This time of year is always a time for reflection. I lost my best friend to an AIDS defined illness in 1998, Steve died four years after being diagnosed with HIV. I think about him all year round but there is something about the collective echo of remembering those lost to this disease that brings comfort and anger in equal measure for me. Comfort from the love of those who share in the experience and the fight, anger towards the prejudice and stigma which added to the already existing fear of diagnosis.
More than anything now though, I feel hope.
Steve remains my North Star, a fiercely kind and clever man, energetic and moral. I often still ask myself ‘what would Steve do’. We were from different worlds, he from family wealth and the generations of medics stretched behind him, a line he would break as he chose, to the bewilderment of his parents, to walk away from rather than risk ‘being discovered’. I was rooted in the determination of the working class. He spoke well, I spoke in my Midlands accent where the alphabet only has 24 letters and H’s and T’s are generally absent. He was almost 8 years older than me, wiser and a visionary. He was a storyteller, he spoke with an unfiltered truth but was never critical or hurtful.
Yet his truth was hidden, until it couldn’t be anymore. I was part of a truth of him he created ‘to protect his family’. I was generally on the scene, and whilst we never lied, we also never challenged the assumption that I was his girlfriend. A truth that was somewhat contradicted by the fact I was a married Mum of three.
As his truth revealed itself, as he was coming to the end of his life, I educated his Mum too late, but in time, for his Dad, his education would come in the form of regret. Steve died on July 4th 1998, with just 4 people knowing all of his truths.
I wonder so often, if Steve was here now. The treatments that made him so ill, are so much better and are truly saving lives would have made his virus undetectable. More than that, PrEP, treatment that stops HIV in the first place and now the availability of Cabotegravir as a long-acting injectable treatment for HV prevention. This was so far from the thought possibilities back in the 90s. I think of all the loves he would have known and all the other people who would have had the joy of being loved by him.
There is no doubting the progress made around HIV, the brilliant science as together we continue the collective action around testing and treatment to stop new transmission of HIV by 2030.
