He refused to get tested because he couldn’t cope with the idea. I was very close to him and he died suddenly. People were being chucked out on the street by landlords and room-mates. So it was like, you can do that, but we’re not going to tell you how he died. I paid for the funeral out of my student grant. We couldn’t set it up until we got the information from him. But once you’ve set up the charity I can probably tell you something.’ It was Catch 22. And he said, ‘Well, since you’re not family, I can’t tell you anything. A nurse came out and put me in a side room and said, “I’m very sorry, he’s just died.” She asked me who I was and I said, “I’m his boyfriend.”Īfterwards, when we were setting up the trust, I wrote to his consultant asking for confirmation of the cause of death. I’d brought some lollies and things he’d wanted. I went to see him and they were trying to resuscitate him as I was waiting at the entrance of the ward. Our relationship was not recognised until he had, literally, just died. I had to look through a porthole into an isolation room. They just thought it might be contagious so they put him in isolation. There was no idea that Terry’s illness was connected to this American disease, as it was called then, when he first went to hospital. Rupert Whitaker, co-founder of the Terrence Higgins Trust Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian ‘People were being chucked out on the street by landlords and room-mates’ Rupert Whitaker, the co-founder of the Terence Higgins Trust.
Here, four people who were at the forefront of the struggles brought so powerfully to life in It’s a Sin, tell their stories in their own words. Yet as bleak as the period was, it also gave birth to an upsurge in gay activism and support groups that helped transform the position of the gay community in this country. As with the current pandemic, many people died lonely deaths, only in the case of HIV there was no medical reason for their confinement.
It was largely social ignorance rather than community protection that drove such practice. The gay community was held in suspicion by all sectors of society, including the health service where, again as Davies shows, Aids patients were often placed in harsh conditions of isolation. Terms like the “gay plague” were widely used and the belief was fostered that the disease could be transmitted by any kind of proximity. Then it became known as “Grid” – gay-related immune deficiency – before acquired immunodeficiency syndrome was finally coined (Aids).Īs it spread to the UK, a community that was just beginning to find its public voice and confidence was ushered back into the shadows by a homophobic press campaign. Early on, it was referred to as the “4H disease” because it appeared to affect “homosexuals, heroin users, haemophiliacs and Haitians”. The first mysterious cases were reported in the US, where otherwise healthy people began suffering a catastrophic collapse of their immune systems. That was the furtive environment in which Aids surfaced.