Yahoo Finance On the 40th Anniversary of the Aids Epidemic, 'The End of Innocence' Tells a Story That Should Never Be Forgotten
This December marks 40 years since the first reported Aids death in the UK.
It’s a grim anniversary and a hopeful one. Those who lived through the years of fear, tragedy, ignorance and prejudice – or those who have recently watched It’s A Sin – will need little reminder of the human devastation. Aids affected us all. It changed the landscape for healthcare and activism; it reformed the way we conduct funerals and memorials; it transformed the way we talk about sex.
For several years we have celebrated an epidemic in retreat, at least in the UK. HIV, if detected early enough, is now entirely treatable; even transmission is preventable. Not all the stigma of HIV has disappeared with the decline in infections, but we are in a much better place than we were in the Eighties and Nineties.
In November 2020, Public Health England reported that the number of people newly diagnosed with HIV in the UK in 2019 decreased to 4,139 (1,139 females and 3,000 males), a 34 per cent fall from the 6,312 new diagnoses reported in 2014. In 2019, a total of 98,552 people received HIV care in the UK.
But the numbers have never told the story the way people told the story. In 1994, with the epidemic at its height, I published The End of Innocence, a social, political and medical history of Aids in the UK. I spoke to doctors, politicians and activists, and many people with HIV. The book has been out of print for several years, but Faber has just released a new edition with a foreword by Russell T Davies, who used the book for It’s A Sin’s factual framework.
The new volume opens with a 1994 interview with Rupert Haselden, an out gay man who was diagnosed with HIV five years earlier. Here it is in its entirety.
I’m a farm boy from Sussex. My dad was a farmer. My parents divorced when I was eight. I have a brother and a sister. I was sent away to boarding school which I neither liked nor hated and then I realised: I lay in bed at school when I was thirteen and said to myself, ‘Rupert, you’re homosexual.’ I remember being rather pleased. I remember thinking this was going to be a key to meeting all sorts of people in a strange underground world. Far from being horrified, frightened, I remember thinking it was going to be the most fantastic adventure.
Rupert Haselden, 36, is sitting on a large sofa in his house in Balham, south London. It is early February 1994, clear and crisp, and the room is stifling, made airless by a wheezing fan heater. He’s wearing two sweaters and heavy jogging pants. He is thin and pale but quite dashing, a little like the English comic actor Jeremy Lloyd, a big Roman nose and thin oaty hair. He has a rich voice, almost plummy. The room is elegant, packed with a traveller’s treasures, framed by large paintings, giving way to a wild garden visited, this particular afternoon, by an inquisitive heron. By his side there are tea and digestives, and remote controls. By the controls a large black metal box containing his pills. Sam the dog has a noisy nightmare on the sofa opposite.
I was fourteen when I first got picked up by a man in London. In order to get to and from school I had to go to London on the train and change, and on one of these train changes I had gone to the toilet on Waterloo and got picked up by some bloke. I was somewhere between fourteen and fifteen when I went into Piccadilly Circus toilets one day and followed a chap out who seemed quite nice and he turned round to me and said, ‘Are you rent?’ I thought it must be some sort of slang for ‘Are you queer?’, so I said yes. He said, ‘Well so am I, so there’s no way then is there?’
He realised that I was naïve and took me off to coffee at Swan and Edgar’s and told me that he was a rent boy and explained what all that meant and I was transfixed. He lived in Earl’s Court he told me, and that sounded terribly exotic. But I went with him to Earl’s Court and he lived in this terrible hole of a flat with about eight other rent boys.
But it became, this flat which was one of the most dreadful places I’ve ever seen, became like a second home to me really. During school holidays for the next few years and with the other kids – we were all teenagers – I used to sort of do rent, as they say. It was wonderfully naïve and childish. It was basically wanking off old men in the staff bathrooms at the Regent’s Palace Hotel. You got a tenner for it and then you went off to the James Bond movie in the evening. The rent boys got into the few nightclubs that there were for free. This is about 1972–3. I certainly didn’t feel like a prostitute, not that I would have cared if somebody had said I was.
