I’m old enough to remember what for a generation of the world’s LGB people could be the ‘day the music died’. It was a time when the nascent freedoms of gay and bi men in particular which were starting to be won after generations of campaigning, came to an abrupt and appalling end. That time was when the AIDS virus arrived on the scene.

I wondered what I should write for this year’s World AIDS Day and wanted to make it meaningful but in the end I decided that as AIDS is still with us I could do little better than to repost last year’s piece which contains an excellent quote from Clive Simpson.

Here it is:

Only those of us who are older remember the horrors that the Human Immune Deficiency Virus brought to a generation of young and some not so young gay men in the early 1980’s to the 1990’s. We remember the men, some of whom were friends and work colleagues, who went from fit, healthy and full of life to shrunken and dying husks decades before it should have been their time. We remember the setback to gay rights that the virus caused and the press stories that treated all gay men as either diseased or disease vectors and which helped to increase societal hatred of gays.

This disease terrified a whole generation of gay men who had to endure not just a horrific disease but also negative public attitudes to both homosexuality and HIV. This disease, whose origins were at the time unknown had a horrible randomness as to whom it targeted and this disease could be contracted from people who looked healthy and fit and who may have had no idea of they were carrying a killer disease. It could be contracted in ostensibly secure relationships where either one partner cheated and picked up the disease or where a relationship had started with neither of the partners knowing they were infected. This awful disease decimated British gay men and traumatised a whole generation.

A diagnosis of HIV was back then a certain death sentence. There was and still is no cure for HIV infection, but there were also no effective treatments. There were no antivirals or other treatments to keep the virus levels in an infected person down and control the effects of the disease and no post exposure prophylaxis to stop an exposure to HIV becoming a full on HIV infection. Once the disease had properly set in people declined and died and there was very little that medicine at the time could do for them.

We are a long way on from those times. HIV / AIDs is now a manageable condition but still one that I would advise anyone to avoid if they can.

I was going to write a much longer form article about World AIDS day and the ongoing problems that HIV / AIDS causes in the contemporary world but I found an article that made much more sense than what I was going to write and is in my view much more impactful than what I was intending to publish.

The article is by Clive Simpson ( @QueensSpeechUK Twitter) who has been a doughty fighter against gender identity ideology but who also has a well deserved reputation of standing up for young gay men who are being targeted by the ‘Gender Mengeles’ and guided towards rounds of horrifying useless surgery and medications that are often an attempt by ideologues to ‘trans the gay away’.

Mr Simpson said:

Picture it: Basingstoke, 1982. A 19 year old man makes his debut on the gay scene. He’s young, fresh, eager for experience – for all of which, read “randy as hell”.

He’s hoping to meet some new friends, go to some new, exciting places and, mainly, get his legover. Then, bam, the ultimate party-pooper appears. A new virus has hit the streets over in America, so new it doesn’t have a proper name yet. They’re calling it GRID – gay-related immuno-deficiency because its victims seem so far to be mainly restricted to gay men. It’s killing them. Beautiful young men wasting away to nothingness, dead long before their time.

It’s terrifying and our protagonist takes all the precautions, follows the rules but basically tries to ignore its existence. He doesn’t join ACT-UP but he wears the badges. He doesn’t read about it in the press.

He moves to London in 1986, qualifies as a nurse in 1989 but doesn’t use his qualification to work in the London Lighthouse or the Mildmay. He’s scared. He remains scared even after the medication improves, even after it’s long stopped being a death sentence. He just lives his life as he hears stories of old friends who died in the plague.

Fast forward to 2009. They can test for HIV in sexual health clinics, results instantaneous. He’s never been tested before but the nurse there tells him that it isn’t the 80s anymore and not knowing your status is as outdated as legwarmers and tukka boots. So he gets tested, with much fear and trepidation. Negative, as he suspected he might be because he’s kept to the rules all that time (mostly). Reader, that man is me, rather obviously.

I’m no hero of the plague years but I do what I can to fight against the more pernicious mind-virus that’s infecting young gay men these days. HIV is still out there, kids, forget working out what pronouns you prefer and get tested, keep safe, stay alive. So many men didn’t.

I would like to conclude this piece by adding this. If nothing else the arrival of AIDS and the damage that it has caused to countless people is a warning. It is a warning to be careful about not just the sexually transmitted diseases that we know about and understand, but we also need to be aware that lurking out there might be sexually transmitted diseases that we are at this time completely unaware of. Nobody, not even those involved in epidemiology or sexual health medicine in the late 70’s predicted either the existence nor the impact of AIDS and there might be sexually transmitted diseases that could be just as awful as AIDS but just have not made their appearance yet.

I remember organising a benefit gig back in the 1990’s for local AIDS charities in East London and the slogan that I chose for that gig and which went on the tee shirts and the flyers etc was ‘Love Safe’. In 2024 in order to reduce the number of people who are afflicted with this terrible disease that is something we still have to do. So go and have the fun you want with the adult partner or partners of your choice but for your own sake and the sake of others please do it safely. Condoms are cheap, your life and the lives of those whom you are intimate with are not.