In 1980-81 HIV was out there and you knew about it. I was going to San Francisco a lot. Every other weekend I’d fly out from Denver. It became quite apparent that something big was going on as you slowly started to hear about more people getting sick, and more people getting a diagnosis.

I had Degrees in Forestry and Wildlife, worked for a big tree company in Denver. I’d met somebody who was a captain in the US Army, Greg.

He got me into nursing. ‘I think you’d be really good at this.’ We had been together for a couple of years and planned that I would go to Nursing School, while would leave the army and become a nurse-anaesthetist. We were going to have a little house on the prairie and live happily ever after. But that came to a screeching halt in 1985 when he was diagnosed in his first year, after a routine blood test.

Somebody spotted that white cell counts weren’t right. This was before it really had a name. He left school and went back to California where he had a good group of friends. I couldn’t get any answers to my letters and phone-calls. I went out to California to find out what was going on. The house was burned down. Greg had gotten very sick, very fast: horrible KS and quite a bit of dementia. He’d started cooking on the stove, fell asleep, set this house on fire and burned the place out. It took a few days before I finally tracked him down. He wasn’t in good shape at all. I got a message from him saying that he was going to go back to Wisconsin, back to his mom and dad’s, and then a letter from him saying: By the time you get this letter I’ll be dead. I’m really not well. I’m gonna commit suicide. I’ve not told anybody else about this but I just wanna let you know.

He was going to do it but fell asleep his parents found him and found a letter he had written to them. I saw him one last time and he died shortly after that. But that was my trauma with somebody I was directly associated with. I didn’t know if I had it or not because there was no test. The test came out in ‘85 and Greg was already dead. I tested positive in 1985.

Black Death didn’t kill everybody; people survived it. And my feeling was whatever this is, not everyone’s going to die. I had faith that they would find a cure and that everything would be okay somehow. And then it didn’t and they didn’t and then they were saying they didn’t know if they could and it would take decades. That’s when the panic started spreading: you can’t be around anyone who’s gay.

In 1986 an old friend of mine from college, Bruce, got married and I didn’t get invited to the wedding. I thought was a bit weird. When I got a hold of him he said they’d decided it was family only. I wanted to visit when they had a little baby.

‘You can come but we’ll hold the baby up to the window and you can look in. We won’t let you in the house because we’re too afraid that we’ll all get AIDS.’

It was the biggest, crushing blow: someone I knew well, someone who was not stupid. It still festers in the background.

I was still working in medicine at this time, in ICU. I had to go to my employers and say ‘I’m HIV positive.’ I was told I couldn’t take care of anybody with tuberculosis. But otherwise everybody was pretty pragmatic as far as work goes. I couldn’t work directly in surgery or Obs and Gynae, because of the risk. Full credit to Presbyterian St Luke’s for their attitude toward managing their HIV positive staff. I saw some hideous things during those early years: people dying in ICU with HIV-related illnesses and having partners that the families were refusing to let come in because there weren’t legal rights in those days. There wasn’t gay marriage. Couples who had lived together were prevented from seeing each other.

One of the first patients we had in the hospital with HIV wasn’t somebody I knew. There was a lot of concern about how we protect staff. It was pretty over-the-top the way they’d isolated him; people were double-gloving and masking. We already knew that you didn’t need to do that. You would not catch HIV through casual contact. I went up one day to see him. Everybody was around him with masks and gloves and it looked like the attack of the cyber-Martians or something.

I sat down and held his hand and said, ‘Hi I’m Mike and I work in the hospital and I’m sorry about all of this because it’s a bit ridiculous but people just aren’t settling down yet.’ That’s about all you could do and I made a point of going to see a few people and sitting down like that with them.

I remember one particular situation in ICU where the partner was there and the family came in. An ugly scene ensued. ‘Get out, you’re not part of this family, you’re not part of his life, we’re taking care of him now. It’s because of you he’s like this. You’ve killed our son.’
In the middle of an ICU full of other people, everybody was freaking out.

‘Oh my god we’re in ICU and our family’s in ICU and someone has AIDS over there!’ Again the hospital was pretty good about shutting that kind of business down.

They were also very good about keeping staff up to date about what was going on and what their policies were and how we were going to manage that kind of behaviour.

I did go down to the lab one day and get a bit of a bee in my bonnet. There was this big board that listed all these people’s names and it just said, HIV+, HIV… well AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, it wasn’t HIV+, AIDS, AIDS, AIDS down next to them.

And I’m like, what’s that? And it’s like, those are all the people in the hospital right now with HIV. I said, with their names up on a big board that anybody who walks into this lab can see, I said, I don’t think that’s protecting their privacy is this. I said I don’t think that’s what we really should be doing.

I was straight to the Director of Nursing’s office saying you can’t let that happen, you have to stop that, and they did, they did, I was very pleased again that they stopped that. But those kind of things went on and you just had to cope with it and deal with it.

At the same time my T Cell count’s dropping and dropping, again this was after ‘85 and there’s no cure, there’s no nothing. When, oh god I’m just even forget what was the first drug that ever came out that everybody was taking…AZT, AZT came out and the beeper boxes, god, the beeper boxes, you have to take it every six hours, had to, they were so strict about this. If you’re going to take it you must take it every six hours. I was on one of the very first trials that they did in Denver with this and we all had our little beeper boxes. I remember waking up three o’clock in the morning or four o’clock in the morning whenever it would go off and you have to take your dose and go back to sleep again. And it didn’t make you feel good, I was pretty sure I was on it, and that was when we were still trying to find out what was the safe dose.