I finished my schooling and my mother split up with this second husband and I wanted very much to live in London.
I had a year between school and university, but I didn’t want to continue doing the rent. I wanted to make it a bit more legit and so I wrote four letters: to the Tate, to the Royal Academy, the zoo and to Buckingham Palace asking for work. I said anything would do, and they all wrote back and said no, all except for Buckingham Palace which wrote back and said: ‘Well we might have something, come and talk to us.’
And I got a job as a sort of glorified office boy, working under the master of the household, and I had a year that I could never have imagined, it was just fantastic. Wherever She went I went, and I met her every day and sort of glammed around and had absolutely nothing to do all day except putting a couple of things in a file. I was just a clerk, but I had an office of status which always amused me and I just swanned around. I mean there I was in Buckingham Palace... I used to do things like going and organising the private little details of the royal family’s life, so I’d go off to Harrods in one of the cars with a driver and be shown up to the VIP suite. I’d choose binoculars or something ridiculous and take them back to the Palace and get the OK or not.
We would shoot off to Windsor for the weekend and then we would go off to Sandringham for a few weeks and maybe Balmoral and then be on the yacht and nobody actually seemed to have anything to do. There must have been a few people working terribly hard but nobody else did, and we all spent the time being drunk, jumping in and out of bed with each other.
It’s quite rare to meet somebody who isn’t gay at the Palace. Office staff tended not to be quite as gay as the footmen and under butlers and kitchen people. I remember the very first night I spent with the royal household, it was in August 1976 and we travelled up on the train, the whole royal entourage to Balmoral. The weekend before I had thought, ‘Oh my goodness, going to the deepest, darkest Scottish highlands for twelve weeks, there won’t be any sex at all, ghastly.’ So I’d had a bit of a binge that weekend in London. I arrived at King’s Cross to meet the train, that was when I really met all the staff for the first time. Two hundred and fifty of us travelling north, and I just looked and it was like some sort of huge gay convention. By the time the train left the station I realised I was in for a ball.
So I had a wonderful year with them, and then they asked me if I’d like to stay on a second year because it was her Jubilee, and I thought it would be great and it was. But during that year I realised something. I had sort of been going to do medicine as a career, and I’d realised I wasn’t a scientist. The whole medicine thing was one of those childhood things where whenever anybody asked it was, ‘Oh Rupert’s going to be a doctor.’ So I didn’t go to medical school, instead I decided I’d better go to New York, get out of it because I didn’t have a clue what to do.
His partner, a BBC film maker, comes into the room. They’ve been together for 13 years. He’s off to South Africa on a business trip. He says: ‘I’ve made a will, Rupert, very rough, just in case anything happens to me. It’s been so long since I made my last one. It’s really about what happens to the house. Here.’ He hands him a handwritten sheet of A4, both sides covered. ‘I’ll leave it on my desk upstairs. ‘ A little later his taxi comes. They kiss goodbye. ‘See you soon,’ Rupert says. ‘Do phone.’
I arrived in New York in 1978 with no money. I think I had a couple of hundred quid at the most for the summer. I had one telephone number of somebody I didn’t know at all, a friend of a friend of a friend. I spent the first night in this dreadful dump. On the second night I phoned this telephone number and this chap was extremely nice and helpful and he said, ‘Oh I’ll show you the Village tonight.’ During that evening we bumped into some friends of his and we went back to one of them. He was called Bob, and it was clear that Bob was a very, very successful young designer and had this spectacular loft apartment. The next day Bob contacted me and invited me to dinner and there and then said he was going off, away for the summer, and did I want his apartment? Well of course I said yes, but then it turned out to be much more than his apartment.
He also had a wonderful house on Fire Island in the Pines. He used to fly me out each weekend, and he and I became terribly close, non-sexually actually. He was round about forty, twenty years older than me. He had come from nothing and had made a huge amount of money and he just quite obviously loved spoiling me. He loved doing things like, he’d phone up and, it’s all so ridiculous, he’d phone up and say, ‘Look out the window,’ and there’d be a limo. He’d say, ‘Get in it,’ and then it would take me off to the sea plane. He would introduce me to all sorts of other famous designers that were around on the Island at that time. I had a summer like I couldn’t believe. Like everybody else, I fucked my way stupid round the nightclubs and the bars and the bathhouses and everywhere else.
