WITNESSES TO THE UNSEEN

Having previously written about the medical and political issues arising from the AIDS explosion for Hot Press, I wasn’t surprised to be asked to write something for this year’s World Aids Day. Initially, and unimaginatively, I thought an AIDS update would somehow be adequate. List off the latest demographics, thank the many dedicated people working to alleviate the isolation and fear that can accompany infection and, finally, wrap it all up with a pithy comment or two drawing lessons for the future.

That was before I met ‘Eddie’. Eddie is not his real name. In fact, very, very few of the names that follow are real. Minor details have been altered throughout in an attempt to protect the identities of all the ‘witnesses’ I spoke to. But once I began speaking to him and others, mostly teenagers, living at the fringes and among some of the highest risk groups what I discovered was so distressing that I felt it was their stories that needed to be told.

Eddie turned seventeen two weeks ago. When his ma died from an AIDS related illness nearly three years ago he was just fourteen. Technically an orphan since then, Eddie’s made stabs at living with relations and living on his own, cobbling out his necessities by mixing an orphan’s pension with petty crime. It took him years to admit to himself that his ma, an HIV drug-user, had died from AIDS. Even now, he finds it easier to talk about the uncle he had who also became infected via a needle and died about a year and a half ago.

“There’s been nothing but death in my family for years now,” he admits in an unusually unguarded moment. Eddie’s no wimp. He’s a tough, wiry looking kid: a ‘cunning animal’ as Krishnamurti might have described him. His father was killed in a street brawl, possibly over drugs, about a year before his mother died; he lost two half-sisters in a fire and his oldest sister had recently lost her first child in a tragic miscarriage.

Eddie talks scornfully of the eejits who shoot heroin, possibly because he claims to prefer smoking it; more often than not he claims never to use it at all. Though he likes to present himself as sexually active, the idea of using a condom seems miles away from his reality. He’s prepared to admit that it’s “probably a good idea”.

For Eddie, however, AIDS largely remains something you get if you let a guy fuck you in the arse. He refuses to accept that his mother might have been infected even if she wasn’t mainlining. “She didn’t know any better. Nobody knew,” he adds defensively.

Eddie never received any counselling, didn’t seem to even know he could have got any. But that would have involved both him and his family admitting that both his mother and a brother of hers had died from AIDS. From what I can gather, Eddie was ostracised within his inner city pecking order. On more than one occasion he had to fight to defend and assert himself in an increasingly hostile environment.

The law also came down on him. The Gardai knew his parents and rarely had a week gone by since their deaths that he hadn’t been picked-up, verbally harassed or searched. At least that’s what he says in a voice too resigned and weary to hear in someone so young. Although he would deny it, Eddie’s a very angry boy. Human relationships, for him, have become a series of more or less self-evident manipulations or exertions of will.

His is a world in which compassion and affection seem strangely alien. Having dropped out of school more or less when his parents died, Eddie can’t even conceive why it might be a good thing for him to go back.

Annie is nineteen. She’s been mainlining for nearly two years

and pays for her fix by street walking. Like Eddie, though, she, too, is a cunning animal and seems uncertain as to my motives whenever we speak. Perhaps she thinks I’m just some perv getting my rocks off by talking to her.

Because of that there’s an ambivalent and contradictory tone in much of what she says from one occasion to the next. Though she has no interest in discussing the subject of AIDS, I gather she feels safe enough as she claims to never go “all the way” with her clients anyway. She only does ‘hand-jobs and blow-jobs’. I ask her about her boyfriend whom I’ve often seen with her along her patch of the strip. I know that more often than not she’s out there drumming up cash so both of them can get their fix.

“Does he use a condom?” I ask her. “What for?” she says sharply. To suggest that he should seems like an insult to her. I don’t doubt for a minute that he’d probably take it that way himself too.

I first met Mikey about six months ago in the context of another story. When I decided to look him up I discovered he’d been put in prison, ostensibly on an assault charge after getting into a row with a Garda. At first I wanted to believe that this might have been a good thing for him, that maybe now he’d have had to go cold turkey.

