I’m known to the world as Polara. In my drag act, I always said I was an Oregonian pig farmer’s granddaughter. I was born in central Oregon, USA. I knew I was different. I was fey. Camp in the crib. I didn’t mix with a lot of other kids after school, because we had to go home to the farm. There were no children around except my sister, so I didn’t judge myself against other boys. I was three the first time I did drag. I got Mum’s favourite dress and a pair of heels that matched it perfectly. I marmalised the dress with her heels and got in a lot of trouble.

We came to the UK when I was 9 because of anti-gay feeling. Sixties pig farms were not a good place for a young gay boy. When I was 12 or 13, I fitted into all my mum’s clothes and shoes perfectly. She wore wigs, because people did in those days. I dolled myself up. The makeup wasn’t too good, but I trotted along with my little basket of dirty laundry to the laundrette, four streets away and did an entire week’s washing in drag.

I went to a gay pub for the first time, the Ship and Whale in Surrey Docks. I was underage. You had to be 21; I was only 17 or 18. I enjoyed it, although I was frightened by the air of seediness. The DJ was Pat, known as Lewisham Lil. He played fabulous dance music. You couldn’t be served in an ordinary pub if you were flamboyant and camp, as I was. You’d have trouble. That’s why we came to the Ship and Whale. Or the White Bear at Kennington, the Union Tavern in Camberwell, the Castle in Lewisham.

The Ship and Whale had an annual Miss Ship and Whale contest. My friend Peter and I decided we were going to enter. Neither of us had a hope in hell of winning, but we got ourselves down to Greenwich, and bought some old 40’s ball gowns from Spreadeagle. You couldn’t travel in drag, so we took it all in a suitcase and got ready at the pub. It was1978.

We went into amateur review at the White Bear, run by Roy Alvis, who’d been part of ENSA in the Second World War. It became like a home from home for a while. It was a good school to learn your craft. From there I went on to solo shows. I stopped miming in1983, became a live act, and worked solidly until 2007.

In late ’82, or early ’83, the papers were vague. HIV hadn’t yet become the gay plague. It was in San Francisco and New York and, as far as we knew, it wasn’t here yet. But it travelled so fast. You began to hear things. It was frightening.

When we started to get advice about safe sex, I stopped having sex for quite a while. I didn’t know enough. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t drink in those days, or do drugs. You had to keep a level head. Buying condoms, or going to the clap clinic to get them, was embarrassing, so it was easier not to have sex. It was hard not to let all the hysteria around it get to you.

Sandra Hush’s was the first HIV-related gay, drag funeral I went to. Savage did the eulogy. Anybody who was anybody was at that crematorium, because Sandra Hush was so well loved. It was coming closer to home.

We started doing the charities as soon as we found out that people were suffering with HIV. We were always raising money. Before, it had been for children’s homes, or old people’s homes, but when HIV came along, people were dying of hunger because they couldn’t work. Such benefits as they could get weren’t covering things. People were being thrown out by their landlords. There was so much difficulty. So any time anybody asked, the answer was always yes. We raised a lot of money. Initially, we asked them to throw our money onto the stage, but stopped that quickly because it got vindictive. You took buckets around. You kept asking. University of London Students’ Union used to do a Winter Pride. They did big jumble-sales. All proceeds went to HIV charities. You never threw anything out, a book, or anything that had any life left in it; you donated it because it might raise sixpence for the charity. We put our hands in our own pockets because donating time really wasn’t enough. You had to do something.

It went on for years. I don’t remember when we stopped, presumably quite quickly after combination therapy came along. You could get the DLA, the Disability Living Allowance by then, so that solved a lot of problems for people – once they’d begged sufficiently to get it.

My best friend David, or Desire as I usually called him, was another drag queen. I came home from work and he’d been for a test and got a bad result. He hadn’t even told me he was feeling unwell. This was before we had anything other than AZT to treat it with.  He and his boyfriend knew what was coming, or what was likely to be coming, because we’d seen other people get ill with it.

He was treated at the Royal Free in Hampstead. There was another patient who we took for a visitor, to begin with, because it looked as if nothing was wrong with him. But whatever he had was affecting his brain, giving him a form of dementia. You’d sit in the smoking room, which they still had in those days, and he’d come in. One of the first questions would usually be, ‘Have I had sex with you?’ Or, he would state, ‘I’ve had sex with you!’ But of course, there were families sitting in the smoking room that had nothing to do with the HIV ward. You had to talk him down, keep him from being too loud.

David was physically ill with HIV, rather than mentally. The new combination therapies were beginning at the end of ’95, early ’96, but he was too ill to take them; too weak. I still miss him, though he wasn’t a lover, he was my best friend. I would have done anything for him. He was the little brother that I didn’t have.

You couldn’t mention his name to people on the drag circuit without them bursting into tears. He was well loved for the short time that he was performing – infamous, and had a big effect on a lot of people. But he wasn’t alone in that. There were so many who were more than acts.

Once David had gone, people trod on eggshells around me.I was exhausted. We’d had two and a half years of running around, cramming things in. I’d been willing David to stay alive. I went off the rails a little bit, as you sometimes do when you lose somebody really close. Within a couple of months, I’d contracted HIV myself. I felt like a fool! I knew how to stay safe. I had just watched my best friend die. There was no self-destruct in it. I went out and got drunk and it wasn’t safe.

He died in March 1996 and, by the time I knew what was wrong in June, we already had the combination therapy. I was put straight on it. It was still an experiment. Any doctor who was around at the time will tell you that they were experimenting on patients. But they had to. They had no choice.

I learned I was HIV positive. Two weeks later I was in hospital with DVT. It was quick. Suddenly, I thought: I’m 36. I’ve done nothing with my life in respect of certain things. I’m going to dive into it. And I did.

It was liberating in a way, to be diagnosed positive. You were relieved of the fear of ‘catching’ it anymore. That weight was gone.

I got over the shock of diagnosis and settled into a new routine of taking pills every day that made me sick, and affected digestion. Then there were other weight to contend with, like not passing it on. That would haunt you. I made mistakes, just like everybody else, before – and after – diagnosis.

When the internet arrived, if you identified at all as positive online, in certain areas you had ‘bug-chasers’ as we used to call them, who wanted to be ‘pos’d up’. It still flummoxes me. I don’t know what they thought they wanted.

I stopped working in cabaret many years ago through ill health. When I couldn’t do the drag any more, it felt like having a leg cut off, it was such a big part of my personality. I contracted Hepatitis C, another wasting disease. I got really thin. I couldn’t lift the speakers and sound equipment, or all the costumes. I couldn’t cope with driving home overnight. I was 47, but I looked twenty years older. The treatment for Hepatitis C is an injection. I’m one of about 30 percent of people it worked for. Again, I was lucky. The HIV was well-controlled by then.

I just dress in gentleman’s drag now. And I still try my damndest to make people laugh whenever I can.