Thread by @DrWillN

On my first day at university I was given a copy of Don’t Die of Ignorance leaflet.

A few months earlier I’d picked up a copy of @THTorguk booklet telling me not to bum Americans and to wank.

#ItsASin @alexander_olly

🧵 1/11

For the whole time I was at university, I was celibate.

Like many other queer men in the 80s, the shame and fear of sex was deep.

#ItsASin

🧵 2/11

I had a friend who was a priest.

He had separate mugs in his kitchen for the young drug users who used to visit him.

He knew that HIV couldn’t be transmitted through sharing cups, but that segregated crockery was to reassure his other parishioners.

#ItsASin

🧵 3/11

One of my best school friends died (not of Aids) in his first year at university.

As his mother wept in my arms she told me they wouldn’t put an obituary in the local paper.

Because people might jump to conclusions.

#ItsASin

🧵 4/11

I volunteered for my local Aids Helpline. Other volunteers had lost sons, siblings, partners, friends.

Parents of people like Ritchie volunteered - having had an epiphany. Their grief was hard to observe. Their entrenched homophobia, just as hard to see.

#ItsASin

🧵 5/11

Right from those early days it wasn’t just “the boys”. Women, trans people, drug users, migrants, sex workers (and the intersection across us all) were dying.

Yet those voices and experiences were and continue to be marginalised.

#ItsASin

🧵 6/11

I was asked to buddy a guy who was the DJ in the local gay club. Me, because I wasn’t a scene-queen at the time. Everyone else knew him.

Before I’d finished buddy training he was dead.

#ItsASin

🧵 7/11

A young man who worked in a city centre clothes shop got fired because he was gay and his boss found out he had HIV. Just like Colin.

We planned a demonstration against the shop owner, but the lad died before it happened.

#ItsASin

🧵 8/11

A friend of mine, post 1996, believed conspiracy theories about HIV meds. Smoking weed and taking vitamins would be enough, he said. It was the meds that would make him sick - he’d read the evidence he told me, from the bed of the hospice he died in.

#ItsASin

🧵 9/11

I have less hair, more wrinkles, a growing belly. And every day I live I know how privileged and grateful I am.

I know that everyone of us who were left standing have to live our lives to the fullest.

#ItsASin

🧵 10/11

And I’d never, never wish our collective experience on new generations. Know your history but please love, dance, party, fuck, live.

And be on the frontlines to fight for those in the world who aren’t yet reaping the privileges that took us out of hell.

#ItsASin

🧵 11/11

Btw - I ended up marrying an American ❣️

And because we all like happy endings: I *way* more than made up for that celibacy in the years that followed.