It was early, early trials. And I could tell that whatever I’m taking it doesn’t feel very good and I don’t think I wanna take the dose they’re telling me. So I just started taking half of what they said. And as we got through and the end of it and they said you were on AZT but you didn’t have the reactions that lots of other people did.

I said no I said, because I stopped taking the dose you told me, I said I know this messes up your data and I’m really sorry I said, but this is the only dose that might keep me alive. And I couldn’t take that high dose, I said, you felt so sick with it. But any time you were out and about you’d just hear beeps here and there if you were in the bars or out clubbing or anywhere. Just even in the park sunning yourself on a beautiful afternoon, you’d beep-beep, beep-beep, it was like oh time for someone’s dose. I’m really happy the days of the beep-beep box are gone because that was annoying, plus a drug that wasn’t particularly good and wasn’t particularly healthy.

I know a few people that probably died of AZT poisoning just because it was too much and systems couldn’t handle it. 

And the alternative cures, god the things people were doing, like blood-warming, I don’t know if that ever happened over here. But there were, there was a theory that if you took the blood out and heated it up it would kill the virus, so should you auto-transfuse. And there were clinics that were setting up that I knew people were spending a lot of money to go to and they, you know, cannula out of this arm and cannula into this arm and it was going through some machine and putting hot blood back in you. That didn’t work.

There was enema therapy of some sort, again America has a bit of a habit of going overboard on certain alternative treatments. But there was a certain enema therapy, I know a friend of mine in Hawaii was, was doing that. I know somebody that did the blood-warming. I was one of those people if they said this was a good drug to take, I will take your drug, I’ll believe science.

I had another friend that did absolutely nothing, And the four of us are still alive interestingly enough, all of us are on medication regimes now. But it was a complete crap-throw, you didn’t know who was gonna live and who was going to die and most everybody was dying. By the end of the Eighties pretty much everybody I knew had died. When you’re in your mid-thirties and you’re going through what your grandparents are experiencing in their seventies and eighties where all their friends die away and they’re the last ones. But that was happening in our twenties and our thirties.

I had easily thirty-five, forty, fifty people I knew over about a five year period just disappeared, they had all died, you just went to funeral after funeral after funeral. It got to be a bit of a game to see who could make the most creative interesting funeral. When a good friend of mine died, the service was a fantastic endless video montage of his entire life from when he was a little kid to growing up, parties, the gay scene, then the whole trip through getting sick to a final image on his death-bed waving goodbye.

One of three lovers that I died and buried over the years was Barry. One of the things he hated was that, in my gym days, I could pick him up and carry him around. He was cremated and, at his funeral I had his urn with me all the time.

Everyone said, ‘Why are you carrying Barry around?’

‘It’s my last revenge for Barry,’ I said, ‘this is the one thing he would hate more than anything in the world!’

Barry was number three. Number two was Dan. Dan and I met at the gym and he was an oil geologist who found the North Slope oilfields. I used to go to a little town in the mountains called Crested Butte Colorado, a slice of heaven, and we ended up buying a plot of land together, built a bed and breakfast and did our little house in the mountains. We were both HIV positive but Dan did start getting sicker Out of the blue one day he decided he didn’t wanna do this anymore and he wanted to move back to San Francisco because he was convinced that there would be a doctor in San Francisco that could save him. 

within two weeks he packed up and left. It’s like, what? And…

this would have been ‘91, ‘92 this happened. And he went out and bought a little flat out there and within six months he had died and he died with nobody around him and no friends and support and people. I was out twice to visit but I was still trying to run this bed and breakfast trying to sort out the finances and get that sold before he died. And it was just really really weird, just all of a sudden out of the blue boom, I’m gonna go to San Francisco. He just had it in his head that somehow somebody out there would save him and that’s where he had to be. And that’s what happened and then again another difficult problem with mama and all that.

But back to Herschel.Herschel in Crested Butte, and this is the complete flip of things going bad, this is how good things could be. Herschel I met through a friend and that’s how I started going to Crested Butte, but he had lived up there for years. Now this is a tiny town, it’s seven streets by nine streets, snow-bound nine months of the year, a little ski town. But he owned Herschel’s Luscious Lawns and he did property management and watered lawns and tended and cut grass and fixed your flowers and whatever for your holiday home. And he was just beloved of everybody and went up, and great guy, loved him and fell in love with Crested Butte and that’s why we ended up going up and living there.

He got sick, HIV positive, he was from Oklahoma and Augy and Honey were his mother and father. And when he was getting really sick he moved back to Tulsa, Oklahoma. He couldn’t tell anybody and his parents wouldn’t let anybody know that their son had AIDS and he was basically locked up in the house, not allowed to go anywhere or do anything. And then he was getting KS so he was starting to get blotchy and didn’t look right so he couldn’t go out any more. And he called one of our friends Buki Louise (?) who was an accountant up there and told her that he was gonna kill himself, life wasn’t worth living blah-blah-blah. And she’s like, okay Herschel I understand.

