(no subject)
Jan. 28th, 2026 04:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bitterlawngnomeA youngster at our leather club asked us oldsters to answer a few questions about life during the AIDS years.
1. What age range were you during the height of the AIDS epidemic? (0-18, 19-35, 36+)
2. How were you impacted by the epidemic?
3. How did you first learn about HIV / AIDS during this time? Was there much education around it?
4. Did you publicly identify as a gay/bisexual man at this time? If so, what were other peoples' attitudes towards you?
5. Did the epidemic discourage you from telling others about your sexuality?
6. One problematic term for HIV/AIDS at this time was 'the gay disease'. What were your thoughts on that term back then compared to now?
1. What age range were you during the height of the AIDS epidemic? (0-18, 19-35, 36+):
I was born in 1965. I'm not sure what year you'd put the height of the epidemic.
I remained HIV-negative at my last test.
2-6. How were you impacted by the epidemic, etc. Sorry this all kind of ran together:
I'd already been having gay sex for years when I started coming out, in Hamilton Ontario Canada, in about 1982. I skulked into the only gay-friendly bookstore in town and nervously bought porn and The Body Politic, both of which talked about "the gay plague" (or GRID or various other names that came and went before people settled on AIDS and HIV). The few mentions in the mainstream press alluded to it as a disease of squalor and sinful behaviour.
Testing at the time was primitive and expensive and many doctors were just unaware. I went into a clinic in Hamilton for a panel of STI tests (Venereal Diseases, at the time) and had to explain to the nurse not only what GRID was but also what park cruising was. "Wow I never would have known you're gay if you hadn't told me", delivered as a compliment. She was doing her best to be reassuring, it was not malice. Because:
Queer people living in Hamilton in the 80s were very unlikely to be out in the general sense, it was common for groups of drunk youths to "beat up queers" for entertainment on a weekend night, and sometimes it resulted in deaths, so "passing" was a survival skill. People were routinely evicted, fired, disowned, formally shunned, refused service, etc etc, and while gay sex was theoretically no longer illegal, public indecency laws were frequently used to prosecute. Gay Panic cases were common and usually worked for the aggressor. The only gay-ish bar in town was organised-crime-owned, was frequently raided by the police (leading to extortion), and people were surreptitiously photographed coming and going and the photos used for blackmail. Toronto, in truth only 45 minutes away by bus, was seen as this semi-mythical paradise on the hill where you could flounce down Yonge Street in broad daylight unmolested (spoiler: it wasn't).
STI testing was focussed on straight sex workers and trying to get a test for HIV was virtually impossible, it was considered a rare and exotic thing that only those perverts in big cities got, not relevant in Hamilton. So a self sustaining loop - doctors didn't know they had gay patients, so they saw no need to learn about HIV etc. There were likely quite a few AIDS deaths that went unrecognised.
My first ever Official Gay Event was a meeting of Hamilton United Gay Societies (HUGS, https://archives.hpl.ca/index.php/hamilton-united-gay-societies-hugs) in 1983, and on the agenda was support strategies for members of the community who were dying of what would be called AIDS. The main drive was to somehow get people to Toronto where there was some hope of treatment, however faint.
So - I'm not especially proud of this bit but it's my truth; also remember this is in retrospect, so I didn't think about things the same way as they were happening. My affect and tastes in men and sex were formed in that setting. Passing as straight was important so as to survive. I already had a beard fetish (having been treated kindly by a group of feral hippies) so I grew a beard and it was very easy for me to pass as biker-adjacent, and leather was part of that. Being slim was two-edged, it was on the one hand enforced by drastic body shaming, but also on the other hand it was read as wasting from AIDS, so being fat (sometimes on purpose) became a choice people made (this combination of forces were among those that conditioned the emergence of the Bear ideal in the later 80s). When I first encountered girly boys and drag queens I was *terrified* cause I thought for sure they would attract fatal attention. I had to do a great deal of work over many years to address that whole complex of repressive ideas.