There were gays on Fire Island for twenty, thirty years before, but it felt very much as though it had only just become chic four or five years earlier. I got the impression that Halston was just building his fantastic place, and Warhol had just built his amazing place and there was a sense that it was all happening. Everybody was somehow somebody. Suddenly people would turn up on your deck and it would be, that bloke Cousins, the figure skating guy and Nureyev was around, and there was all this sort of stuff.
All of these beautiful grey shingle beach houses with these huge decks in amongst all this greenery... The routine of the day was to get up late and then you probably had staff who prepared everything for you, so we got up around lunchtime and then you did drugs and doing drugs was a big part of being there. You sunbathed all afternoon and in the evening they all had these silver foil things they stuck under their chins. Suntans were very important. Nobody went in the water, nobody swam. I always thought that was very odd.
Teatime you went to the club, back near where the little boats came in, and you then went to the dance. After the dance you slowly crawled back, still drugged out of your heads, back to your houses, had dinner and then after dinner you all went back to the bar, danced some more and then rather than going home you went to this area of scrubland where everybody was fucking everybody, and so you fucked a few people and then you went home to bed.
I couldn’t believe the scene in New York either. I’d only been there for a very few nights and I met somebody in a bar and they said they were going to go on to the Mineshaft. Now I’d heard of the Mineshaft when I was in London – it had a reputation. I thought, well it’s now or never, so I asked if I could go with him. We walked up and it was very dramatic, because it was in the middle of nowhere in the old meat market section, and we arrived and we went up and they had a big guy sitting on a stool outside the door who sort of checked you out.
The person I’d gone with disappeared on inside and the guy stopped me and he said that he wouldn’t let me in. I asked him why not, and he said, ‘I don’t like what you’re wearing.’ I said, ‘How about if I wasn’t wearing it?’ He made me strip, stark bollock naked at the top of the stairs in the middle of this pitch dark place lit by a few red light bulbs. And then once I’d done that he let me go in and I stood there and I had never seen anything like it: fist fucking, racks, and the stench of piss and poppers and everything else and the heat and the men and the light was all red and I remember thinking standing there, adrenaline thundering round me and thinking, ‘This is evil, this is wrong.’ I remember being very frightened; it seemed so extreme. But later I was thinking about it a lot, and wanking when thinking about it, and the next thing I knew I was back there and within weeks it felt like home.
New York at that time... you professed to liberation by your promiscuity: that was how you said ‘We are different, this is a different lifestyle from the straight one, we’re not pretending it’s the same, we’ll behave as we wish to.’ And I took full part in it.
I never, ever once got clap, I didn’t even get crabs, and how I didn’t I cannot imagine, because back in London I seemed to spend my life in the clap clinic.
Eventually what happened was that I realised that I had to have some sort of work, and I started working for a tiny film promotions company in New York. I started life as a nobody. Peter Yates had made a film called Breaking Away, which the studio, Fox, didn’t know what it was when it was delivered to them. So they handed it to our specialist outfit to try to market it. There was a little screening for the staff of this company to talk about it, and I jumped up and down and said I thought it was fabulous, and my boss turned round and said, ‘Well if you think it’s so fucking good, do something with it.’
I didn’t actually have a clue what I was doing, but we opened it up in a cinema in New York and were lucky: the New York Times went and loved it and suddenly it became a hit [and was later nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film].
Peter Yates mentioned to Ray Stark, the head of Columbia Pictures, that there was this English boy who’d done this, and Stark came to New York and took me out to dinner, asked me about what I was going to do. I said, ‘Why don’t you invite me to Hollywood and let me find out.’ Stark made me the script boy really, you know the filing clerk in the script department. I moved up, and then I came back to England when they wanted somebody to work their London office. So I did that, and I was backwards and forwards for eight years.
