In 1982, I was a newly out gay man in my early thirties when the company I worked for sent me to Colorado in the US for a couple of months. It was there I first heard about this mysterious illness that was coming out of the West Coast. 

 

I’ll never forget the night it exploded dramatically upon my consciousness. A man with whom I was having a wonderful summer affair, Barry, worked for Public Health in Denver and he gave a talk at a gay man’s social group, The Gay Business Association. He said: “There’s something coming out of the West Coast, it’s only affecting gay men, we don’t know what it is, but there’ll come a time when half of you in this room will be dead from it.” As a social event, that pretty much killed the evening. 

 

A couple of months later I was back in London and had put the mystery illness to the back of my mind, busy forging a new social life for myself in the UK. Those were great years, with a terrific sense of freedom in the London gay scene, dancing into the small hours in nightclubs like Heaven. I found a partner, Gary, who a few years later started work as cabin crew for Virgin Atlantic, his dream job. I was 33 and he was 24. We lived together right from the beginning in a stable partnership; it was my first real gay relationship. HIV seemed remote, nebulous, something we half-knew was happening over in New York and San Francisco, but still didn’t fully understand how it would eventually touch us all. One day in the summer of 1983 I spotted a small advert in GayTimes, asking for volunteers for a cohort study into this new illness, to be carried out at St Mary’s Hospital by the Wellcome Foundation. Some instinct flagged this up to me as important, so I joined the study and remained part of it throughout the 1980s. A couple of times a year I would undergo blood tests, psychological assessment and a whole battery of seemingly random tests – at this point I’m not sure anyone really knew what they were looking for, but it became an extremely valuable study as it threw up a great deal of useful data. 

 

It wasn’t until 1986 or 1987 that, for us in London, an undercurrent of fear started to creep in. I’d stayed in touch with my gay family in Colorado, especially Barry, and visited Denver often; the city was a gay hub, because of the mountains and the skiing. Barry’s partner Horst was one of the first in Denver to become sick. Within a year or so I knew at least 20 people in the city who were positive. By then, it was becoming obvious that people in London too were affected. One of the greatest tragedies of HIV is that, instead of treating it as a catastrophic medical pandemic, the rest of the world treated it as a moral issue. The attitude was that people who had it didn’t matter, because they were gay and therefore expendable. They’d brought it upon “One of the greatest tragedies of HIV is that instead of treating it as a catastrophic medical pandemic, the rest of the world treated it as a moral issue.” themselves: “It’s your own fault if you catch it.” But because the world didn’t care about us, our response was: We will just do what is needed and look after our own. I went to volunteer at London Lighthouse, a place where so many went to die because they had nowhere else to go. Families would turn up from Scotland or the North of England, perhaps having just found out for the first time their son was gay, and now having to deal with the fact that he also had AIDS and maybe just a few days to live. They had no idea how to cope and the staff and volunteers helped as best we could. Once I remember sitting up for hours with someone whose lungs were affected, simply holding him upright so he could breathe more easily: as I say, we did what we could. 

 

At that point, tests for the virus were not widely available, so generally people only discovered they were positive when they became ill. I was in the unusual position of knowing for certain I was negative, because I was part of the cohort study at St Mary’s, tested twice a year. Then, one Bank Holiday weekend in 1990, I didn’t feel well. My GP sent for an ambulance and I was taken into Hammersmith Hospital: I was seroconverting.1 Six days later, my HIV test came back positive. As coincidence would have it, the consultant on duty there had been involved in the Wellcome study, knew me, and was dumbfounded. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “David, you were an all time negative in the study”. When my partner, Gary, was tested two weeks later, he too was positive. He had never been tested previously and we had just assumed that he too was HIV negative. Apparently he wasn’t. 

 

It wasn’t until 2020 that I discovered that, because I had remained HIV negative throughout the study period, out of the 400 gay men who were in the cohort, I was the only survivor. 

 

Those were terrible times. Imagine reaching your forties, building your career with a close circle of friends you meet regularly for dinner parties – and then in the space of just three or four years, forty of them are wiped off the face of the earth. How are you going to behave? There’s no manual for that. I had started a business from home, but was too distracted to keep it going. Work became secondary because, by that time, we were so busy caring for and burying our friends. I remember one particular chaotic week: friends of mine, Kevin and Chuck, had flown back from where they lived in Saudi Arabia because Kevin was ill. He was in hospital, and I sat with him as he lay dying. As soon as he had passed, I got on a flight to the States to see Barry and Horst. Horst was dying too but he’d been hanging on for me to arrive so Barry wouldn’t have to deal with it on his own. He died a few days later and after his funeral I flew back to London and we buried Kevin. Chuck died the following year in his home state of California and Barry died in Denver in 1996. It was a mad, terrible time. Your perceptions change, and by the time I’d buried 25 or so friends, knowing that soon I would be burying more, I really couldn’t summon the energy to answer the letters about bank loans and the mortgage repayments. We managed to sell the flat just before it was repossessed. Gary moved in with a friend and I went to the States to try and sort myself out. I’d only been there four months – this was December 1991 – when Gary phoned and told me he was getting sick. 

 

Right from the day he tested positive in 1990, Gary considered it a death sentence, though at that point he was completely fit and healthy. Two years later he was dead. He was 33 years old.

 

During his last days, I lived at the hospital for three weeks, sleeping on a bed in his room. I ate the hospital food, but I bought his food from Marks and Spencer. It took every penny we had, but that’s what you do. His lungs kept collapsing, and finally the thoracic surgeon, a tall, elegant, wonderful man, told us: “I’m really sorry, there’s nothing we can do. The only option would be a lung transplant but you simply wouldn’t survive the operation.” Gary and I talked things over, knowing we didn’t want to prolong this. We knew he was going to die and the only question was: do you do it badly, in distress and pain, or do you do it well, with your friends around you?

 

We had a meeting to explain this to his doctors. One asked Gary: “Anything we can get you?” “A bucket of morphine,” was his reply. “A bucket of morphine coming up,” said the doctor. We called Gary’s family and close friends and told them they needed to be there in the next 24 hours. We dressed up the room, we put music on, and slowly increased the morphine to ease his pain. All through, we talked to Gary as if he were wide awake – just because someone is unconscious doesn’t mean they don’t know what’s happening. Once, when the music stopped, his close friend from Virgin Airways, Carol, who’d been given as much time off work as she needed to come and help us, asked what she should put on next. I said “ask Gary”– he hadn’t spoken for several hours. She asked him – and he astonished us all by simply saying: “Enya.” So we did. 

 

Finally, peacefully, in the early hours of the morning, off he went. I’m proud of what we did for him. One of the nurses came in and helped me wash him and dress him, then I and a couple of close friends walked out of the hospital into a bright sunny morning, and I remember thinking: this is another dawn I’m seeing which someone I care about won’t.