As I walked out of the Tate Modern, from the UK AIDS Quilt Memorial, I was thinking back to people I knew living with HIV in the 1980s and 90s… Some stories I’d like to share, here, are for particular people who didn’t have a quilt, well, not one that was visible that day. I am hoping that the reason there was no quilt is because they are still alive.
Category: Gay / LGB&T+
“It’s going to be a bright, bright sun-shiny day”
What a start to the Bank Holiday sunshine: jumping off the bus the other evening, listening to ChérieFM, the French “pop love music” station, via Bluetooth headset, when my face totally lit up as I heard Johnny Nash singing “I can see clearly now the rain has gone” (1972). I was 15 back then. The early May…
“Don’t you look at ME like that!!!”
On talking to Paul on the phone, yesterday, aka my boyfriend when we were both 17, we shared some stories about a young man we both knew. I think he was slightly older than us at the time, and he re-named himself “Nap”, short for Naparolla (Some Polari-speak lingo, not doubt). From what I recall,…
Tales of my Investiture
Dilectis et Fidelibus nostris What a week to be ill! Two days before the Investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace and I come down with sinusitis. Lucky I was well enough for the great day itself (Thursday 7th December 2017), because by Friday night, on top of asthma, I started the most horrendous bronchitis that I have ever had. …
50 years: The Sexual Offences Act 1967
Celebrating 27 July 1967, the 1st partial decriminalisation of male homosex, and the victories to equality won over these past 50 years
You will be more old on Friday!
I took one sip and BANG! my poor head was gone!
Imagine having your bum pinched … by Rupert Everett!
More tales from The Coleherne What amazing fortune that I paid heed to all those people who have told me I should write my autobiography! Okay, well I’m not quite up for that, but it is a joy dotting down some stories, every now and again, for these memoires. Little could I have imagined what…
Hoc est corpus … hic est sanguinis
Similar to Damian’s story, Cosmo was a patient on the same ward, in and out with every new opportunistic infection or tumour his HIV could lay its grubby hands on. In the end he developed severe Kaposi’s sarcoma, with the classic bodily marks, from the tip of his nose, then dotted all over his body,…
Out In Force
Yes, I exclaimed … I’m bisexual!
Tales of the Coleherne
My heart would be pounding as I got on the underground and headed for Earl’s Court … it seemed that there were more men ‘like me’ … some even used to wear pretty coloured hankies in their back pockets!