Before you go can I just talk to Honey and Augy again, I haven’t had a chance to say hello to ‘em. And she got ‘em on the phone, it’s like you watch him, you don’t let him do anything, I will be there tomorrow, but you make sure he doesn’t get near anything, he’s that depressed. She went down the next day, drove the fifteen hours to Tulsa Oklahoma, stayed there for four or five days, sorted some, few things out and came back with him and a Power of Attorney that she would manage his financial affairs. Immediate pow-wow, it’s like okay Herschel’s back, we need to put a plan together.

Mike and Dan, do you have a spare room in the house, yeah absolutely, we can put him in the house because we have six guest rooms. Fine, one is Herschel’s room. Okay, fine. So and so’s in charge of activities, so and so’s in charge of medicines, so and so in charge of getting him back and forth to the hospital, you’re in charge of this. And the whole little community just rallied around Herschel. And he spent that last summer in Crested Butte and it is, like I said, a place of stunning, stunning beauty and I have a great photograph of him on my front garden with our big German shepherd golden lab doggie with him just laying out with Winston and scratching his belly in this little field of daffodils that came up through the front garden that year. And he got taken care of and the, the whole town rallied around to make sure one of theirs got the best possible care he could. We couldn’t fix him but we could make sure he was well looked after. And then eventually he got to the point that he was gonna have to be in hospital. But we kept him at Gunnerson and he died in Gunnerson and not in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And then the quilt, a big quilt that was being made, everybody’s like right we’re making a panel for Herschel. Okay. So people started working together on getting this quilt together and it had to be a cer… two metres by one metre and that’s all it can be. And then I got a phone call one day, right Bonnie’s gonna go tomorrow to Washington, it’s the last chance we have to get panels into the quilt, but we need some place big enough that we can quilt this.

You guys have a huge big dining-room, we’re all coming to your house. Okay. So fifteen people showed up that afternoon, this quilt gets spread out, everyone gets their needles out, the threads out, the hoops out and everyone just starts quilting this beautiful design that they had done with columbines and the mountain and poppies and Herschel’s luscious lawns spreading out through the greens.

And it was spectacular and, people were quilting till their fingers bled that night. Five o’clock in the morning Bonnie wraps it up, goes home, takes a shower, husband drives her down to the airport, she flies off to Washington DC and comes back two weeks later with a photograph of the quilt and Herschel’s panel in it. 

But that was an amazing summer, when everything actually worked as it should have, that people actually cared about someone for being a person, didn’t make any difference what they were sick with, what was wrong with them, somebody that everybody loved and everybody was gonna do everything they could to make it as good as you could, And, it was just amazing and every once in a while I’ll flip through old photos and especially if I see the quilt panel I’ll just sit and just cry because it was a pretty heavy-duty event with that one. But yeah I forgot all about the quilt.

I think the NHS does a really good job with this over here and I’m really pleased. I mean my care is fantastic and the care I see other people getting now is great. But we live with it now. Back then everybody was going to die from it, you didn’t live with it. I didn’t expect to live with it. If it wasn’t for protease inhibitors I wouldn’t be here.

Because I quit working ‘92 and didn’t work for two years watching my T Cells drop into single figures, getting KS and it was a miracle in ‘94 when they gave me protease inhibitors and then within six months my KS faded and a year later I went back to work again, because you could. And  that’s the huge difference and it’s become normalized. Now there’s still stigma about HIV, no question about it, certainly nothing like it used to be, and people do realise that you live with HIV. So that’s good. What is unfortunate that some people are still getting infected with it that know better.

Part of it’s human nature but I, you know, that’s people’s choices and nonetheless, you know, you, you deal with that. From a medical point of view you treat the person and whatever’s wrong with them and I do think like I said, I think the NHS does a pretty darn good job. 

I don’t live in London, I live out in the south-west of England and again there’s good care and there’s good Centres and, and we have a fair number of people within our Practice and it’s just managed.

Spots started showing up, little purply marks on my arms and it’s like, I knew what it was, I’d had plenty of patients with it. I had lots of friends die from it, you know, covered in looked like leopard spots by the end with some of ‘em. Greg, my first boyfriend, terrible KS, his face was blown up and swollen shut, he could barely get his eyes open. I’d seen as bad as it gets, I knew what, you know, kind of a death that was. I wasn’t that concerned about that in a way, my great fear was pneumocystis pneumonia because I never wanted to be on a ventilator or anything like that. But again, because of the work I’d done I’d taken care of people like that and I didn’t want to be that way. I didn’t want to die by not being able to breathe. I didn’t wanna die full stop. But partly in the back of my head I never thought I would, it’s like oh I’ve got KS that’s a drag. I had a KS on, lesion on the bottom of my foot which was another experimental treatment, chlorophyll photosynthetic treatment.

So this specialist, because I worked in the business a lot of doctors were around me really wanting me to not die and taking good care of me as well. One of the cancer specialists I worked with said I know this guy that’s doing this special new thing with chlorophyll and you get this IV thing of chlorophyll and then you’re exposed to special light treatment. But it’s soaked up by KS lesions and then they’re basically going to kill them with light. And I’m like, yeah okay, basically I’ve got nothing to lose because it looks like I’m not going to live much longer anyhow. Even though I was still healthy and going to the gym and doing things, I’d stopped working only because it was, I was getting a bit spotty and it was difficult to hide it.

