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.
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.
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.