‘FAREWELL TO MY SKANKY HO ’“How big?!” asked my best friend Julia, over a plate of slurpy oysters. “Nine and a half inches, I know, I measured,” I replied. “Problem was it was so big I kept getting urinary tract infections. Anyway, he didn’t have the best hygiene regime, so whenever I’d pull back his foreskin, out would spill a tub of cottage cheese.”
The other girls squealed, sharing stories of encounters with smegma surprises and massive members. And so it has continued over the last 10 years: my best friends and I meeting regularly for dinner in Soho, sharing intimate details about the men who have come in and out of our lives and orifices. Ten years of giggly, girlie gossip, with splatterings of pain and pathos. Long before and after my HIV diagnosis, we’ve been there for each other. And it’s coming to an end.
Julia is moving to Bermuda and I’m not happy. In fact I’m f****** furious. I’ve tried dissuasion (“you realise thousands of people are lost forever each year in the Bermuda triangle”) and toyed with sabotage (would it be disloyal if I somehow arranged for her husband to catch her, trussed up like a chicken, with a man in a latex gimp suit, dump her on the spot and leave without her?) But it seems she’s really going to do it. I feel betrayed, abandoned, bereft.
Julia was one of the first people I told about my HIV diagnosis. She reacted as I expected: with initial shock and distress, but was and continues to be solidly supportive. She was the one who persuaded me to tell my current partner about my HIV diagnosis, instead of unceremoniously chucking him, as I originally planned, to avoid rejection. Three years later, he and I are still together, and she continues to listens sympathetically as I whinge about his flagrant capitalism and crippling marriage phobia.
HIV isn’t really an issue in my friendship with Julia and other close female friends. Yes, they may ask briefly if my health is okay, but we quickly move on to more important issues like how to travel through customs with a Rampant Rabbit vibrator in your hand luggage (the solution, it appears, is to slip it into the luggage of your male travelling companion). How extraordinarily dull it would be if each conversation had to touch on the travels of my CD4 count, or latest HIV related fungal ailment?
I was asked recently if I had many HIV positive friends. Yes, a few of my friends are living with HIV, however we’re not friends simply because we happen to have been infected with the same tiresome virus. I choose my friends because I enjoy their company; we have a laugh and share interests. Saying that having a virus in common is a good basis for friendship is as arbitrary as choosing friends because they also have big tits. (Incidentally, I do have the biggest tits of my friends, thanks to breastfeeding two babies and Agent Provocateur push-up bras.) I have absolutely nothing in common with many people living with HIV, beyond HIV. Why should that minor commonality be sufficient to sustain, or even commence, friendship?
Many of my friends had HIV tests after my diagnosis. I imagine their rationale was: if it could happen to Susan, (the epitome of virginal chastity), it could easily happen to them (skanky ho’s). Luckily for them, they all tested negative. However, I believe my diagnosis has affected their attitudes to HIV. They now realise it doesn’t just affect gay men and people from the African community, it can happen to anyone. They also realise people living with HIV aren’t simply passive victims, but real people living normal diverse lives, who can obsess about shoes and shagging.
Julia and I have been there for each other in worse crises than my HIV diagnosis. She was the one I turned to as my second marriage imploded, as well as the more heinous catastrophe when my front veneer fell out, rendering me a toothless hag.
I’ve been there through her plethora of relationships, from hemp-obsessed Swiss art-student, to her marriage to the man I initially jealously resented and finally have come to begrudgingly like. Our friendship survived my marriage to the loathsome American she detested, and I have no doubt it will survive her move to Bermuda. That is, of course, if I can't prevent her from going. Can anyone lend me a gimp suit for a photo session?