And trying to explain it to patients, it was difficult and the hospital was very good about just basically keeping me on if I could come back. But I was on benefits and, and living that way. Anyhow, came in and, and got this IV of the green goo, it was like bright green stuff in and I had to wear long sleeves and come with gloves and this was in the middle of summer and it’s hot in Denver and big sunglasses.

And for the next forty-eight hours I had to go home and sit in the dark, don’t sit near a light-bulb or anything like that because you’re going to be so basically light-sensitive. Okay. And like your retina could burn out. Okay.  And then came back into this darkened room and they’re focusing this beam of light on this thing on my foot, and it’s on the bottom of my foot. And it was big, it was about that big. And it really hurt, it just felt like it was on fire and they’re feeding me Percodan and Demerol and everything else and it’s like I do not think I’m gonna do this much longer. And yeah that was a pretty weird experiment and my foot got infected and bandaged and it was hobbling around on crutches for six weeks. And it’s like okay I wouldn’t advise chlorophyll therapy for anybody but you know. it definitely, definitely pooled into the tumour areas, there’s no question about that, the light did destroy it. But because my immune system was so weak that you know, I ended up with a pseudomonas infection on my foot and  then like months of treatment to get that better. And so it’s like all right, I’ll be all right with crutches. There we go, the things we tried. But they said it was a good idea and it, you know, it didn’t kill me, okay goodie.

KS between ‘92 and ‘93? it probably started showing up maybe ‘91 even, but you know, it, by ‘93 it was definitely spreading more and more and more. I’d say pretty much by ‘95 ‘cause protease inhibitors came out in ‘94 if my memory’s correct. I think it was like June ‘94 and within about six months most of my lesions had faded. But definitely within a year all my lesions had faded and my T Cells soared up to like I think twenty-two.

And it’s like wow, that’s good, they’ve over doubled, you know. And everyone’s like how are alive, because most people were dropping dead after three hundred and from the start my T Cells were only like three seventy-five in 1985. Now I met Greg in 1980 and you know, how long I had been HIV positive before I ever got the test I don’t know.

But T Cells were never great and like I said I went down to, to single digits and you know, when I got up to twenty-two I’m like woo-hoo, you know, I’m back again. But it was years and years and years before I even topped a hundred and, but you know, we’re still climbing mountains and kayaking and doing everything I wanted to do.

I met David, this was during the “Barry years”, he would have been probably ninety… god it gets a bit of a blur, ‘92, ‘93, I know we were… maybe ‘94 ‘cause I had, Barry and I hooked up not long after Dan moved out to California. But this friend of his was coming, this English friend of his was coming and I heard “David, David, David, David” you know.

So this, this little English friend shows up and this was over Christmas time and okay fine, but he knew everybody in Denver, I couldn’t believe it, you’d go out to the ‘burbs, oh David, David, you know, blah-blah-blah. Okay fine. And we didn’t get along very well, you know, he was just annoying, I found him very annoying, he was into lots of woo-woo stuff and the Kabbala and trying to find the meaning of life. And it’s like oh just get a job, all right. Anyhow he was on this round the world trip and stayed with us for a while. And then he came back in the spring and he was gonna come back and stay for a while. All right. Barry didn’t work, I worked. David shows up and finally there’s the three of us in the house, I’m the only one with a job. And after about six weeks we’re sitting at breakfast one morning and I said I don’t really care that much in a way, I said, but how long are you planning on staying?

And he said oh I’m not really sure. I said okay fine. So I went out that weekend and came back with piles of bricks and piles of lumber, I said okay the two of you I said, grass comes out there, I want brick patio around straight to the ???, this tree goes there, I want, this is my plans, this is what I want done. So over the next couple of weeks they built a beautiful brick patio and put up a nice wooden ramada in my lovely back garden and then David said, right I think I’ll go now. Okay. I said I’ve got lots more projects. No, I’ll go. It wasn’t until ‘95, ‘96 maybe I had come over to Amsterdam, I had been over for Queens’ Day and met somebody, got invited back to stay.

I went over for a few months, why not, had a good time. And took a break, came over to London, hadn’t seen David in years. And as soon as I walked into his flat he’s like, oh you’ve changed. And I said oh you’ve changed. And we just got along like a house on fire from there on out, became best friends. And he was really encouraging of me to like, after I went back to the States I just never settled, I never ever settled. And he said you, come over, just, you know, see what it’s going to be like. And then I had the opportunity because I went back to work and I had the opportunity to do a corporate transfer and I came over working in the private sector with a big private hospital in London.

And then after six months moved into the NHS and, and then never looked back, that was nearly twenty years ago now. But that was ‘98 is when I moved over. But yeah I think it was about ‘90… ‘96 I think is when I re-connected with him and he had been through a lot and Barry’s death.

And in, in some ways he was a great help when Barry died ‘cause Barry could hold a grudge, wow he could hold a grudge. And he expected David to come running over and help take care of him and David couldn’t. So a lot of his anger got focused on David and he was like no-good so-and-so blah-blah-blah and he doesn’t care about me and if he cared he’d really come over and I knew all along he was a false friend.

And you know, really ridiculous things and it’s like, he can’t, he doesn’t have any money, he’s, you know, he’s got his own issues right now and you know, just leave him alone and let’s try and help you. But yeah he was, Barry was hard work, god. Anyhow, that’s why he got carried around at his funeral, there that’ll show you.

