CONTENT WARNING – This post covers sexual assault/rape and thoughts of suicide. I’ll put a further warning in the text when the challenging content is coming up, so people can read the background if they want.
I’d like to tell you a story. It’s a true story. But first, let me explain why I’m telling it. I recently found someone on twitter who was writing some great, uplifting, and supportive tweets around the stigma of HIV. And then I saw this response to him.
It reminded me of a story about a guy I knew, we were the same age and had quite similar life experiences. For background, this story took place in 1995 when we were 17. The Age of Consent for gay sex had been reduced to 18 a few months before, so we only had a year left to wait until we could legally drink and have sex (instead of the 4 years it had been until the change).
Having just reread that last line I think I should clarify, we didn’t find each other attractive, we were thinking about sex with other people. We were also righteously indignant that we still had to wait. I knew people with whom I’d been to school that were not only in legal, sexually active relationships, but had children. By my age my own mother had introduced the world to her firstborn – and that was in the 70s. And yet, here we were, unable to follow the same rules as our parents or peers. Section 28 had been in place for around a decade, meaning that schools, colleges, teachers, and youth groups were extremely wary of covering homosexuality in any way, shape or form for fear of being branded as “promoting homosexuality”. (It would be another 8 years until that particular gift from the Thatcher Tory Government would finally stop giving…)
Where would a sexually active 17 year old go to meet like-minded people in order to have sex? He couldn’t go to the bars or nightclubs because he was underage. All of the social clubs and groups set up for his age wouldn’t even countenance the idea of allowing discussions of homosexuality. There was one, Tuesday nights at the local MESMAC sexual health awareness centre. It was mostly geared towards 18-24 year olds, but they did allow guys to join from 16.
So where could 17 year olds meet guys for a furtive fumble? The same places that married men would meet to avoid scrutiny. (For those people not au-fait with gay parlance, don’t worry – I’ll explain in a second.) Cottages and Cruising Areas. Cottages were (and possibly still are, although there’s not many around nowadays) toilets that were used by men to meet other men for sex, either in the toilet block, or to meet and then head somewhere they were less likely to be caught. Cruising areas are usually dark areas with bushes/trees/other cover, away from major thoroughfares, where again, men could meet men for sex.
Hopefully that’s set the scene for where we were in the mid-90s. Things were changing, slowly, but they were changing. But the scenes that we see in It’s A Sin were still very much relatable and existed 15 years later. The major difference was that HIV/AIDS was much more well known, killing millions including a number of famous faces. And because we went to a young gay men’s group at a sexual health centre, we were very much aware of it.
!!! CONTENT WARNING STARTS HERE !!!
Anyway, to the story. Remember, the original tweet from 3dx that said “it’s the conditions in which you caught it”? Well, I wonder what he would say about this…
The guy I’m talking about had gone down to the local cruising area one night in order to find a one-night stand. he’d been there for around an hour, not seeing anyone he found attractive, until he saw a couple of friends walking around together chatting. He fancied one of the friends and started to try and attract him. And he was successful. They sneaked off to a dark corner and began to have a fumble. The guy who I learned this story from didn’t notice the friend creeping up until he suddenly found his arms pinned to the side of the man he was already engaged with. He couldn’t shout as he felt the friend enter him.
It turned out that there were 4 of them, each took their turn, none used protection and he was left huddled in the dark corner. He couldn’t shout for help, he couldn’t even cry, he just hugged his knees, jumping at every crackle and rustle around him. When he finally managed to get up and away from the cruising area he went home. Covered in loose leaves and mud he got into the shower and finally broke down crying. He wondered who he could call at 4am to get some support, some reassurance. Thinking about how that conversation would go he considered ending his life.
And so he called the Samaritans, when he got through to the lady on the other end of the phone she was sharp, almost rude. And as he began to explain, catching his breath from the sobs, and trying to fight back his stutter that came out in times of stress, she explained that she thought he was pleasuring himself and hung up on him. A 17 year old lad who’d just been raped by 4 men. He didn’t sleep that night, but when a friend came round in the morning he managed to explain what had happened. The friend called the police and they took a statement and referred him to the local Women’s Refuge to collect samples etc…
They then referred him to the sexual health clinic who ran a full set of tests (not exactly good when you’ve just been through all of that). They advised him to take combination therapy drugs for a month as a preventative measure against HIV. For four weeks he had to take the drugs, and the doctor was very strict about the timings. One of the tablets had to be taken every 12 hours. The second had to be taken every 8 hours on an empty stomach, and the third one had to be taken every 8 hours but with food (however it had to be a low-fat meal). For four weeks he followed this regime knowing that, if it didn’t work, there was a chance that this would be his life.
He was tested at the end of the course, and again 3 months later and was negative for HIV. But he knew that it was sheer luck that meant this was the case. He could just as easily have been positive. And if he had, would 3dx have blamed him for it? Would he only be entitled to the lack of stigma by telling people that he had been the victim of a rape? Or do we think that he brought it on himself by going down there? Should the only people who are entitled to not be stigmatised for having HIV be those people who got it from blood transfusions?
Even then I knew the answers to those questions. The answers were clearly “No”. No-one deserves to be stigmatised for catching any disease. Whether it’s because of a medical procedure, rape, or consensual contact. And that goes even more emphatically today. As Combination Therapies have moved on and allow people to lead long, fulfilling and normal lives along with the discovery of therapies like PrEP, as well as U=U (Undetectable = Untransmittable) we need to move away from the early days, and even the middle days of the HIV Pandemic.
HIV/AIDS cost our community nearly a whole generation. We shouldn’t be ostracising the next one too.
Proud Ankylosaur 