San Francisco at the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s was the most wonderful, freeing place to be. It was a revelation: joyous, confrontational, liberal, terrific fun. My girlfriend at the time hung out on the fringes of the gay scene and took me to Polk and Castro. You would go down to Castro on Hallowe’en, and I’d never seen anything like it. It was incredible street- theatre. I remember one guy dressed as a Pan Am stewardess, waltzing down the street, “Please fasten your seatbelts”, doing the whole routine, or The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of gay men dressed as nuns who raised money for charity. 

 

I was completely naïve about gay sexuality at the time, being straight and essentially monogamous. I had a job for a while painting the front of a toyshop owned by two gay guys who were a couple. They gave me carte blanche to make it as colourful as I could – gold and green, yellow and blue and purple. Every lunchtime, one would leave the shop and go up to the park for lunch. Then he’d come back, and the other would leave and go to the park. I thought it curious, and it was only when my girlfriend explained it to me that I understood. That was San Francisco – a tangible atmosphere of anything goes. 

 

But there were also pockets of redneck prejudice in the city, people with long hair and beards who would spit in your face if they thought you looked different. I had short hair and an earring, and wore suits with skinny ties, and I would be called ‘faggot’ and have stones thrown at me. Not long after I arrived in the city, Harvey Milk, a local politician and gay activist, was assassinated along with the Mayor, George Moscone, who’d signed a bill outlawing discrimination against gays. 

 

Then one day, people you worked with in the theatre there suddenly stopped coming into work. They would disappear into a black hole. We didn’t know what was wrong with them. People died very quickly, and horror stories began to circulate, about the lesions, emaciation, people’s skin falling off. 

 

I remember sitting in a friend’s house, having my hair cut. A TV evangelist appeared on the screen and said: “AIDS is God’s vengeance on the gay community.” It made me feel sick. The men dying might have had the kind of lifestyle I didn’t, but they didn’t deserve this. 

After my visa and my money ran out and I went home, letters from friends in San Francisco kept arriving, telling of more illness among people we knew, more deaths.

 

There was a palpable sense of fear too among the gay people I worked with in UK theatre. We were all shocked when, in 1990, the actor Ian Charleson died. I was between acting jobs and my first marriage had broken down, so I started doing voluntary work almost as a kind of therapy really, to take my mind off my own problems. After a stint at a homeless hostel, I became involved with the Mildmay Hospice in Shoreditch, where a friend of mine had a job. 

 

The Mildmay had a day-care centre where I spent most of my time, but they also had in-patient rooms for respite care, or when people were reaching the end. I’d make cups of tea, give people their lunch, fetch their medication from the pharmacy and hear their stories. 

 

At that time, having AIDS and HIV was a terrible stigma. People tried to hide that they had it, because rumours circulated among the public about how it could be caught from tears or sweat, which was rubbish. For our clients, to come to a place like that day-centre where they could be open and recognised for who they were, was a release. I was a churchgoer and Mildmay was a Christian organisation. But the real embodiment of Christ, that unconditional love that transcends everything, was in those people who came to the day centre. They were staring at a death sentence because there was no cure. It was only a matter of time and they all knew it: they had the lesions, they grew thin, then they were gone. But their generosity towards each other was without parallel in my experience. 

 

AIDS has its peaks and troughs and, whenever someone hit a trough, the friends they’d made at the Mildmay would do whatever they could to help them through. They were indefatigable in the service of each other. They would walk across town to encourage and support each other, cooking their food, sitting holding their hands. They were all on benefits because they could no longer work so, to save money, they would walk everywhere instead of taking the bus or tube, and it took its toll on their feet. I admired them for their bluntness. They would come in and say, I’m having a shit day, can someone please come and bathe my feet? It was a privilege to do it. 

 

As well as gay men there were also women, drug users or Africans or simply people whose partners had passed the virus to them. That’s when it hits you that this is not some ghetto condition affecting just one group of people; this is everybody. We are all in this. 

 

One of my jobs was to go round the wards and ask people if they’d like a priest to give them Holy Communion. I remember knocking on one door to see an African gentleman in his pyjamas, shaving his cheek to try to maintain some sort of dignity, some fading sense of the person he’d been before his illness. 

 

He turned and looked at me with his face full of awful shame because of the way he looked. His whole lip was peeling off, like someone sloughing their skin, a horrific sight. He told me yes, he would like Communion, but I’d never witnessed someone so caught between their struggle to be seen as human, and their fear of what was happening to them. 

 

Another time, I knocked on a door and went in to find pitch darkness, like a pit. You could sense the rage in the room. When I asked if the person there would like to take Communion, a howl of raw anger came from the bed: “Aaarghhh f––––– ooooooff….” Furious, terrified. That sort of moment never leaves you. 

 

Many, many people have done much, much more than I did, more tirelessly, more selflessly, trying to find a cure so people can have hope and get better. But what I took from my experience at the Mildmay is that our value isn’t dependent on our bank account or our status in society or the job we do; our value is our humanity, shared with other people. In the face of equally insurmountable troubles, especially these days when times are strange and turning, the thing we can all do is the thing right in front of us, to hold out our hand to the next person who needs help. If you’re blinded by the tsunami of horror coming at you, you will be nothing more than driftwood. 

 

Those examples of unconditional love at the Mildmay have stayed with me forever. I’ve forgotten almost all of their names, because I’m hopeless at names, but those faces, they never leave me.