Russell T Davies, screenwriter and producer of Queer as Folk, The Second Coming, and the Dr Who revival
There are things I can’t say here. Men I dare not name. The first man I ever had sex with. A man I loved for three months in 1988. That hilarious friend I spent a mad week with in Glasgow. All of them dead, now. And they all died of Aids.
But I can’t say their names because their families said they died of cancer or pneumonia. And they maintain that story to this day. Even now, I’ve had to change a few details in those opening sentences, just in case. The stigma and fear of Aids was so great that a family could go through the funeral, the wake and then decades of mourning without saying what really happened.
A virus had jumped species, probably from chimpanzees. But we couldn’t have known that, back in the 1980s. So as the decade unfolded and HIV proliferated, we had to cope with terror and anger but also, more insidiously, sheer disbelief. An illness? Which attacks gay men only? A gay plague?! Impossible! (And yes, I know, it can infect anyone, but forgive me a middle-aged gay man’s perspective. At the time, if felt like it was targeted at us.)
The hysteria quickly caught fire, because fake news, false facts and conspiracy theories weren’t invented in 2020. They ran riot with Aids in the 1980s. If you think the internet is to blame for misinformation, I can guarantee the problem existed long before I even had an electric typewriter. Read more via Guardian