I’ve never been able to figure out what came first with him, whether he went on the game before or after developing his addiction. His cousin, Antony, whom I’d met at the same time, told me when I spoke to him again this week that Mikey first started hanging around Burgh Quay when he was twelve and that he probably didn’t start shooting up till he was fifteen.

Like everyone else profiled so far in this article, Antony and Mikey were both reared in the North Inner City. Like Eddie who I mentioned earlier, they’ve also had relations who have died from AIDS, with family histories of drug abuse going back two generations. In going on the game, both Mikey and Antony felt it was the only way to get anything they wanted, from nifty runners to bicycles. While Antony never took up drinking or drugs and has largely rejected ‘the life’ since his cousin went into prison, he certainly doesn’t seem to have a moral position about it and AIDS hardly enters his head.

I asked him whether he and his cousin used condoms and he admitted that he never insisted on it, though occasionally their tricks would. In the AIDS era, the asking price for unprotected anal sex has skyrocketed. Mikey, who, by the way, unlike Antony, had always identified himself as being gay, didn’t enjoy being fucked anyway, so if he had to do it, he preferred to go without a condom. The added risk meant that he could ask for and get anywhere from £100 to £150.

You can be forgiven when you hear such patterns of thinking that you’re living in a third world country somewhere. Mikey, for all his occasional bluster, was a frail and very young looking seventeen year old when I met him last spring. He preferred shooting up through the veins in his feet and seemed to think he was pretty much risk-free because he kept his own needles ‘around’.

But Mikey’s fate since going inside sounds tragic. With a known history as a junkie/rent boy, and his runtish body type, he seems to have become the brunt of all of the other inmates’ anger. Within weeks of his arrival he was set fire to and, although allegedly put into protective custody, he has nonetheless been stabbed three times. Antony assured me they were more gashes and described just how inmates might make, carry and use such a weapon.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just in the prisons that HIV-positive status or the suspicion of its likelihood becomes a pretext for violence and abuse. A homicide case that comes to trial this week revolves around a hate-crime against a person living with full-blown AIDS on Dublin’s Northside. In all likelihood this aspect of the case may be played down, even with the connivance of the murdered man’s family, because that, at least, will help keep their son’s homosexuality out of the papers.

Tommy is twenty-eight and in comparison with most of the

others I spoke with, would have been considered privileged. He’s been living with his diagnosis for nearly three years. Relations with his family are severely strained. Like so many others I’d heard about they too were desperately ashamed of their gay son. He’d even come to the conclusion that they probably just wanted him to go off somewhere and die quietly. There are, sadly, no shortage of stories about sons dying away from home in places like London and New York. Gay sons who had to flee the bigotry of their communities often find themselves doubly rejected for having dared become sick.

Tommy is very, very scared and very, very lonely. About eight months ago his behaviour took a very bizarre turn. He’d abandoned his flat and began to sleep rough. He told friends that he was no longer scared of dying because he had, in fact, already died. As of this writing, Tommy has only recently become an outpatient again, a diagnosed schizophrenic. The best that can be said is that, once again, he at least makes the effort to look after himself. To eat properly, to rest, to go easy on the old sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll. He supports this life joylessly and it is clear that all the internalised shame and negativity have made his chances of sustaining his well-being over the longer term less than optimum.

It’s impossible to offer any of the tried and true banalities to him. For people living with AIDS, Ireland is neither a warm nor a welcoming place. Our prejudices and ignorance have compounded an already problematic health issue. Our blindnesses have ensured the maximum of grief and social stigmatisation for those trying to live with AIDS while simultaneously guaranteeing that yet another generation has grown up in fundamental ignorance.

Our continuing hatred of gay people, reinforced by an abjectly stupid brand of Catholicism, has reinforced the social pressures that make, for young people especially, the coming to terms with their affections impossibly oppressive. As long as we continue to make easy targets of gay people, we continue to endorse the terrible self-loathing that people in the closet are so often prey to. Denial of sexuality actually increases the likelihood of their practising anonymous, and often unprotected, sex.

