![]() ![]() My memories, of course, are of a time when HIV/AIDS – or human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immune deficiency syndrome – first arrived in the UK. ![]() It was a shameful chapter in our history, and one that I hope will never be repeated for any reason. Young men suffering with illnesses like Kaposi’s sarcoma were said to ‘deserve whatever they got’ and were accused of being a drain on the NHS, then hospital staff started refusing to treat them for fear of catching something.īecause of ignorance and indifference, the LGB community (the T had not been added at that point) was all but abandoned and left to take care of itself while a pandemic spread unimpeded by those in authority. As religious leaders proclaimed the outbreak was a sign of retribution from whichever deity they promoted, flustered politicians attempted to avert panic by insisting the ‘general public’ need not concern itself with a ‘gay disease’. The tabloids were in their element, describing the mystery illnesses as a ‘Gay Plague’ while rallying their readers to demand all homosexuals be deported somewhere remote, away from ‘decent people’. I remember vividly that bleak period in the early 1980s when a spectrum of bizarre but fatal conditions started afflicting gay men. “ They were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy.” Home › LGBTQ › BOOK REVIEW: The Great Believers ![]()
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