Disclosures, published by Stewed Rhubarb Press, is a book of sometimes harsh contrasts. Of visibility and invisibility, silence and noise, innocence and experience, openness and closedness — despair and hope. And the contrast at its core is about shame. It is, unashamedly, a book about living with HIV in Scotland today. And yet, without the shame that […]
Category: HIV/AIDS
How stigma killed us too
It was just another Saturday afternoon in Stoke Newington, around the middle of January 1993. Lawrence had sent me to Safeway for the last few things we needed for dinner. I’d left him preparing mussels we’d bought earlier that day at Steve Hatt’s fish market on Essex Road in Islington. We were expecting guests. I […]
PrEP: a sweet pill to swallow
It’s not often that I shed a tear at a public policy announcement. But today I did. I cried when I heard that Scotland had become the first of the UK nations to approve the provision of PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) by the NHS to prevent HIV. The announcement was made by the Scottish Medicines Consortium […]
A love by any other name
This is how it was. In the early 1980s, a whole generation of gay men who had scarcely known the ability to live and love openly was besieged by an epidemic. Because it turned sex into something dangerous, it was an epidemic which for more than a decade scarred love and relationships. It framed our […]
PrEP Not a whiff of homophobia but a stench
The row over PrEP is a chilling reminder to many of us of a time we thought had passed. In the early 1980s news began to emerge of a ‘gay plague’ sweeping America. In 1982 AIDS claimed its first life in the UK when Terence Higgins died. My late partner Lawrence who died in 1995, […]