Blame though must also be laid at our judicial/law enforcement agencies. The continuing treatment of heroin addiction as a legal problem instead of a social/medical one is largely shaped by class hatred, an undeniable distaste prevalent in nearly every aspect of our culture, for our urban poor. They are treated little better than travellers by most sections of our society (as if the treatment of travellers were not, in itself, an equally disgraceful set of affairs) and this policy of criminal containment so undeniably in force has ensured an urban underclass that the law essentially exists to keep in line.

No single group of people have their lives as easily disrupted by policing and yet receive so meagre protection as Ireland’s inner city poor. This disgraceful set of affairs has shamelessly allowed a culture of criminality to exist by virtue of our own continuing expectation to find it there. Like young Eddie described above, young people grow up being treated like criminals anyway, so for many of them the decision to cross that line is just a case of “why not?” In our failure to ensure a balanced legal system, we have created our own inner-city nightmare.

Politicians and policy makers have all but written off it’s redemption, though its very creation was the result of shoddy policies in the first place. In a climate where tax dodgers owing millions can get an amnesty but a teenager lifting a pair of jeans in Dunnes Stores can get six months, where known millionaire drug dealers seem to lead unhindered lives, but Joseph’s Mansions gets raided regularly, and guys with little sidelines in half-ounces of hash get sent-up for years at a time, you’d be forgiven, too, for thinking that prison was probably just an eventuality anyway.

In the last few years, AIDS has devastated our inner city and

yet we continue to look blindly away from the root causes that need to be tackled. If these communities are allowed to continue in their decline we will have to share in the ravages that are yet to come.

AIDS is not the only social reality we need to think about on World AIDS Days. We also need to think about the homophobia and the class hatred that so tragically hinder efforts to humanise and lessen the suffering of those living with AIDS. We need to recognise that it is that same homophobia and class hatred which has created such an ideal breeding ground for the virus’ transmission in the first place.

I had hoped what my interviews would lead me to would have proved more optimistic and although there are stories that have seen families reconciled and people pulling together with courage and dignity, for nearly every one of those, there are a multitude of other hidden and silent witnesses that tell a very different story, a frightening picture of denial and institutional complicity, an unrelenting and fatalistic vision of an inner city scarred beyond repair.

Equally chilling, though, is the ignorance displayed by middle-class kids who delude themselves into a false security by indulging the very homophobia and class hatred that they need so desperately to re-examine. The illusion that AIDS is an issue of limited relevance to them persists, while their own sex and drug practices seem on the increase. One feels that our current crop of TV-weaned teens have a false sense of security, some background notion that AIDS has somehow been contained or is somehow failing to continue in its spread. This erroneous logic has created an apathy that suggests that people have simply got bored talking about AIDS.

But simply shutting up about AIDS has not made it go away. If anything, it could be laying the ground for a situation far more tragic than what even the most pessimistic would have dared to predict.

WORLD AIDS DAY is being marked in Dublin with a wide range of events that are designed to involve, inform and entertain as many people as possible.

Kicking things off on Thursday December 1st is the Fire Walk, a one-off show by performance artist Bren Dalton which takes place at 6.30pm at Larch Hill, Rathfarnham. That’s followed at 8.30pm by a gig at Whelan’s featuring Bird, Frere Jackman, Ultra Montanes, In Motion and New York poet Dale Arden.

7pm on Friday December 2nd finds renowned novelist Edmund White reading from his new book, Sketches From The Mind, at Waterstones. A deeply personal account of his life in Paris with Hubert Sorin, the book is lent an added sense of poignancy by the fact that Sorin died earlier this year from an AIDS-related illness.

The showpiece event on Saturday December 3rd is the AIDS And The Family gathering at the Central Bank Plaza which runs from 12.30pm onwards and includes clowns, face-painting, street theatre, carol-singers and buskers. There will also be information stands and Red Ribbons – the international symbol of AIDS awareness – throughout the city centre.

