World Aids Day. I am reminded of the first time I ever heard of the mysteries of HIV. I was 15, a student in Year 10 at the bland and conservative Meriden School for Girls. It was summer and I was in a geography class with Mr Mawad who was droning on and on as I played out my version of teen rebellion in the back row of that classroom. Mr Mawad rarely caught my attention with geographical content, though to his credit I do still remember in graphic form that relentless cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation, as well as the fluffy formations of high, middle, and low clouds, especially the heroic cumulonimbus.

Anyway, that day, back in 1985, Mr Mawad starting saying something about apes and men and how a disease had passed from one species to the other. I can’t remember the ensuing discussion, but there was one. It must have one of the rare times I asked a question of Mr Mawad. It was the oddest thing I’d heard. Then, Rock Hudson died. I remember my mother’s shock. Such a handsome man! Gay. To die of the gay disease… Κρίμα. What a shame. That he died of that terrible disease? Or that he was gay? In the mid-eighties, it was not always clear what some people thought was worse.

The fashion model Gia Marie Carangi died in 1986. She was the first woman in America to die of the disease. I didn’t know about her until I saw the movie starring Angelina Jolie (Gia) in 1998.

Then in 1987, the Grim Reaper appeared on our television screens. It was the Australian Department of Health’s way of scaring us into safe (though what exactly was safe wasn’t clear) sexual practices. The personification of Death went about his business of indiscriminately killing people. Who would be next? Me?
The Grim Reaper was the most frightening thing I’d seen on the little screen since I witnessed a rerun of The Blob one late night on a visit to a cousin. I was 9. It took me weeks, possibly months to overcome those images of the substance with a fierce life of its own. Now, the Grim Reaper visited me at night with warnings of strange ape-human diseases that could kill anyone. Everyone. I had to keep the light on.

in Australia, the Grim Reaper education campaign was launched, with television images of death mowing down a range of victims in a bowling alley. Although widely criticised at the time, the advertisements did succeed in ensuring widespread discussion of AIDS.”

A Bowling alley of death, haunted by decomposing grim reaper bowling over men, pregnant women, babies and crying children was featured on national television last night as the part of a $3 million AIDS education campaign, The 60-second commercial featuring the grim reaper, a macabre and dramatic rotten corpse with scythe in one hand and bowling ball in the other, is spearheading efforts by the National Advisory Committee on AIDS to Educate Australians about the incurable disease.”

Source: Avert.org

Grim got people very scared at a time when there really wasn’t enough information going around. People were scared of kissing. At church I remember that people were scared of drinking communion wine from the same golden cup. I didn’t have a problem as I’d rejected the church long before Grim’s macabre appearance.

A year or so later Roberto died. He was a glamorous fashion designer, all arms and mouth and movement, who’d designed my dresses for my Year 10 and Year 12 formal balls. I never knew he was sick. Just that he was gay, and happy, which was the first meaning I’d attached to the word back in primary school. And then it was Freddie Mercury and a host of other public personalities. One for how many thousands of anonymous personalities?

In 1993, the movie And The Bank Played On (based on the book And the Band Played On: People, Politics, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts published in 1987 by St Martin’s Press) explored the politics of the “gay disease,” the politics of fear and ignorance and of government indifference and apathy.

By then, I knew about Aids testing, safe sex, and if it’s not on, it’s not ON. But I was ending my first (monogamous, and hence safe!) relationship and I was back in dangerous territory. Grim was always around. Sometimes I heeded his warning, other times I took chances, risks. The eruption of Aids coincided with my “sexual awakening.” It was an odd time. A time of passion, to be sure, but not unbridled passion, not always. Instead, a softened eroticism, restrained with fear.

Today? There are:

~ 40 million people worldwide living with HIV.
~ Only 1.3 million people have access to treatment.