The Shadow of AIDS

The way the Conservative Party advertised the AIDS crisis and the way they labelled it as, you know, as if it was almost driven by evil homosexuality. Plus, there were all the adverts which pretty much told you if you were gay, you were going to die. And that was the kind of take away from all the AIDS iceberg adverts and the tombstone – I remember that fell over! And you know, it scared the daylights out of me, even to the point of making me even less likely to have sex or find out about sexuality or anything like that. And then when I finally did realise that I was gay, it was so traumatic because I still was associating being gay with an inevitable death sentence, you know. And that was the messaging that we were getting, you know. It wasn’t exactly supportive.

It was all about the language of gay plague and danger. And there was a strange advertisement on television which involved the actor John Hurt, with a very sinister sounding voiceover, and a falling tombstone with AIDS marked on it. But it was – again, you weren’t going learn anything from watching the advert. And then a leaflet came through the door. My parents, I think, were really cross that there was a leaflet campaign, which again didn’t really say very much about how you might catch AIDS, or any information really. I seem to remember there was talk of condoms. But it didn’t really say anything about my life or, you know, increase anyone’s level of knowledge about what was going on. It was just all very fearful and sinister and secretive and dark. There was a horrible – I think he was the Manchester police commissioner, I think it was James Anderton, and he talked about homosexuals swimming in a cesspool of their own creation. You know, there was that sort of language. He was, he was a fundamentalist Christian and, you know, it came from a very judgey place on religious terms.

I came out to my sister and she was, yeah, she freaked out. She was more concerned that I was going to be having loads of anal sex and die. Yeah. There was just nowhere to go really. I felt like a very isolated child, and I think Section 28, thinking about that then, really impacted on that. Because, you know, there weren’t groups at school, you know? When you’re told by a teacher that you’re a poof or you’re crap at sports because you’re a gaylord or whatever then it’s kind of…

There was a taunt going around the playground from, well throughout all of my schooling, ‘do you know what gay means? Got AIDS Yeah’. Because you had that kind of, yeah, added thing of you’re going to get AIDS and die because it’s a death sentence. And I was never scared of that personally. I just think it was the messages.

There was an advert in ’87 called ‘don’t die of ignorance’, and the Tories had left it for so long to actually do anything, because they, you know, it started affecting heterosexual people. Because when HIV was first found it was known as GRIDS, gay-related immunodeficiency syndrome, and I think it was ‘82/’83 they changed it to AIDS. And I remember watching the advert at my auntie’s house, at a family gathering, and I really clearly remember, and I was what, eleven, my auntie saying ‘we’re making too much of that’.

But the general population were homophobic and Section 28 definitely exacerbated that, and made people think they had the right to speak exactly what they thought of our community. And our community as well sort of slightly stepped back into the shadows, and part of that through fear, and also partly through violent and abusive ways that we were treated, even walking down the street.

So when we did raise money we usually raised money in our own clubs and pubs, and even down to doing different things, like a drag show and collecting the cash from that. Yeah. The community were well aware that we needed to do something. But it did create, that is a positive from it, it did create an expansion in our separate safe spaces, and also we started to look for alternative ways to generate cash to support people.

It was not long after the AIDS, AIDS hit our community hard, and the press around AIDS, the publicity around HIV, and basically seeing us as some sort of disease that’s going to kill the entire population, so people’s confidence about being in society as who you, your authentic self, dropped quite significantly. So those two things came very close together, HIV crisis and…

And also that sort of, the Thatcher era and Conservative government meant that the right of the country is, a bit like now in a lot of ways, that the right of the country thought they had the right to speak out and say exactly the sort of, I was going to use the word fascist, but exactly the sort of terminology that they felt was appropriate for our community. We were, very much became second-class citizens in a lot of people’s eyes, or non-existent.

Section 28’s wording was about promoting homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. And that was interesting, because it wasn’t about sex, it was about family, you know?

And so there was a real sort of, but that effectively meant you couldn’t talk about anything. There was no sex education around LGBT stuff. But deliberately, we felt at the time, around HIV and AIDS, because talking about HIV and AIDS in the eighties was a very, very complicated thing to do. Because initially it was very much targeted as a gay plague, you know? And how to talk about safe sex so that people wouldn’t, so the virus would be sort of tackled rather than, because in the eighties and early nineties there was no medication that helped at all, it was literally a death sentence.

So how to talk about that when you couldn’t talk about homosexuality, it was designed, I think, you know, and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had a very close relationship, and Ronald Reagan certainly didn’t care if gay men died, he was very open about that, you know? And I think a lot of people genuinely thought it didn’t matter if gay people died, that they would get what they deserved.

You know, people used to talk about it sort of punishment from god and all stuff like that, you know? And Section 28 tapped very deeply into those themes within people, that if you don’t educate people they’re more likely to catch the virus, the HIV, and they’re more likely to die, and then that would be a good thing. That’s what I think. That people wanted, somehow wanted that to happen. Yeah. It was just a very slow extermination program, you know?

I think that’s what they were aiming for, you know? Just to sort of let them all die, and then we’ll be, you know, without any kind of understanding that whatever people have done, wherever you look through history, wherever you look in the world, gay, LGB and T people just keep coming. There’s no stopping, you know, it’s sort of in countries where there’s the death penalty gay people still keep coming. You know, it’s, you cannot, legislating about it never worked, you can’t ban it, you can’t, you can’t. Gay people and lesbian people and trans people and bisexual people and pansexual, and all of those people just keep coming.