THIRTY-FOUR MILLION PEOPLE CAN T BE WRONG

There are thirty-four million people living with HIV/AIDS on this planet.
Unlike many people who read hotpress, I m old enough to remember a time when AIDS didn t exist, or at least didn t exist in the public consciousness in the way that it would during the eighties. In those halcyon days, when, incidentally, condoms were only available to married couples and then only with a doctor s prescription, for a sexually active boy like myself the only concern was that you didn t knock anybody up. Other sexually transmitted diseases like syphillis, gonnorhea, NSU, chlamydia and herpes were simply not known about, and certainly not talked about. While it may well be that STD clinics existed in Ireland at that time, I never visited one, nor indeed knew anybody that had. I knew a lot of people who had weekended in London clinics, mind you.
The advent of AIDS in the mid-eighties changed my life forever. At the time I had discovered a burgeoning dance scene in Dublin s gay clubs, having been introduced to them by a best friend who was himself gay. Finding myself at home and welcomed by my queer brothers, I made many friends. Some of those guys are close friends to this day. Many of them are dead.
When word began to filter down of a super-flu that was affecting gay men in the United States I can remember that nobody really took a lot of notice. We weren t Americans, it wasn t going to affect us... By the time the first cases were diagnosed in Ireland we were aware that American gay men were dying in droves. The message was simple. If you got this disease you were going to fucking die, end of story. While it s not a pleasant thing to admit, in the early days of dealing with this virus, many men living with HIV/AIDS were ostracised by gay society a pathetic if understandable reaction.
In the absence of any official acknowledgment, let alone help, some gay men gradually began to organise and educate their brothers and sisters about the issues surrounding this illness. This genesis led ultimately to the formation of many organisations who still work tirelessly to promote AIDS awareness, including the Red Ribbon Projects, Gay Men s Health Project, Dublin Aids Alliance, PozIreland and Cairde, among others. Mick Quinlan of GMHP is deserving of special mention, as he is one of the longest serving and indeed hardest working activists in the area of HIV/AIDS awareness. And there are many others.
By now HIV/AIDS had entered the public consciousness, but it was seen as an exclusively gay-male phenomenon. A disease of filthy queers, if you will. Try to imagine what that felt like in a country that was one of the most homophobic in Europe. For a time it really felt like God was out to get us. It seemed he didn t like us just being ourselves... Like we weren t real people...
Then straight people started to get sick. Again not real people, you understand, but the unfortunates, mainly from working-class inner-city areas and outlying Dublin Corporation projects like Ballymun, Finglas and my own home, Coolock, who chose to escape from a world which had nothing to offer them by availing of (incredibly) cheap smack that some thoughtful souls had brought into Ireland for our amusement and their profit. Mainly for their profit, in retrospect. In the late eighties, unemployment was sky high and even a university graduate could expect to go straight onto the dole if working abroad was not an option. I can remember families that didn t have enough money to eat dinner every day. Really.
By now, we at least understood how you contracted this illness. It appeared to be a blood thing you could catch it from blood and (shit!) you could catch it from come. Saliva we weren t sure of; I can remember kissing one HIV positive friend in a drunken flirtation and agonising about it afterwards. I was that ignorant. Medical advances had indicated that while the virus was incurable, its effect on the body could be lessened by the use of drugs. Hmmm...
By now the government had finally copped on and belatedly began a series of awareness campaigns that seemed to suggest that if you held hands in the pictures you could get AIDS. It was a start.
Fast forward to the mid-nineties and by now I was working for Gay Community News, Ireland s national Lesbian and Gay newspaper, and an organ that includes raising awareness around HIV/AIDS issues in its mission statement. I remember I was once sent to cover a concelebrated mass at St Patrick s Cathedral to mark Irish AIDS day, and left in tears after a working-class woman presented three quilt panels to be added to the Irish AIDS Quilt. They were in memory of three of her daughters all of whom had died in that year from AIDS related illnesses contracted through intravenous drug use. On another occasion I was at a party with a group of friends and, pointing at a photo on the mantlepiece, I asked someone who the four smiling guys with him were. They were friends, he smiled sadly, but they were all gone now.
It was clear that HIV/AIDS was the biggest threat to human life that had ever existed. We now knew how to protect ourselves from it, but it was too late for Rock Hudson, Freddie Mercury, Liberace and my friend Fran. Also, combination therapy drugs meant that the death rate had slowed. Hanging out on Dublin s gay scene I noticed that the paranoia that had afflicted an earlier generation of gay men was not present in younger men I met the view seemed to be that HIV/AIDS wasn t the killer we had been led to believe. Of course, it is, but you re only young once...
The situation remains pretty much the same today. Irish rates of infection continue to rise, although the death rate is falling.
While we shouldn t be frightened of the virus, we need to protect ourselves from it. We need to be aware. There is currently no effective Government prevention campaign in operation. The success of combination therapy drugs means that young gay men are not being personally touched by the virus; people they know who re HIV positive aren t dying. People who have come to Ireland from areas with high rates of HIV infection need to be fully informed about preventative practices. We desperately need to facilitate i/v drug users with needle exchanges in order to prevent the sharing of needles among users. We need to realise that people like us are still getting infected.

Stephen Robinson acknowledges the assistance of Noel Walsh of GCN and HIV Services Network in the compilation of this piece.