I moved to Toronto full-time in the summer of 1984 to go to university and got into gay politics ("queer" as a radical reclamation was around but was not widely used by queer people, typically "gay" was used as we'd use "queer" today). The most important oranisation in my circle was Gays and Lesbians at University of Toronto (GLAUT, at the time, eventually LGBTOUT https://thevarsity.ca/2019/10/20/the-breakdown-lgbtouts-50th-anniversary/) Virtually every lecture or meeting was prefaced by "and does anyone not know how [HIV - at the time often still LAV or HTLV3] is transmitted" and if any hands went up, the business of the meeting stopped and there was an informational. Transmission information was sketchy, by today's standards, but we did the best we could. There was some published information floating around but the science was evolving so quickly that it was often obsolete by the time it got published. There was also deliberate disinformation being published mostly by religious groups, claiming that for instance semen transmitted during fucking destroyed the immune system etc etc.
People used a number of prevention strategies, the most popular being condoms. A lot of us chose to avoid anal completely, or set up (supposedly) monogamous relationships even if it was not our natural inclination. The problem with the monogamy scenario was that if someone slipped up there was this overwhelming social guilt and shame thing that made it virtually impossible to confess to a partner and then isloate and test; it would almost always lead to the end of the relationship, and often to guilt from friends and medical professionals. So a lot of people were infected in that way despite having "been good". The relentless USE A CONDOM message everywhere all the time also led to a some of us associating condoms with death (oops). The strident black-and-whiteness of it proved to be counterproductive in a lot of ways and it wasn't until the 90s that people generally started talking in terms of harm reduction rather than these draconian absolutes. Bug chasing was a thing and it was some combination of resistance against the gay orthodoxy and exhaustion with always always having death in the back of one's mind when fucking. There was a moment where some quack decided poppers were the true cause of AIDS, and there are still people pushing that narrative and others similar - HIV denialists.
Looking like a biker, when I went to bars I attracted people in the leather scene, so that was my entree into "the leather levis scene" whch was more closed and yet less rigid than what we have now (the formal pageant system has not yet congealed, and "old guard leather" didn't yet exist). You weren't part of the scene until people knew you and had a sense of your character, which also meant that when someone got sick there was immediately a cadre of people ready and prepared to look after them. It was an article of faith that sucking dick could not transmit ("unless you had just brushed your teeth", so there was a moment where oral hygiene was suspect), and it was relatively easy for me to give up anal fucking because there was this whole extravagant menu of leather sex, toys, etc that I could keep busy with. So in a sense AIDS encouraged me into leather. Another consequence I find among guys my age is that for some of us it remains very difficult to come in/on/by the efforts of someone else, because we developed such a strong aversion in the 80s. And condoms are still an instant trigger and turnoff for me.
By the end of 1984 I'd already experienced the first AIDS mortality in my circle. It was relentless until the protease inhibitors came in (I think Saquinavir? ca 1995?). Sometimes it would be multiple deaths in a week - winters were worst, PCP and flu and even a cold might be anough to kill someone.
I met my first serious romatic partner, Brad, at a Victoria Day party in 1985 and we moved in together almost immediately. About six months later it developed that he'd been deliberately infected by his previous partner who had lied to Brad about being positive. His scheme was to make Brad positive so that they could fuck unprotected and Brad would feel bound to him because of the overwhelming stigma that poz people experienced at the time. When Brad was diagnosed the doctor blithely informed me that I should get ready to get sick and die within a year or so, even though I was testing negative it was just a matter of time. It was about 10 years before I stopped believing that. But it was also a matter of the zeitgeist, I think most of us lived with the expectation that at some point it would be our turn. And as I say there were the bug chasers who had decided it was inevitable so let's just get it over with. The entire gay community was split into poz and neg. Serosorting was the norm, athough everyone gave lip service to inclusivity and unity.
It was common at the time for people to get sick with AIDS and be denied any sort of government assistance. Despite being literally unable to get out of bed, doctors would describe them as "malingering". And so people would be unable to work and so unable to pay their rent or afford food etc. It was in this context that I first worked closely enough with drag queens to get over myself. There was a strong drag community and it was basically a weekly occurrence that they'd put on a show as a fundraiser for someone about to be evicted. Or who needed meds that weren't covered (more homophobia). The other group that was there for us whenever and wherever was the lesbian community, already well practised in collective action and community based care.
