David Furnish: The inspiring story of those who fought against Aids apathy

A new film shows how far we’ve come in tackling HIV. Yet still it carries a stigma — and many won’t get tested
8 November 2013
WEST END FINAL

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I remember seeing the first reports about a mysterious new disease called Aids on TV when I was a closeted young man in Canada. They started with gaunt, almost skeletal gay men losing hope as fast as they lost weight, and they were followed by clips of fundamentalist preachers, gloating that everything they said had been vindicated. Here, they announced, was God’s judgment on perversion.

As I watched, I backed deeper into the closet, and deeper into despair. Indeed, I ran to the very back of the closet and tried to nail it shut. The illness was gleefully labelled “the gay plague” and victims were treated like lepers in medieval times.

Back then, everybody knew how the story of Aids was going to play out. It was going to rage through gay people and prostitutes and injecting drug addicts across the world, and kill them all. Here was a disease for which there was no cure, killing people who were widely despised. There would be no political action. There would be only loss.

Except that’s not how it turned out. The story of Aids did not turn into a tragedy. It turned into a story about how people overcome tragedy and achieve the seemingly impossible. The most reviled groups in our society demanded action — and they were so successful that if we continue on the current course, we will end Aids in my lifetime, or the lifetime of my sons.

The story of how we got from those gloating fundamentalist preachers to the last days of Aids is told in How to Survive a Plague, the most moving film I have ever seen. Even if you think you have no interest in Aids, it is a story that will show you how to hope, and dream, and fight.

The film opens in New York in despair. Gay men and drug-users are dying in epidemic numbers, their government will not even mention the name of the disease killing them, and the pharmaceutical companies are saying any treatment will be decades away. The government regulatory bodies in the US are insisting on such a slow testing process — taking at least seven years — that they are effectively condemning anybody who is diagnosed with the disease to death. As I watched it, I remembered the terror I had felt as a young man.

A handful of gay men, heterosexual supporters and concerned doctors gathered together. Larry Kramer — the great gay novelist, playwright and activist — told one of the first meetings: “Until we get our acts together, we are as good as dead.”

They formed a group called ACT UP — a cry in the dark. Since nobody was listening to them, they decided they had to make themselves heard.

They stormed the offices of federal regulators and refused to leave until they were listened to. They shut down train stations and thoroughfares throughout the city. They took the ashes of their loved ones, killed by inaction, and threw them on to the White House lawn, crying as the ashes blew into the air: “I love you.”

They were dismissed and laughed at and ridiculed. But then something else happened. People began to listen. The pressure from ACT UP and its affiliate, the Treatment Action Group (TAG), grew into pressure from the wider public. The government was forced to allow faster drug trials and to divert far more money into Aids research.

As a direct result, the first treatments were found — and millions of lives were saved.

This story shows that if we pour all our love and strength into a fight, we can really achieve anything — no matter how improbable it seems at the start. But the dangers confronted by those gay men in Eighties New York are still alive for many people across the world today — including here in London now.

Some 22 per cent of the people who are HIV-positive in Britain don’t know it yet. They don’t get tested because they are afraid of the stigma, the very judgments that were spat at ACT UP. Too often they think that if they have the HIV virus they have done something shameful and disgusting. We can only get to the goal that is tantalisingly within our reach — a world without Aids — if we hose away these last remnants of stigma and prejudice.

As I know from my work with the Elton John Aids Foundation, many of the people carrying the HIV virus in London today are either gay men or recent African immigrants. There are people who would rather remain silent about this because they are worried that it gives fuel to bigots who want to attack and demean these groups.

But How to Survive a Plague shows the right way to respond to bigotry. Don’t deny it. Acknowledge it. Fight it. At the end of this month it is National HIV Testing Week. We need a big national push to get ourselves and our friends tested —without stigma, without shame and without stalling.

As the documentary shows, Peter Staley was a bond trader with J P Morgan on Wall Street until he was diagnosed as HIV-positive in the first wave of the crisis. He was certain he was going to die.

He played a key role in all the activism, not for himself — he was sure it was too late — but for the next generation. He told a conference: “Some day there will be a people alive on this Earth who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease, and that a brave group of people stood up and fought — and in some cases died — so that others might live and be free.”

Peter Staley lived. Peter Staley won. Peter Staley is alive. He survived a plague, and thanks to people like him, millions of others will too.

We should thank them, and follow their example, into the fight against Aids and into our doctors’ surgeries to get tested.

How to Survive a Plague is in cinemas from today. Listings: surviveaplague.co.uk

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