I have always been fiercely proud of who and what I am. I learned very early that I was homosexual and had my first love affair at boarding school when I was 16. But London in the 1970s was grey, dull and repressed and I was drawn to San Francisco and its exuberant experiment to build a community of gay people. So off I went down the Yellow Brick Road to see what was at the end of it, and I found everything I’d hoped for, a vibrant, joyous, celebrational, sexual Nirvana full of beautiful men holding hands.Businesses were run by gay people for gay people; the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, dressed as naughty nuns,were promoting gay politics.I became an honorary member of the Order, Sister Knickerbocker Glory. 

 

In 1981, rumours began to circulate about a group of gay men in Los Angeles who, three or four months after a sex party, had all started to go down with what was being called ‘gay cancer’. One day, I saw a Polaroid photo taped onto the glass at the front of the Castro Pharmacy, a close-up of a forearm with a purple lump and a rash. A sign underneath said anyone with symptoms like this should immediately go to the Gay and Lesbian Health Center. A shiver went through me; it felt like a portent of horrors to come. 

 

I was invited by a friend to take photographs at a tea party he was holding – only when I arrived it became clear it wasn’t going to be just a tea party. The whole room had black plastic on the floor. Within minutes of arriving, the guests began to shoot up with drugs and an orgy of heavy sex began. I fled in terror, because this didn’t feel safe. It wasn’t free love or intimacy, it felt like abuse; the experiment had gone too far and was out of control.Two weeks later, I left San Francisco for good. 

 

Fast forward ten years or so, and I was living in Thailand with my partner, Sam. He was a gentle man like so many Thais, tall, handsome, with a black moustache, well-educated, a teacher of children with hearing difficulties at the American University in Bangkok. We were in many ways a perfect match. On a business trip to Hong Kong, I noticed a lump had formed on my belly. A Chinese doctor said it was only a cyst but, by the time I returned to Thailand, it was growing and turning purple. I knew I had to go back to England for treatment – and within a week found myself in the Middlesex Hospital, on Broderip Ward, diagnosed with an AIDS-related non-Hodgkins lymphoma. The man in the bed next to me died in the night. 

 

The day you get your diagnosis is like a personal earthquake.You had somehow to adjust your expectations, your opportunities, your desires, your needs, your sexual practices,your intellectual landscape.I’d lost,at a stroke,my lovely life in Thailand, my fabulously paid job, and had to leave behind my handsome lover and my gorgeous four-hundred-year-old house with servants and an orchid garden, all this replaced with a bed in a hospital ward filled with fear and grieving and screams in the night. 

 

I then spent two months in the London Lighthouse residential unit, where I had chemotherapy. It was two months of watching people die, wondering if I would be next. Every morning, a candle would be lit if someone had died in the night. There were twelve of us in that unit and one morning there were three candles burning. I remember one beautiful young man who arrived on the ward and had tea with us in the living room.Then he stood up and told us he was now going into his room to starve himself to death. And he went into his room, closed the door and three weeks later, he died.

 

There’s no single way to cope with a diagnosis of AIDS. Everyone has to do it their own way, and his way was as valid as the way I chose, which was to fight and go on fighting. Another man had a head swollen with purple lesions. He would get up every day, climb in his wheelchair and go downstairs into the restaurant. As he was wheeled in, every eye would be on him and the fear in the room was palpable, everyone knowing that the way this poor young man looked might soon be their fate too.But he held onto his dignity and was brave enough to eat in the restaurant every day. They were all heroes in their own way. 

 

There was a balcony where I went to sit every evening at six o’clock, alongside a very frail man with advanced AIDS. He was blind, he had dementia and was being eaten from the inside by Candida, a fungal infection. I never knew his name and we never spoke a word. But I’d take some strawberries with me, hold his hand,and very gently try to feed him a berry.He couldn’t eat anything solid because the Candida had almost blocked his throat. And he would take the strawberry, and squeeze my hand. It wasn’t long before he too was dead. 

 

It was relentless, loss upon loss upon loss. Loss of people, loss of experience, loss of opportunity,loss of choice and loss of hope. 

 

While at the Lighthouse, I was selected to have tea with Princess Diana on one of her visits.She was so beautiful that she shone,a good soul. She said: “Shall we play a board game?” I asked her which one she would like to play, and she said: “Anything but Happy Families.

 

As for my own family, I never really got on with my parents, but they came to visit me at the Lighthouse. The counsellors there told them they shouldn’t be afraid of infection, so I was invited to have a meal at home with them. We had a stiff little dinner and I was itching to get away. As I was about to leave, I picked up my pudding spoon and noticed that on the back of it was a dot of red nail varnish. Looking closer, all my utensils had a red dot. I thought, that’s it, we’re done, and I never saw them again. 

 

I fought to get Sam to be allowed into the UK to come and look after me.Chris Smith, the MP, took up our case, but it took a year, and when Sam arrived, he wasn’t allowed to work and he wasn’t allowed benefits. We were both living on about £60 a week. He was such a proud man, and I believe the fact he couldn’t work depressed him so much it woke up the virus inside him – because, of course, he took a test when he came to Britain and he was positive. Against my advice, he signed up for AZT trials – I had refused to take part, because they were dishing out such huge toxic doses. Just as I was getting better from my cancer, he began to weaken and sicken and eighteen months later he was dead. 

 

For the funeral, I cut some jasmine from my garden to wrap round his coffin, along with a beautiful hand-embroidered Thai silk scarf he’d once given me. I didn’t want anyone else there in the church, just him and me, in silence, no words, just ten minutes together to let him go. 

 

I still have his ashes which will be mixed one day with mine.