Bringing proceedings to a close is Madra Mor 3, the return of what both I.D. and The Irish Times selected as their 1993 Club of the Year. Running from 10pm until much later at the Ormond Building, there will be three dance spaces manned – or should that be personned – by Claire Moloney, Shaz, Jim Carroll and special guest Gavin Friday. Tickets are £8 on the door or £6 in advance from Phuture Groove Records, Sé Si Progressive and the Events Office at 53 Parnell Square, Dublin 1. For further information on this and the rest of the World AIDS Day programme call (01) 8720246.

Cork

CORK AIDS ALLIANCE will also be taking to the streets on World AIDS Day with Red Ribbons and information available throughout the city.

The organisation’s Peters Street headquarters will be playing host to a number of additional events including the Christmas Tree Ceremony at 11.30am on Thursday December 1st and the Irish Quilt Display which runs from Monday December 5th to Wednesday December 7th. All are welcome to attend with a special invitation extended to those directly or indirectly affected by HIV/AIDS. More details are available by calling (021) 275837.

AIDSWISE Hotline. Tel: (01) 6712680.

AIDS Helpline. Tel: (01) 8724277. Monday to Friday 7 to 9pm and Saturday 3 to 5pm.

Baggot Street Clinic, 19 Haddington Road, Dublin 4. Tel: (01) 6602149.

Body Positive, 24 to 26 Dame Street, Dublin 2. Tel: (01) 6712363/4.

Cairde, 25 Mary’s Abbey, Dublin 7. Tel: (01) 8730800.

Dublin AIDS Alliance, 53 Parnell Square, Dublin 1. Tel: (01) 8733799.

The Family Planning Association. North City Centre: 5/7 Cathal, Brugha Street, Dublin 1. Tel: (01) 8727088. South City Centre: 59 Synge Street, Dublin 8. Tel: (01) 6682420. Tallaght: Level 3, The Medical Centre, The Square Shopping Centre. Tel: (01) 4597686. Information & Advice Drop-In: 36/37 Lr. Ormond Quay, Dublin 1. Tel: (01) 8725033.

Gay Men’s Health Project. Tel: (01) 6602149.

Holistic Health Project c/o Dublin Aids Alliance.

St. James’ Hospital GU Clinic, Hospital 5, Rialto Entrance. Tel: (01) 4535245 (direct line) or (01) 453 7941 ext. 2315/2316. Monday & Friday 9am to 12.30pm and Tuesday & Thursday 1.30 to 4.30pm.

HIV Clinic. Tel: (01) 4535245 (direct line) or (01) 4537941 ext. 2161. Monday 1.30 to 4.30pm and Wednesday 9am to 12pm.

Irish Names Quilt c/o Dublin AIDS Alliance.

Cork

AIDS Helpline Cork. Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm. Tel: (021) 276676.

STD Clinic, Victoria Hospital. Monday 5.30 to 7.30pm and Wednesday 10am to 12 noon.

Cork AIDS Alliance/Cairde, 16 Peters Street, Cork. Tel: (021) 275837.

Donegal

AIDS Help North West, Mount Southwell, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 10.30 am to 12 noon. Tel: (074) 25500 or (010 353) 74 25500 from Northern Ireland.

Limerick

Limerick AIDS Alliance, P.O. Box 103, Cecil Street, Limerick.

Limerick AIDS Helpline. Tel: (061) 316661, Monday & Thursday 7.30 to 9.30pm.

Waterford

STD Clinic, Waterford Regional Hospital, Ardkeen, Waterford. Monday 2 to 4pm and Thursday 10am to 12 noon.

The North

AIDS Helpline N.I., 24 Mount Charles, Belfast BT7 INZ. Tel: (0232) 249268.

ACET, P.O. Box 18, Belfast. Tel: (0232) 320844.

Body Positive, Room 308, Bryson House, Bedford Street, Belfast BT2 7FE. Tel: (0232) 235515.

Voluntary Positive Care, Room 301, Bryson House, Bedford Street, Belfast BT2 7FE. Tel: (0232) 237337.

Royal Victoria Hospital, G.U.M. Clinic, Level 3B, Austen Boyd Outpatient Centre, Falls Road, Belfast. Tel: (0232) 320159.

Health Promotion Agency N.I., 18 Ormeau Avenue, Belfast BT2 8HS. Tel: (0232) 311611.