…and then soon there’s one more; soon there are so many you cannot even visit them…

And then there’s your first funeral…and it’s bleak and sad and full of laughter hoarse with tears. You’ve no idea how many there are going to be…and still less that you will eventually be unable to go to them all…because you can’t…and then you feel ashamed and guilty that you’ve done so little…guiltier to be untouched…guiltiest that you’ve survived.

Then there are the lovers…partners for life…partners who’ve survived, who’ve nursed and loved someone through this slowest of deaths… put out on the streets by families who cannot bear to acknowledge their son was gay. Partners who have no inheritance rights…who lose everything they shared in a lifetime of love and who find themselves locked out of that love’s comfort….

Still there’s no cure but by now so many of your good friends are dying it’s no longer reasonable for you not to have the test. Of course you know that having the test will change everything…your endowments that cover the mortgage, all life insurance; everything will be worthless from the moment you know your status…from this point forward you will have to live a lie.

The irony isn’t lost on you that in coming-out you chose not to live a lie…now here you are…back where you started…hiding in the dark…afraid…

And then comes the question: who can you tell…employers are very nervous of HIV positive employees…and families are already living in shadow of its fear…will it help for them to know before the time when they must know…which realistically cannot be long postponed from diagnosis.

It seems oddly unreal when you get the news.

It’s not a shock. You calmly ask how long you’ve got…as if your asking for a cup of tea…they parry the question with an answer answerless…but it turns out you’ve got maybe two years well and no more than five in total…would you like to see a health advisor…you smile wanly…it’s a little late you say…the doctor smiles back. Idly you wander how many times has he had this conversation…this year, this month, this week…today?

What do you do next…. you call a few friends. In my case I’m visiting my closest friend Mark who is already in St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington…dying…dying so sweetly and so well… and I tell him…and he comforts me…he tells me how sorry he is and hugs me…there’s a selflessness hidden deep in all of us…it has a great beauty when it flowers in the need of our deepest distress.

And then I go out get drunk and then I get stoned and then I get on with life….

…Except now you’ve got a new life…or a new routine in your life…a new companion…every month you go to give blood and see the doctor…the nagging reminder than no matter how well you feel…you are about to die…in the trenches waiting for a whistle to blow…every blood test…every result…a little Gethsemane of waiting…

Next Week….Part II….The angel of death passes over….

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