World AIDS day 2012
Somethings in life are very important to me for personal reasons as well as the fact they're just decent things to do. The fight against AIDS is one of them...
When I was a kid my parents knew this awesome couple who for the sake of argument we'll call David and Robert they lived in south london with their cats and I grew up knowing them as Uncle David and Uncle Robert. We saw more of David than Robert but they were both lovely. David used to give us a lift to the supermarket at the weekends and afterwards he'd come back to ours and He, my Mum and I would play Heroquest (very old RPG boardgame similar to D&D) beng very generous to me because I was about 7. We went to theme parks together and on various other trips and David would babysit my sister and I from time to time. I was aware that He and Robert were gay in the same way I was aware they had cats, no value judgements about it they just were. I wasn't aware at that point that David had AIDS (this was the early/mid 90's) so AIDS was still massively misunderstood and people my mother knew displayed some appalling homophobia with statements such as "aren't you worried he'll do things to them" being fairly common (to my mother's credit her response was "well no because he's gay and they're girls and even if they weren't why would he?") I'm fairly certain that if she'd mentioned he had AIDS they'd have been reporting her to social services.
It wasn't until I was a little older, around 9, that David himself explained to me that he had AIDS and something of what that meant although I'm afraid I probably didn't understand the exact implications I understood enough to know it meant I had to be careful if he cut himself and that it was serious and could make him very ill. The thing I didn't understand until I was older was how incredibly sad David having AIDS was. Unlike so many others he wasn't infected through accident or ignorance. He was infected on purpose. He'd picked up a guy one night and slept with him waking up the next morning to find the guy gone and a copy of an STI test result with 'welcome to hell' scrawled on it. David didn't deserve to have AIDS, he didn't deserve to die when I was 13. He deserved to grow old with Robert and his cats and if he'd been infected a few years later he might have managed that. But then again nobody deserves AIDS everyone deserves to have access to the drugs that will give them longer with the people they love if they do have it. So please get tested. huge numbers of people have no idea about their HIV status and many don't care. But even if you don't care about yourself spare a thought for the people you might infect and the people who love them and you. Please donate to charities who promote HIV testing awareness and charities who help provide drugs to people can't afford them so that people can stay alive as long as possible.
