My friend, who eventually died from AIDS, pointed out to me that I had been lucky to escape HIV simply by virtue of being out of the country while the pandemic struck, because our lifestyles had been very similar. He persuaded me to volunteer as a buddy with the Terrence Higgins Trust. I used to visit a young man who lived alone in a high rise flat in Docklands, whose friends had deserted him. I would take him to the pub once a week to have a drink and a chat, though he needed to be coaxed because his face was disfigured with Kaposi’s Sarcoma and he was shy about being seen. He would sit in the corner with his cap pulled down. When he died, I went to his funeral, and all his old mates turned up, claiming they hadn’t realised how ill he was. I felt like punching them in the face. 

 

THT was doing an impressive job, but it struck me that everyone who came through the door was white, male and gay. Were there people in the black community suffering from this illness? We didn’t see any of them, but I knew there had to be, so I decided to try to find them and set up some sort of support they would use. 

 

Blackliners began in 1988 as a telephone helpline set up in the spare room in my flat in Balham. Once the word went out, calls built up and before long we had to find funding for an office in Brixton and set ourselves up as a charity. We soon realised there was a great deal of stigma attached to HIV in the black community. I once managed to persuade Doctor John Sentamu, who later went on to become Archbishop of York but was then in charge of a church in Herne Hill, to preach a sermon on compassion for National AIDS Day. Afterwards older members of his congregation made it plain that they didn’t want to hear about such things. 

 

But there was a huge appetite among young, gay, black men for what we could do to help them. They wanted counselling and they needed condoms, because few were using them at that point. One man I talked to told me he had one condom which he would wash and wear, over and over again, because he couldn’t afford to buy more! We gave them out for free at the office. 

From counselling and condoms, we went on to help with housing. One Christmas Eve, we were closing the office when a distressed young boy came in to tell us he’d been thrown out of the house because his parents had found out he was gay and HIV positive. He had nowhere to go, so one of our volunteers took him in over Christmas. It highlighted that we needed somewhere to accommodate people like him. We contacted a local Housing Association and looked for funding from one of the big construction companies. They told us: “Find the land and we’ll build something.” We secured a plot in Wandsworth where they built us six one-roomed bungalows and equipped them. 

 

By this time, we were also dealing with the breakdown of relationships, both gay and straight, when a partner discovered the other had HIV. Heterosexual couples turned to us: perhaps a wife who discovered her husband was sleeping around and wanted advice on how to stay safe from HIV, or how to be tested. The saddest case was a man from Uganda who passed the virus on to his wife, but was in denial so he accused her of sleeping around. He beat her up, she died and he went to prison. The prison contacted us, and one of our counsellors went in once a week to talk to him, and to bring him familiar African food to replace what the prison service could offer. Food for black people in hospital became another project. An African restaurant in Brixton would make up a week’s worth of meal cartons which were taken to hospitals to be kept in their freezers and served as needed. Deaths were frequent. At this time, there were no drugs to combat the virus apart from AZT, and not everyone was able to tolerate it. I stopped going to funerals after a while – it was too harrowing. 

 

The work was stressful, especially as time went on and it seemed that people were becoming complacent about the risks. I remember younger black guys saying: 

“Nothing to do with us, it’s those who went to America and brought it back to the UK – they’re all dead and gone now, so why should we worry?” Or – and this was a line I particularly hated – “Nothing to do with us, it’s a white man’s disease.” The wider black community was hostile to our work because they felt we were stigmatising black people – remember, this was a time when all sorts of ridiculous and offensive myths were circulating about how AIDS had transferred into humans through Africans having sex with monkeys. 

 

At the height of our success, we were dealing with people as far afield as Manchester, opening an outreach office there, and one in Bristol where there is a large and diverse black community. Mel C from the Spice Girls threw a huge party in her house for us, and raised around a hundred thousand pounds from her friends. 

 

I eventually retired and left Blackliners in the hands of others, but though it has now been subsumed into the wider work of the Terrence Higgins Trust, I’m immensely proud of the organisation I founded, which made such a difference to the lives of black people living with HIV and AIDS. It’s a contribution I am grateful to have been able to make to my community. 

 

I’m immensely proud of the organisation I founded, which made such a difference to the lives of black people living with HIV and AIDS.”