Gscene News Archive

“It is now 25 years on from the onset of the global epidemic which has evolved both in terms of the communities impacted and their experiences of loss and survival.

For a number of years in the early 90s I ran the Brighton Names Project from Brighton Body Positive which provided a weekly space for surviving partners and friends to express their loss and love through making panels for the international Names Project Aids Memorial Quilt*, started in San Francisco in 1987. The Brighton Star Quilt, I made, was intended as a local focus for marking the overwhelming weight of loss and grief shared by many at that time. It was never intended to go on permanent public display. The crisis we then faced is far from over.

However I do believe that as a LGBT community we need to mark a right of passage from our shared and personal experiences of those dark days before the onset of combination therapies. Back then an AIDS diagnosis was often literally a death sentence, and where the Government’s flagship ‘Don’t Die Of Ignorance’ campaigns were sunk on their maiden voyage by the iceberg of Section 28. My personal journey is inextricably bound to that history. I came out into a community in crisis with the tabloid press running reader polls on ‘special camps’. The headline in my local paper before I came to Brighton as a refugee read ‘shoot all gays’.

Many of us will recall the annual reading of the names of those who had died was only made bearable by the fact that this was a communal expression of love as well as loss. Some of us had lost whole chains of friends, and feared who next? How could we survive this? Many of us were vexed by survivor guilt like survivors of the holocaust. We had to stop going to funerals and making quilt panels for each other. But shared remembrance is also a tribute to the power of community and our collective efforts to move beyond just surviving. We owe it to those we outlive not only to remember the horror of the early epidemic and those personal tragedies of loss but also to reflect on who we have become, what we have learned, and what we can now achieve together.

Working with other fellow survivors at the Names Project was not just an act of individual remembrance, but a powerful vehicle of shared hope, love, and healing. The gay writer Paul Monette, wrote of his experience of living and dying with Aids, “Grief is a sword, or its nothing”. We could do worse than write these words at the foot of the planned memorial. Let us never forget what we have survived or who we now are as survivors.

HIV prevention must of course be a priority for public health funds and I share the concern of many at the poor allocation of HIV prevention and Aids services monies for the city. However funding for the Aids memorial is not intended to come from HIV prevention or even public funds, neither should it. It will stand because we need it to.

In my role now as Spectrum Coordinator I have been invited to join the steering group for the project and am committed to ensuring that consultation takes place throughout the planning process to engage with the communities affected.”

*more info here: www.aidsquilt.org