As an aside, this era was also the origin of most of the organized Compassion Clubs in Canada - at the time completely under the radar cause of course pot was quite completely illegal. Drugs like AZT and many of the later drugs made people nauseous, and/or people were already in chronic pain that none of the legal drugs would touch, and pot was quite helpful for a lot of people in those circumstances. So there was a network of people growing, mostly in the country, and co-op type purchasing and distribution. People were careful not to buy from org crime cause that would have attracted attention from the police (also you had no idea what was in it ... it was the age of paraquat contamination https://crypt.creepycatalog.com/paraquat-pot-the-true-story-of-how-the-us-government-tried-to-kill-weed-smokers-with-a-toxic-chemical-in-the-1980s/)
Brad was treated with aerosolized pentamidine and AZT. You can read elsewhere about how brutal both those drugs were. The side effects for him were in the same ballpark as chemotherapy might be today, and that was very common. It was not unknown for people to decide the treatment was worse than the disease, and find a way to off themselves.
Looking after Brad was my first experience of providing AIDS nursing. It was quite common at the time for doctors, nurses, social workers, priests etc to refuse to see patients with AIDS. Which was probably homophobia rather than any fear of transmission as they claimed - we already knew it was not airborne at that point. So we kept lists of which doctors and clinics etc to send people to when their own doctors wouldn't see them. Brent Hawkes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Hawkes) was among the first priests to have any sort of AIDS ministry. Casey House (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_House_(Toronto) run by Deborah Randall-Wood) was one of the first hospices. There was a hospice run by the catholic church too but I can't recall its name - it had to sort of be run under the radar as the public catholic position was that gay people deserved whatever they got. There were several doctors who specilised in AIDS treatment and palliation - the name I recall at this moment is Frank Ferris (https://iahpc.org/bio/frank-ferris/) but there was a small group who worked closely together. Perry Kendall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Kendall) was instrumental in the early days of the Hassle Free Clinic (https://www.hasslefreeclinic.org, where you could get testing and someties treatment without the attitiude) and also worked in BC - he's still with us IIRC so it would be a coup to talk to him.
By 1986-7 I was spending so much time looking after PWAs that was I hired on to do it by a nursing agency (Nightingale, an independent iirc; later I worked for Spectrum, a tentacle of Kelly). The field was largely unregulated at the time because it was so hard to find professionals who would work with PWAs. It wasn't until the industry lost some of its stigma in the mid 90s that my job was successively diminished to cleaning toilets, and I was also burned out, so I transitioned out of it. If you want to know more about my professional involvement with the AIDS industry let me know.
In retrospect I'm thinking about how much growing up gay then and there sounds like living under a hostile occupation.
1. What age range were you during the height of the AIDS epidemic? (0-18, 19-35, 36+)
2. How were you impacted by the epidemic?
3. How did you first learn about HIV / AIDS during this time? Was there much education around it?
4. Did you publicly identify as a gay/bisexual man at this time? If so, what were other peoples' attitudes towards you?
5. Did the epidemic discourage you from telling others about your sexuality?
6. One problematic term for HIV/AIDS at this time was 'the gay disease'. What were your thoughts on that term back then compared to now?
1. What age range were you during the height of the AIDS epidemic? (0-18, 19-35, 36+):
I was born in 1965. I'm not sure what year you'd put the height of the epidemic.
I remained HIV-negative at my last test.
2-6. How were you impacted by the epidemic, etc. Sorry this all kind of ran together:
I'd already been having gay sex for years when I started coming out, in Hamilton Ontario Canada, in about 1982. I skulked into the only gay-friendly bookstore in town and nervously bought porn and The Body Politic, both of which talked about "the gay plague" (or GRID or various other names that came and went before people settled on AIDS and HIV). The few mentions in the mainstream press alluded to it as a disease of squalor and sinful behaviour.
Testing at the time was primitive and expensive and many doctors were just unaware. I went into a clinic in Hamilton for a panel of STI tests (Venereal Diseases, at the time) and had to explain to the nurse not only what GRID was but also what park cruising was. "Wow I never would have known you're gay if you hadn't told me", delivered as a compliment. She was doing her best to be reassuring, it was not malice. Because:
Queer people living in Hamilton in the 80s were very unlikely to be out in the general sense, it was common for groups of drunk youths to "beat up queers" for entertainment on a weekend night, and sometimes it resulted in deaths, so "passing" was a survival skill. People were routinely evicted, fired, disowned, formally shunned, refused service, etc etc, and while gay sex was theoretically no longer illegal, public indecency laws were frequently used to prosecute. Gay Panic cases were common and usually worked for the aggressor. The only gay-ish bar in town was organised-crime-owned, was frequently raided by the police (leading to extortion), and people were surreptitiously photographed coming and going and the photos used for blackmail. Toronto, in truth only 45 minutes away by bus, was seen as this semi-mythical paradise on the hill where you could flounce down Yonge Street in broad daylight unmolested (spoiler: it wasn't).