In 1982, when I’d been working for Columbia for a couple of years, I came back through New York and I phoned up Bob. I knew he was pleased that I suddenly had this good job and was doing well and was no longer just the little boy who . . . I was staying in a nice hotel. I took him to dinner; I’d never taken him to dinner before.
I took him to the restaurant where he had taken me the very first night we’d met, and that night he said, ‘Do you want to come and stay with me?’ and I remember thinking he’d lost a lot of weight. I said to him, ‘Yeah, OK.’ We’d often slept in the same bed before and nothing had ever happened, but that night we had sex and we had quite extreme sex and I remember feeling odd about it. I remember feeling I wished I hadn’t done it really; in a funny kind of way it betrayed the friendship that we’d had.
Then I went back to London and for whatever reason I didn’t get in touch immediately, and about two or three months later, perhaps slightly later than that, I had a telex from his business partner saying that Bob had died and that in fact he’d been ill for some time and had never really recovered from a trip he’d made to Japan or China or somewhere and that he’d had these terrible stomach problems.
I remember a chill went through me because I knew, I was just starting to hear, about this illness that was happening in New York.
A younger man enters the room carrying supermarket bags. This is Gary, who helps with some of the chores: making lunch, driving him to the hospital. There is also a district nurse who calls round every morning to help him get up and wash. Soon they’ll bring a hoist for the bath and put a frame around the toilet. He’ll get a pair of tongs to help him pick things up from the floor.
I have no real way of proving this but I believe very strongly that I got HIV from Bob on that one night. I certainly don’t harbour any kind of resentment or anything. I spent my night with Bob in January or February 1982 – the dates are very difficult. And then after Easter I had this strange illness, and I was just terribly tired and I felt I just couldn’t cope at all. I went to a guy who was the STD consultant from St Mary’s and I remember going to see him privately in Harley Street one afternoon. He examined me and he suddenly said, ‘You’ve got a fever and you’ve been having night sweats, haven’t you, and you’ve got an enlarged spleen.’ He then suddenly said, ‘I want you to come into St Mary’s this afternoon.’
I was horrified but I knew exactly what he was thinking. I must have started to have read enough about this illness to know what the symptoms were. I refused to go to St Mary’s. He did blood tests on me nevertheless, but of course they didn’t have an HIV test then. I was terrified, absolutely shit scared. Later he told me that the test had come back with an abnormal T-cell count [the standard marker of the body’s immune system] and I imagined I was going to die there and then.
My partner was concerned that I was being so neurotic about all of this and sent me off to a homeopath. The homeopath there and then said, ‘You do not have this Aids thing, you are fine.’ That was of course all I wanted to hear and I remember leaving his surgery and thinking this is fantastic, I’m OK. And I never went back to see the doctor again.
I just got on with my life for the next few years. I was very anxious: I was all too aware that I’d lived in New York in the most dangerous time, and California too. It was all becoming mad – everything you touched seemed to be about Aids. I lived the next years in a strange state of denial and terror. I started to get more and more paranoid, more and more convinced that I had HIV and unable to bear to look... if the newspaper page had the word Aids on it I turned over, I couldn’t bear to see anything or know anything about Aids.
But I did start to be safe. We’ve never had a monogamous relationship, but my promiscuity declined after I met my partner. But both of us did a lot of travelling for work and it was always understood that it was OK to meet people and sleep with people when we were away. Basically what happened for me was that I became terrified of any fucking at all, I just found it a turn off. In America I already knew of or knew a lot of people who were ill and I avoided seeing them. This paranoia continued and I started to know of people in London who were ill and in about 1987–8 I knew somebody quite well who got ill and died.
I suppose it would have been ’89, spring of ’89, when I got what I thought was flu which I couldn’t get rid of, and then I started to get very breathless. I seemed to get worse and the breathlessness got worse, and my brother-in-law is a doctor and my sister insisted that he came and looked at me. He immediately said, ‘You’ve got pneumonia and you’ve got to have this treated.’ Eventually I was so unwell that one evening my sister called an ambulance and I went to the hospital. St George’s.
