Have you tested?

Tuesday 16^th December 1997

Coincidentally I have within the last five minutes finished a rather fraught phone call from a promiscuous friend who yesterday took the HIV test for the first time ever, having been twelve years on the London scene. Understandably he's more than just concerned and wanted to talk.

Last year we had a bit of a flame war because someone refused to understand a question I put which was "do you know your HIV status?" He took that to mean "are you positive" which it does not. I wouldn't be that invasive of an individual's privacy, but I still would be interested to know how many people are confident about their actual status whatever that might be.

When I was at uni in newcastle I had come from social and business circles based in London and a somewhat arty world where gays were commonplace and as a result in the mid eighties so were AIDS related deaths.

Apart from the distress of seeing people die I personally felt furiously angry that just as I had come out and could have got the sex I had been desparate for this disease was denying it to me.

Even at that time, '87, there were recognisable patterns to HIV infection centres: London had it's cosmopolitan gays; Edinburg its intravenous drug users; Glasgow its female sex workers; all of which formed epicentres of infection.

In Newcastle there were non of these in visible numbers. There had been a batch of contaminated blood products resulting in a number of infections amongst haemophilliacs but that was hardly visible to your average gay student working his way through the gay soc. As a result attempts at safer sex information were greeted with boredom.

I myself was quite complacent for a while but I was brought back to the realities by paying a visit to friends in London to be virtually greeted with "Oh, and <insert list here> died last week / last month."

Fuck, was that a shock!

I'm not really leading to a question here, more an observation of incredulity that people don't ascertain their own status, don't enquire that of their partners and seem less than concerned about safer sex practices.

For the record I do know my own status. In the four years I've been back in London three close friends have died and four more are living with illness. It's not something I could ignore even if I were inclined to do so.

Oh, god. I can feel depression setting in. Sorry if this comes overly morbid.

Matthew