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Recently I've been thinking - and regretting - how much
the 'Aids sector ' has changed over the last 20 odd years or so.
My thoughts have been prompted by a number of recent anniversary celebrations.
Twenty years of the Terrence Higgins Trust. fifteen of the National Aids
Manual. Ten of GMFA.
And, to mention the one in which I was most intimately involved, fifteen
of Positively Women.
My first encounter with HIV (other than the fateful one that resulted
in my acquiring it) was via a very close friend called Douglas Lambert.
He was a well-known New York actor who had been living in the UK for some
years.
In 1984, he told me he had Aids - and was terrified. He was convinced
he had got it from an affair with Rock Hudson. He did love a little glamour!
There was nothing glamorous, though, about his appalling isolation, his
terrible symptoms, and the lack of services for him. He died in 1986 after
having gone public. I still have the diary articles he did for the Daily
Mirror - harrowing reading.
Shortly after he died, I had to confront my own virus. There was nothing
for women, no one acknowledged us, and if they did it was only as 'junkies
or prostitutes'.
A small group of us formed Positively Woman with the help of THT. Nothing
was being done by the Thatcher Government of the time, but luckily the
Chief Medical Officer, Sir Donald Aitcheson, was a great admirer of Sheila
Gilchrist, the original founder of Positively Women, and gave us all the
help he could.
It was anger and fear that motivated us. We were not restricted by management
committees, Aids careerists or people who wanted to segregate us into
'ethnic or sexual groups'.
Other activists were setting up organisations too. We were quite an eccentric
bunch. The one thing we all had in common was an urgent need to bring
HIV/Aids to he public's notice - combat stigma
and to set up self-help services to combat isolation
and fear. We worked our butts off.
People were dying all around us - I personally attended at least three
funerals a week. The