STI testing was focussed on straight sex workers and trying to get a test for HIV was virtually impossible, it was considered a rare and exotic thing that only those perverts in big cities got, not relevant in Hamilton. So a self sustaining loop - doctors didn't know they had gay patients, so they saw no need to learn about HIV etc. There were likely quite a few AIDS deaths that went unrecognised.
My first ever Official Gay Event was a meeting of Hamilton United Gay Societies (HUGS, https://archives.hpl.ca/index.php/hamilton-united-gay-societies-hugs) in 1983, and on the agenda was support strategies for members of the community who were dying of what would be called AIDS. The main drive was to somehow get people to Toronto where there was some hope of treatment, however faint.
So - I'm not especially proud of this bit but it's my truth; also remember this is in retrospect, so I didn't think about things the same way as they were happening. My affect and tastes in men and sex were formed in that setting. Passing as straight was important so as to survive. I already had a beard fetish (having been treated kindly by a group of feral hippies) so I grew a beard and it was very easy for me to pass as biker-adjacent, and leather was part of that. Being slim was two-edged, it was on the one hand enforced by drastic body shaming, but also on the other hand it was read as wasting from AIDS, so being fat (sometimes on purpose) became a choice people made (this combination of forces were among those that conditioned the emergence of the Bear ideal in the later 80s). When I first encountered girly boys and drag queens I was *terrified* cause I thought for sure they would attract fatal attention. I had to do a great deal of work over many years to address that whole complex of repressive ideas.
I moved to Toronto full-time in the summer of 1984 to go to university and got into gay politics ("queer" as a radical reclamation was around but was not widely used by queer people, typically "gay" was used as we'd use "queer" today). The most important oranisation in my circle was Gays and Lesbians at University of Toronto (GLAUT, at the time, eventually LGBTOUT https://thevarsity.ca/2019/10/20/the-breakdown-lgbtouts-50th-anniversary/) Virtually every lecture or meeting was prefaced by "and does anyone not know how [HIV - at the time often still LAV or HTLV3] is transmitted" and if any hands went up, the business of the meeting stopped and there was an informational. Transmission information was sketchy, by today's standards, but we did the best we could. There was some published information floating around but the science was evolving so quickly that it was often obsolete by the time it got published. There was also deliberate disinformation being published mostly by religious groups, claiming that for instance semen transmitted during fucking destroyed the immune system etc etc.
People used a number of prevention strategies, the most popular being condoms. A lot of us chose to avoid anal completely, or set up (supposedly) monogamous relationships even if it was not our natural inclination. The problem with the monogamy scenario was that if someone slipped up there was this overwhelming social guilt and shame thing that made it virtually impossible to confess to a partner and then isloate and test; it would almost always lead to the end of the relationship, and often to guilt from friends and medical professionals. So a lot of people were infected in that way despite having "been good". The relentless USE A CONDOM message everywhere all the time also led to a some of us associating condoms with death (oops). The strident black-and-whiteness of it proved to be counterproductive in a lot of ways and it wasn't until the 90s that people generally started talking in terms of harm reduction rather than these draconian absolutes. Bug chasing was a thing and it was some combination of resistance against the gay orthodoxy and exhaustion with always always having death in the back of one's mind when fucking. There was a moment where some quack decided poppers were the true cause of AIDS, and there are still people pushing that narrative and others similar - HIV denialists.
Looking like a biker, when I went to bars I attracted people in the leather scene, so that was my entree into "the leather levis scene" whch was more closed and yet less rigid than what we have now (the formal pageant system has not yet congealed, and "old guard leather" didn't yet exist). You weren't part of the scene until people knew you and had a sense of your character, which also meant that when someone got sick there was immediately a cadre of people ready and prepared to look after them. It was an article of faith that sucking dick could not transmit ("unless you had just brushed your teeth", so there was a moment where oral hygiene was suspect), and it was relatively easy for me to give up anal fucking because there was this whole extravagant menu of leather sex, toys, etc that I could keep busy with. So in a sense AIDS encouraged me into leather. Another consequence I find among guys my age is that for some of us it remains very difficult to come in/on/by the efforts of someone else, because we developed such a strong aversion in the 80s. And condoms are still an instant trigger and turnoff for me.