They didn’t admit me to the Aids ward, they admitted me with suspected psittacosis [a contagious infection common in parrots, sometimes passed on to humans; in 1984 there were 410 reported cases in adults and children]. I had a parrot who was sick, so it made sense. My partner was away in America, but my family were obviously in contact with him and he was furious because nobody was doing an HIV test. He eventually phoned up the sister on the ward from California.
I insisted that I didn’t actually want the test until he was back in London. So I remember one afternoon, they’d put me in a little side room with him and we sat there waiting for the doctor to come and tell us the result. We knew really what the result was going to be. It was just like something out of these awful TV doctor series: the door opened and the registrar came in flanked by a couple of his colleagues and he said, actually he was terribly nice, I like this man, and he said, ‘Rupert, you do have HIV and in all probability you have Aids.’
My feelings then were a total surprise to me, the most fantastic relief I’ve ever felt in my life. He then didn’t stay very long, the doctor. My partner and I, we felt duty bound at that moment to cry, so we did manage to cry for about two minutes and then I realised I didn’t want to cry at all, I was just so relieved, I was so... I just... there was no more pretending. I’d had eight years of whatever it was, of fear and pretence and kidding myself, and suddenly now here I was, and I had to deal with it and I remember over the next few days going into this ridiculous state of elation.
They changed my medication and I was feeling much better, and I can remember everybody coming to visit me, my friends and family, and me sitting there, it must have been a very strange sight for them, being sort of euphoric, totally un-upset about it all. I didn’t cry again about Aids for several months. Very quickly, within a week to ten days, I was well enough to go home.
I was obviously a bit feeble but within months it was almost as if nothing had happened and I was playing squash and running and taking the dog for a walk and working, a mixture of television scripts and freelance articles.
Then my partner was also tested, and he also was found to have Aids and a terribly low T-cell count, twenty or so [a healthy average count is considered to be above 500]. But he was mostly OK too, so I remember for a time saying to people, ‘Aids is nothing like you imagine it, it’s fine.’
I didn’t get ill and I didn’t get tired and I didn’t have night sweats, and I think I almost felt that people who were getting ill with Aids were rather feeble. I was taking AZT [the most commonly prescribed anti-viral drug], but I was taking a very low dose and that was it and then after about a year of taking it, I was reading a lot about it and I decided to stop altogether. Then I was on no medication at all. There was just nothing wrong with me and then suddenly one day, about two years ago, I looked in the mirror and there was a tiny pink patch on the end of my nose.
I tried to convince myself it wasn’t really there. Over the weeks it got a bit darker and eventually I was down seeing the doctor at the hospital and he asked me, ‘What do you think that is on the end of your nose?’ He said he thought it might be Kaposi’s sarcoma. I walked out of the doctor’s surgery and I bumped into this nurse who worked at the hospital who had the tact of a sledgehammer, and she suddenly said to me, ‘Ah Rupert,’ she said, ‘what’s that on the end of your nose?’
So I said, ‘Well he’s just said he thinks it might be KS.’ ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘now we’ll start seeing much more of you.’
I was sent off to the Marsden and sure enough it was KS. Other bits of KS started appearing and for a year it was fine, it was just skin stuff, I had topical bits of treatment. It was a bit embarrassing occasionally when it was on your face but I decided that KS wasn’t really hard to deal with either.
When I was in hospital with PCP [pneumocystis carinii pneumonia] I decided that I was going to be completely open with everybody and so I would tell work-related people and we weren’t going to hide it from any of our friends. We have never, ever had a negative reaction to telling anybody. Everybody has always reacted by being very sad for us or sympathetic or whatever, but nobody has ever felt they can’t deal with us any more or shocked or disgusted, well they might be shocked but never disgusted.
My mother made the decision to talk to her friends about it and now it’s paid off enormous dividends because they have obviously over the years learnt quite a lot about Aids themselves and they really are able to offer her a huge amount of support now that I’m much less well. My mother lives down in deepest Kent, lives in a fairly conventional middle class world down there.