Barry was a lost soul in many ways, his, his, he had a German boyfriend for years and Horst had died and Barry never quite came to grips with Horst dying and leaving him on his own. And then Barry got way big into drugs, it was a bad scene. I had a bad habit that many nurses have, is like I can fix you. And Barry became, I-will-fix-you project which that doesn’t happen, you can’t fix people and that was part of the, animosity that, between us. I mean I really cared about him, he was a sweet, sweet, sweet guy. And then he would just become a very unsweet person because he went back into drugs again.

And it was, you know, one of those sad things. And that was another issue with all those years, this was a big-time drug culture in the gay world so it’s certainly in the gay world that I was part of, big, big, big-time drug culture. Chem-sex isn’t anything new, that was big-time going on back in the Eighties and Nineties.It was different drugs in those days but a lot of that going on. Barry unfortunately learned about injecting drugs which was a really bad thing for Barry and for lots of other people. But yeah, that was a, another weird aspect of that whole thing was there was this huge drug culture going on.

Partly because in the Eighties and early Nineties there wasn’t a cure so why not. I had lots of friends that maxed-out the credit cards and you know, ran up huge debts only to end up being given protease inhibitors just when they thought they were gonna clock out. And then they found out they were gonna live and they were faced with mountains of debts and lost their home. weren’t working any more ‘cause they’d quit their jobs and, and it’s like oops. I, I just never thought I was going to die so I never kind of became stupid-stupid about things. But you know, I dabbled my fair share of things over the years but you know, was always able to pull myself back from going over the edge with stuff.

there was definitely, there was always a little bit of scare and fear in the background, every time you got a cold it’s like what’s this, as I said my big thing was pneumocystis pneumonia so any time there was a cough and a cold it’s like is this gonna be okay.

I did take up smoking which was so counter-intuitive but again part, that was part of the back of my head thinking well if you’re going to die you’ve always wanted to smoke, why not smoke because…I did start smoking probably about ‘86, ‘87 and I smoked up until mmm… 2000, 2001 is when I finally stopped smoking ‘cause I just, actually I really didn’t like it any more and seemed stupid. But anyhow, yeah that was kind of my little rebellion about I don’t care if I die or not, I’m gonna smoke now.

I went through all this stuff back in the Eighties in America about, you know, I’m at work, I’m HIV positive blah-blah-blah. Okay. I come over here in ‘98, this is a while now, I’m working for this private healthcare.When I was coming over I had my health assessment and I’d filled everything in, HIV positive, the medications I was on, you know, full disclosure of everything, okay fine. About two weeks after I was working I got this call one day saying it’s like, can you come up to, I think it was the Director of Nursing’s office, all right fine.

The head of HR was there, the head of Human or of… Occupational Health was there, the Director of Nursing and my immediate boss. And I’m like hello, what’s this about. And it’s like we have your forms here and it says that you’re, you’re HIV positive. I said yes, I said, but you’ve had those forms for nine months, this isn’t anything new, you know that. Well nobody bothered to look at ‘em, I had been there for two weeks before anyone bothered to actually go through my forms. And it’s like, ohh, oh my god we’ve hired somebody with AIDS. And they’re like well um, er, er, ooh, ooh, I said is it, is there a problem, I said, because there isn’t. I said there’s no problem with this, I said we, we all know that I’m not a risk to anybody. I said if anything patients would be a risk to me I said, but that isn’t really the case any more because of protease inhibitors, yada-yada, you are the medical people, so we know that.

And they just didn’t know what to do and I remember the doctor in charge of Occupational Health said to me, back in the States how, who, who at work knew you were HIV positive? And I said everybody. And they’re like, right, nobody knows here all right, nobody gets to know, you don’t tell anybody. It took me a little while to suss it out, but the reason was it was private healthcare, they had contracts with lots of Middle Eastern countries and famous people blah-blah-blah, they couldn’t risk the negative publicity that we have HIV positive employees in our service or their contracts would disappear if they, you know, that wouldn’t fly.

But I was shocked, really shocked at the medical establishment in the private, but again I realised later that that was strictly a financial, like they could have cared less about me. It was the complete opposite of America. We don’t care whether you’re HIV positive or whether you live or die, nobody can find out because it might reflect badly on us, we could lose money.

Where from the start back in the States it’s like is this okay, are you okay, what can you do, what can’t you do, how do we protect you.

this is a foreigner looking inside, I think that’s part of a British mentality in many, many ways. I think oftentimes you get, well I’ve learned you get shown a facade all the time, this is what you want, we want you to see. And I’ve learned the hard way ‘cause too many times it said Door and I walked into Wall and I couldn’t figure out why.That you learn to just say yeah okay and then you find out what’s really happening, because lots of times what’s going on behind the scenes isn’t necessarily what’s put forward. But I think that’s more of a British thing and lots and lots of my non-British overseas friends, we all have the same feeling about that. You, you learn that whatever they say it’s like yeah, yeah okay fine, and then you, you wait around and find out what’s really happening later and what’s really going on. But that’s, you know, it’s a cultural thing.

after that, I had lots of troubles. I really struggled, trying to get settled in to London those first couple of years I was living here, it was like a financial disaster in one way.  But again I was exposed to this European gay life which I loved and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to move over here. I had come over in ‘94, I was in France and Italy, and when I went back home after that I never wanted to settle in America again. I just felt European and I always had, I always felt I didn’t quite fit. And when I came over to Europe it’s like oh, I feel so at home. And several friends have said oh for an American you are so well-behaved.