By the end of 1984 I'd already experienced the first AIDS mortality in my circle. It was relentless until the protease inhibitors came in (I think Saquinavir? ca 1995?). Sometimes it would be multiple deaths in a week - winters were worst, PCP and flu and even a cold might be anough to kill someone.
I met my first serious romatic partner, Brad, at a Victoria Day party in 1985 and we moved in together almost immediately. About six months later it developed that he'd been deliberately infected by his previous partner who had lied to Brad about being positive. His scheme was to make Brad positive so that they could fuck unprotected and Brad would feel bound to him because of the overwhelming stigma that poz people experienced at the time. When Brad was diagnosed the doctor blithely informed me that I should get ready to get sick and die within a year or so, even though I was testing negative it was just a matter of time. It was about 10 years before I stopped believing that. But it was also a matter of the zeitgeist, I think most of us lived with the expectation that at some point it would be our turn. And as I say there were the bug chasers who had decided it was inevitable so let's just get it over with. The entire gay community was split into poz and neg. Serosorting was the norm, athough everyone gave lip service to inclusivity and unity.
It was common at the time for people to get sick with AIDS and be denied any sort of government assistance. Despite being literally unable to get out of bed, doctors would describe them as "malingering". And so people would be unable to work and so unable to pay their rent or afford food etc. It was in this context that I first worked closely enough with drag queens to get over myself. There was a strong drag community and it was basically a weekly occurrence that they'd put on a show as a fundraiser for someone about to be evicted. Or who needed meds that weren't covered (more homophobia). The other group that was there for us whenever and wherever was the lesbian community, already well practised in collective action and community based care.
As an aside, this era was also the origin of most of the organized Compassion Clubs in Canada - at the time completely under the radar cause of course pot was quite completely illegal. Drugs like AZT and many of the later drugs made people nauseous, and/or people were already in chronic pain that none of the legal drugs would touch, and pot was quite helpful for a lot of people in those circumstances. So there was a network of people growing, mostly in the country, and co-op type purchasing and distribution. People were careful not to buy from org crime cause that would have attracted attention from the police (also you had no idea what was in it ... it was the age of paraquat contamination https://crypt.creepycatalog.com/paraquat-pot-the-true-story-of-how-the-us-government-tried-to-kill-weed-smokers-with-a-toxic-chemical-in-the-1980s/)
Brad was treated with aerosolized pentamidine and AZT. You can read elsewhere about how brutal both those drugs were. The side effects for him were in the same ballpark as chemotherapy might be today, and that was very common. It was not unknown for people to decide the treatment was worse than the disease, and find a way to off themselves.
Looking after Brad was my first experience of providing AIDS nursing. It was quite common at the time for doctors, nurses, social workers, priests etc to refuse to see patients with AIDS. Which was probably homophobia rather than any fear of transmission as they claimed - we already knew it was not airborne at that point. So we kept lists of which doctors and clinics etc to send people to when their own doctors wouldn't see them. Brent Hawkes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Hawkes) was among the first priests to have any sort of AIDS ministry. Casey House (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_House_(Toronto) run by Deborah Randall-Wood) was one of the first hospices. There was a hospice run by the catholic church too but I can't recall its name - it had to sort of be run under the radar as the public catholic position was that gay people deserved whatever they got. There were several doctors who specilised in AIDS treatment and palliation - the name I recall at this moment is Frank Ferris (https://iahpc.org/bio/frank-ferris/) but there was a small group who worked closely together. Perry Kendall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Kendall) was instrumental in the early days of the Hassle Free Clinic (https://www.hasslefreeclinic.org, where you could get testing and someties treatment without the attitiude) and also worked in BC - he's still with us IIRC so it would be a coup to talk to him.
By 1986-7 I was spending so much time looking after PWAs that was I hired on to do it by a nursing agency (Nightingale, an independent iirc; later I worked for Spectrum, a tentacle of Kelly). The field was largely unregulated at the time because it was so hard to find professionals who would work with PWAs. It wasn't until the industry lost some of its stigma in the mid 90s that my job was successively diminished to cleaning toilets, and I was also burned out, so I transitioned out of it. If you want to know more about my professional involvement with the AIDS industry let me know.
In retrospect I'm thinking about how much growing up gay then and there sounds like living under a hostile occupation.
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