I’ve known so many people where their families haven’t dared tell anybody.
Then I suppose a year or so ago, I played a game of squash, I hadn’t played for a bit and I remember afterwards I had never been so stiff in my life. I knew it wasn’t just like normal stiffness from being unfit; I was stiff for days and days and then I started to feel always a little bit out of breath. Then in the spring they thought that I was getting pneumonia again and treated me for that, then last April [1993] they did a bronchoscopy and they found that I had KS through my lungs.
I was told by my consultant I should recognise how serious things had got, and without saying so in so many words he implied that I should make sure I had a good summer; I knew that he didn’t think I would be around by November. Initially the chemotherapy worked really well, but by October it was clear it was working less well. Whenever we walked anywhere I kept saying ‘You’ve got to slow down.’ I found myself in the afternoons just wanting to not do much. I’d go to the supermarket and carry the bags and realise that I was pretty out of puff. I also had some terrible pains in my gut and in November I went into hospital with CMV [cytomegalovirus, a virus belonging to the herpes group].
By the time I came out a month later, things had changed very dramatically. In the hospital I was no longer well enough to get from my bed in the hospital to the loo; I just sat on the loo almost in tears, trying to get my breath again. I came home and I suddenly found that all I could do was sit on the sofa. At night I was determined to get to the bedroom upstairs but it was a real fight. I began to wonder what the hell was going to happen.
I remember saying to one of the nurses, ‘My fear now is dying of suffocation.’ I could just see my breathing getting worse and worse, and it was happening so fast, so quick day by day. Then I’d heard about this new drug which they were using at the Kobler Centre in a very narrow trial. My consultant at St George’s said there was some way in which they could make an application for the drug on compassionate grounds. It was very expensive. I don’t know why but I had this obsession that this was the drug that I needed. I am now using it once a fortnight as a form of chemotherapy. It has very many of the same effects of normal chemotherapy, a feeling of nausea and unwellness for several days, but it has helped me a great deal. But I’m very breathless still, and if I got up now and went into the kitchen, I’d be out of puff. I have very bad KS; while the lung thing was happening the KS just suddenly blew up in my groin and my leg here and there. The whole of this thigh is just solid KS.
I take thirty tablets a day. I resent all of them. They discovered I had MAI as well [mycobacterium avium-intracellulare, an aerobic bacteria, another AIDS indicator condition], and so I take three lots of antibiotics every day. I take anti-sickness tablets. I take Acyclovir [an antiviral herpes treatment]. I take eight tablets of dihydrocodeine a day. What other ones? I’m probably missing out some; I just seem to take tablets all the time and I have a box here which is just filled with my tablets, and I’ve got a bag behind there which is just packed. I go to the hospital probably seven or eight times a week, five times for radiotherapy and two or three times for other things. I suspect I’ll be dead by the summer.
I’ve talked a lot about dying with family and with friends. I go through different periods of feeling wonderfully enlightened and calm and then the next day hopeless and neurotic and depressed, but depression isn’t the dominant feature. Shortly after I got ill, to my horror I could actually feel this illness attacking my body. But I felt that’s all – I didn’t feel it was killing me as a person.
I’m racked sometimes with guilt about it because I feel I’m inflicting huge amounts of pain on my family and close friends through this. I’m going home to my mum this weekend with my brother and I know she will be terribly brave with me about my not being well and finding it hard to move around her house and things, but I know that it’s agony for her.
However politically correct I try to be, it’s impossible not to feel that this was self-inflicted. People get furious with me when I say this. I was talking to a couple of people from the Terrence Higgins Trust the other day who were livid, saying ‘How can you say that? That’s what we’re fighting against, to try and stop people feeling that this is our fault.’ When I say self-inflicted, I’m not making a judgement, it’s just that there is no denying that it was my lifestyle that led to this event.