But I came from a very European culture in a little town with lots of Italians and Germans and Polish and traditions that live through, even in America. So I did know how to behave and I’m, I didn’t plan on coming to Britain, that wasn’t a plan, that just happened because I could. I came because David was here and he said come over, , come over. I was trying to get jobs on the continent but because I wasn’t EU it was next to impossible to get a job in the EU. But here I could just transfer as a corporate transfer, it was no big deal, got permanent leave to stay. So I got here, difficult in London, but I was working at David’s clubs, ‘cause he was a club promoter in those days.

And he brought me in just to hang around and keep my eye on people if I saw anyone that I thought was like too off their tits or really getting drug-fucked, get them in, well get them out the door so they don’t collapse or do anything inside the club ‘cause we don’t want the police coming inside the club. again it was a hop, skip and a jump to Amsterdam, Antwerp, Berlin, Paris, you know. And I was, suddenly I had this Euro gay scene on my doorstep which was fabulous, you know, just fabulous to go to these great parties with people from all over the world.

And you know, great times, great sex and they weren’t just all Americans and, which I love that and, and I did a lot of travelling and, and really into the Euro gay scene. And that’s where I was, 2002, I didn’t do very good with British boyfriends, they were just one disaster after another. I had just set up at that point in time, it’s like right I am just gonna go Euro trash for, for a few years. I was making money finally, I had settled in and you know, cheap air fare everywhere. So I was just gonna go be Euro trash. And then I met Mr Simon Cork at a party up in Leicester and said oh all right, so that’s been me and Simon ever since which is great.

then I got into the NHS and I did very well and I settled in. I moved to Sheffield and got involved with walk-in centres. And being HIV, being gay, was never ever ever an issue in the NHS, it’s, it was just really a refreshing place to work as a gay person. And they didn’t mind people coming in with new ideas, well they didn’t mind up in Sheffield. I found London was pretty, we have our own ways of doing things and we’re not going to…

I came in ‘98, I moved to Sheffield in 2000. I moved up there as part of the opening of walk-in centres back in 2000 and, and I’ve been doing that sort of work ever since. But I mean I was, I was the Director of Urgent Care for the City of Sheffield by 2005. And you know, really, really got to do some things, it was quite, quite an interesting time professionally and again I’m not dying, nothing’s going to happen. I, I have my healthcare being done in London, my consultant refused to release me to the teams up in the Sheffield because his comment was, he said I just came back from a conference and they were asking me questions that would have been embarrassing in 1986.

He said there’s no way you’re going to go be seen by those people. Okay. So I still keep my consultant here in London, we’ve been good friends. When I have my appointment we have about two minutes of HIV talk and then we just have twenty minutes of bashing the NHS. But it’s nice to have that continuity of care and to know that I’m well cared for. I, I have just settled down and I have a life, HIV is, is just something that, you know, is some pills in the morning, some pills in the evening and I get blood tests a few times a year. It’s, it’s just not anything really.

I think in the late Nineties there was a lot of awareness and I think, the group that I was hanging out with there was quite a bit of concern about if, I used to go to lots of sex parties so there’d be groups of people there. And one of the first things would be like who’s, who’s HIV positive and who isn’t. And you just declared and it’s like right, so everyone take care of these people because you know, we’re not gonna get them infected and everyone behave and, you know. And that’s how it was done and I thought that was really, really sensible.

I did know some people that could have cared less and basically the drug thing, get drug-fucked and we’ll do whatever we feel like doing and then deal with the consequences. Part of the problem was people were beginning to realise I could live with AIDS so if I got AIDS that wasn’t a bad thing. Well it is a bad thing.

It can kill you, it does kill people, you can pass it on to other people, we don’t have a cure for it and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. I’m really glad there’s medications that make me be able to live with it, yippee, I’m very happy about that, I go do whatever I want and it’s not a concern in my life.

It’s a concern when I travel a little bit because you, I do pick where I’m going to go and I don’t want anyone confiscating my medications if I’m going away for any reason or things like that. I don’t carry my medications in bottles, I make up my trays of medications so people don’t know. 

It’s a concern for my partner going back to the States because they can still bar people from entering the United States for being HIV positive, which is…that’s still on the books, thank you Mr Reagan. But nobody’s ever repealed that and they certainly won’t  with a Republican-controlled Congress. So I carry all of Sam’s drugs with me and you know, we, we do it that way. But yes any, anybody could be stopped and turned away just for being HIV positive if they know it.

No, no that’s not gone, that’s still the land of the free and the home of the brave. Oh it does pain me to see it happening and in one so young! Gay life late 1990s, parties, sex, drugs. One of the things I’ll say, moving up North was the best thing I ever did in coming over here. I had met a few people at parties here and there and everybody I got along with, we were all from “oop North”. I was dying in London financially, it was so expensive, I had no idea and I was being paid, they just took my US wages and converted them to pounds.

Well the pound was 1.72 dollars to the pound, so all of a sudden I’m down, you know, a huge amount on my income in the most expensive city in the world. And I’m someone that, you know, had a home in the mountains, a home in Denver and went to Hawaii twice a year. I’m living in hovels, can’t afford a car and struggling to feed myself, it’s like ooh, I was gonna leave had it not been for that job in Sheffield. Better money, much cheaper to live. And then I meet this great group of friends up North, really great group of friends and that was through what was called the Motor Sport Club and there was a really big one in Nottingham and everybody belonged to East Anglia Motor Sport. just made this huge really good social team that I’m still well involved with and was able to like buy a house and get money together and it all worked. Because I would have gone back if, had I not landed that job in Sheffield I would have left and gone back because I couldn’t afford to stay in London.

It was just so expensive and, and not my cup of tea, I liked Crested Butte, Colorado, I like living in Brixham, I like little towns in pretty places, I didn’t wanna live in the middle of hubbub London, except sex was great and you could have a lotta fun if you wanted to.

I’m not in that kind of medicine any more, I’m not in end of life are, I, I work in primary care. So when you get sick you disappear into the hospital system. So I don’t see that any more. Down here or where I’m living and working now everyone dies of old age because I, I live in a, an old age-centric bit of the country. I’m sure there’s people dying of AIDS-related illnesses in London that aren’t getting diagnosed. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. It probably is bigger in America because the healthcare system is so much different and, and so dysfunctional. I don’t know what HIV rates are like in central and south America right now, whether they have it under control or whether they don’t.

How much of a problem is coming across the border, I’m just divorced from that, I don’t have that. I think here people certainly have the opportunity to find out if they want to, if they choose not to be diagnosed until late that’s a different thing. How, what I don’t understand are pos-parties, I really don’t get that. I did hear about that up-north some, where people would get together with friends of theirs who weren’t HIV positive to pos them up. So you could all join in and then nobody had to worry about safe sex any more and use condoms or like that, because we’re all HIV positive. Which is really just stupid, nuts, what, what are you thinking, I don’t get it. I don’t know if that’s going on in America or not, I don’t know if it still goes on here. But I do know a few years ago there were definitely pos-parties going on.

I think if people had to pay for their medications they’d think twice about it. I’m, you know, thank god for the NHS and we don’t. But you know, the, that’s my only criticism of the NHS is that I don’t think it makes people feel as responsible for their healthcare as if they were contributing a little bit more to it in some ways., between the two systems I’d much rather have the NHS thank you.

going to the Chelsea and Wes… Westminster probably ‘98, ‘99, definitely no later than that, it was right after I got here, I knew I had to get in with somebody. And I was living, initially I was out in Swiss Cottage, St John’s Wood and someone said Chelsea and Westminster had a good team so I went down there and said I’m, you know, I’m HIV positive, I need to get in. Whether I had a GP referred me there or whether I just told my GP to refer me there, I can’t even remember now. But friends had said Chelsea and Westminster was the place to go, so that’s where I went.

experimental…Treatments and things like that. There was different drugs, I remember one that was like this bright banana yellow gook that came in a tube, a little packet like a ketchup packet that was just horrible. Wouldn’t take that, I can’t remember what that drug was.Then one of the drugs we were on, something happened to the manufacturing process and they couldn’t clear it up, so they couldn’t make capsules any more but they could still make it in a liquid form. So they were giving this stuff in a liquid and I took two doses of it and said I will die before I take any more of this.

Because it was so horrible-tasting that I would just throw up every time when I tried to take it. And they’re like, oh take it and jam a bunch of peanut butter in your mouth and then follow it with some chocolate and then do this. It’s like, I, I, no, no, no. But that was something you were, again I can’t remember what the drugs were.

The yellow thing began with an “M” but don’t ask me what it was actually called, but that was weird. First time I ripped one open and this looked like, this just bright banana yellow sludge comes out and it’s like what is this.the AZT trials, they were, as they were bringing drugs out anything that came down the road I was happy to give a try to. Whether I lived or whether I didn’t, it would add to the body of knowledge, maybe somebody else would live, maybe they could, you know, whatever. So I didn’t mind trying anything and like I said certain things were just too horrible to take and I wasn’t going to, but…

What would happen is you, you were being seen by a healthcare professional, doctors and, and teams of people. And somebody, researcher would say right we think we have something here and it would go out nationwide in America. Everyone was told we have a study, we need to enrol x-number of people in it. There’s parameters, you need to be within a certain age, you should have taken these drugs or could not have taken these drugs and narrow down the right group. And then one group’s going to get a placebo, one group’s going to get whatever this medication is.

And then we take lots of blood from them and then we interview them every once in a while and we see who lives and we see who dies and then we take the labels off of everything and we see who got what and find out whether it made a difference or not. That’s how all drug trials go.

These were a little bit more life and death in those days because lots of people were dying. And they just said did you wanna be in them and you could say yes or not. Lots of people I knew didn’t wanna try anything new or different, didn’t wanna be a guinea-pig, thought that was really horrible that you would wanna do that. There were lots of people, there were entire religious orders I remember signing up saying, you know, we’ve never done drugs, we’ve never had sex, we’ve never done anything, would we be perfect candidates to try these things out on. I remember entire convents and, and abbeys and stuff in America making headline news because they were trying to help.

And there were lots of, you know I, still you cannot believe the, the hate that went on in those days about how, especially with the Reagan Administration and the government you know, you know for eight years Ronald Reagan never said the word AIDS. He had a gay son, he never said the word AIDS.

And it was just a pariah and it was politicized and just used as, because we couldn’t, we didn’t have Communists to beat up now so, and everybody hates the gays and you know, that’s a problem with America that you have to have someone to hate all the time. And god only knows who it’ll be when I’m back in a few months but I, it won’t be me for a change.