In September 1991 he wrote an article for the Guardian that provoked howls of outrage. He did not write specifically about his own life or illness, but about the ‘inbuilt fatalism to being gay’. He reasoned that, unable to reproduce, gay men were self-destructive, ‘living for today because we have no tomorrow’. It was a passionate piece, roaming the London clone scene, surveying the damage. At first, he says, gay men changed their lifestyles, lived in fear. But now fear was giving way to acceptance and gay men were again returning to the clubs, ‘no longer in search of liberation but increasingly in what, terrifyingly, we are coming to see as our fate’. There were pickets at the Guardian offices; Derek Jarman held up the article in fury. Haselden was putting the cause back years, the letters said. ‘How dare he speak for the rest of us!’
I was very concerned about a number of young friends that I had who were finding great thrills in not having safe sex, night after night in the clubs. And I felt that gay liberation had, as I said, got stuck in the liberation phase. Unlike feminism and race issues which had moved on beyond that, in the face of Aids we had retreated to the ghetto and to the support structures that it supplied. We seem to not have any clue of a future and nobody seems to be discussing the future, everybody’s so busy coping with this awful present of illness everywhere. I felt we continued to only offer one lifestyle up for inspection, which was the lifestyle of the ghetto, boys in blue jeans and T-shirts running off to the clubs and the discos, and that we were failing to reveal the range of lifestyles that gays live.
Not until the doctors and the carpenters and everybody else would stand up as doctors and carpenters and say, ‘Here we are and this is me,’ would we ever truly become liberated. I think that in the face of Aids we were embarrassed to do that. Aids has been a very retarding force for gay liberation.
There is another side to that: I have the highest respect for the way the gay community has responded to Aids. The fact that it has the profile that it has and that it has the understanding and the acceptance and the government money is a real testament to what gays have managed to do.
I was taken aback by the force of the anger. They called me ‘self-loathing’, which is nonsense; I’m proud to be gay. I got the most bizarre calls. I got one call: ‘Is that Rupert? This is the Lesbian and Gay Switchboard. We’re just phoning you up vis-à-vis your article. We had a meeting and discussed the fact that you could only possibly have written an article like that if you were seriously depressed and we were phoning to offer you support.’
I said: ‘I’m furious that you’re doing this, I’m not depressed, it’s what I believe.’
I’m quite optimistic in some ways: but we have to move on, move on if we can. Personally I’m pleased I’ve lived as long as I have. It’s been a fullish life, and I’m not too sad that I know it’s almost over. On my medical chart there’s a sticker for every year with Aids and I’ve got five. When we first used to go to [the Aids unit at] St George’s we used to virtually have the run of the place. Now it’s crowded. It’s difficult to get the appointment you want.
At Rupert’s funeral on 16 May 1994, every mourner, and there must have been at least 200, placed a long-stemmed yellow rose in a huge waterless glass vase. The funeral, in St Paul’s Church in Clapham Old Town, was suffused with Monteverdi and incense. The service was taken by Malcolm Johnson, who knew Rupert well and had discussed this day with him at great length. Shortly before he died, Rupert had told him that he felt like a man all set to go on holiday, bags packed, but still waiting for the taxi. His mother spoke about her boy, about his charm and kindness and love. A friend sang the same song Frankie Valli sang after the death of Valentino. A man read Siegfried Sassoon. And his partner spoke, about their 13-year relationship and about an archway they had designed together for their garden. Shortly before he died, peering from a window, Rupert saw him lay a hollowed stone in the archway: the stone contained some of his possessions. These included a Biro to complete his long-promised autobiography, some holistic treatment to counteract the effects of chemotherapy, a condom, a box of matches from the Stonewall bar in New York, a coin commemorating the wedding of Charles and Diana and a tin soldier from his childhood. And then we all left, back for tea and more tears at his house, to the room where only a few weeks before Rupert had sat up and talked of a vanishing world.
Nine months later, on 14 February 1995, Rupert’s partner Nigel Finch also died of Aids. His funeral took place in the same church. Finch worked on the BBC arts and culture series Arena, and was responsible for many of its most memorable programmes. He died shortly after completing a highly acclaimed film about Stonewall, the rebellion considered to be the beginning of modern gay liberation.
The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of Aids by Simon Garfield is published today by Faber & Faber
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