But anyhow, it’s, really bad. And, people did lose their job is they found out you were HIV positive, lots of people did, lots of people lost their job if anybody found out they were gay. Because there were lots of people who could discriminate and it was an open way to get rid of people we don’t like any more.

That was, that was the hard bit of the Eighties when everyone was dying, people were hiding their sexuality, you know for a while you couldn’t even get a test. And people weren’t getting tested because they didn’t wanna know because if they knew there wasn’t anything to do about it and you could lose your job, you could lose, you couldn’t get a mortgage, you couldn’t get bank loans. all kinds of things because you might be dead and we won’t loan you any money, we won’t help you, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. You couldn’t get insurance, you couldn’t let anybody know you were gay if you were trying to get private insurance in America, because immediately you just wouldn’t get insurance. 

If you didn’t have insurance you couldn’t afford healthcare. So it was, it was bad. There were lots of other things going on then, Louise Hay, I don’t know if Louise Hay ever made it over here. Louise Hay was one of the first big things before there was anything that would help you. It was like “Can You Heal Your Mind”, and I remember everybody had the Louise Hay tapes and you’d lay down at night and you put Louise Hay on, it’s like imagine a beautiful place and it was all this guided visualisation. Which we know does help lots of things and we still use guided visualisation in lots of different therapies and things like that.

But lots of woo-woo stuff as I call it going on. But Louise Hay I’ll never forget her and lots of hel… self-help books and lots of people trying to make money off you. You know, we have the cure for AIDS, we have the seminar to go to, we have this, we have that. But that’s with anything, people are gonna try and cash in on anything no matter how horrible it is.

I’m one of those unique candidates that although things happened I just felt like I just, it just was part of life and I got almost, not that much happened to me. It happened to people around me and it was just weird to see people go. I remember one of my neighbours, Randy, right across the street was a lovely guy but he came from a very  well-to-do established Denver family that were moneyed and country-clubbed and known and a family of doctors and all that. And he had a, and he was an architect in an architectural design business and just as gay as the day is long.

But he had been engaged to, and I can’t remember her name any more, for years and she was just the cover. But he had to go to the social functions, he had to be seen at the Lavender… or the Lilac and Lobster dinner at the country club every year. And why she kept hanging on because if there was any party and she’d come to, it was just a house full of gay men and her. I mean it’s not like she couldn’t possibly have known and they weren’t married. But it was really sad when he got sick because again he’s one of those people that the family came and plucked him out of his house and he disappeared. And he was basically put in a hospital and then brought to their home and locked away and had private nursing and he died of liver failure. “We regret to announce that our son, our beloved son has died of liver failure”. No he didn’t, he died of Kaposi sarcoma and complications with HIV. No he died of liver failure. And that’s, you saw that lots, you know, “our beloved child” your beloved child, you know, you wouldn’t see him, you wouldn’t even be in the same house, you would spit on their boyfriend, you know, you made his life hell. But you know, died of cancer, private viewing, private funeral.

Things, it was, it was very irritating. But like I said, for me basically I just kept pootling along and didn’t die. Then I got better, which was good, it was really good, I was really really happy about that. And then I moved to England and that all went okay, and I’m still here, and it’s still going okay. I’m pretty happy about all that. But the bottom line is nobody gets out alive, everybody dies some day of something. And that kind of doesn’t matter any more, it, what matters to me is what happens between now and when you die. Do you have a good life. 

in 1957 some lady didn’t expect a meteorite to come crashing through her roof in Montgomery, Alabama, and kill her, the only documented person ever killed by space-stuff. But you know, people die of things, from all kinds of things and there’s nothing anybody ever’s going to do to stop somebody from dying, ‘cause we all do.

But if you have a really good time between now and then that’s what makes the difference and hopefully more people will pick up on that part of it.

I’m sorry for all my friends that died and it was a really weird time to go through. And there was a lot of uncertainty and fear and ugliness in society and all those things. But I don’t feel bad about it, I don’t have bad memories. My, most of memories are really good memories. There’s things that were irritating but there were things that were just funny in some ways. I mean a friend of mine, this is funny… died in a hospital bed, there were quite a few of us around it and his last words were: who farted? ‘Cause somebody did, somebody did, he hadn’t moved for like nine hours, just breathing barely.

And then someone, it’s like who farted… you know, within a minute he was dead. But you know, his last words. Well we just, you know, I think we were still laughing when somebody said he’s dead now. And then we just laughed even more because it was just so absurd.

But those kind of things stick with me, but it almost seems like another lifetime ago, in lots of ways it was another lifetime ago, it was another country, another world and I always say don’t look backwards unless that’s the direction you wanna go.

These things happened in my past and, and shaped me for who I am now, but you know, no amount of guilt changes the past, no amount of worry changes the future. So I’m, I’m pretty much I live in the day and that works really well for me, that doesn’t work for everybody. And some people really do need too work through what happened in the past and analyse it and like that.

But I’m pretty much merrily on my way and so that, that works well for me and if it helps other people and, you know, what I have to say and do and my job helps other people, goody goody. At the end of the day I go home and look at the beautiful view out my window and watch the boats go in and out the harbour and take hikes along the south coast path. And I’m just really happy it’s a pretty sunset tonight.