buggery.org

Advert at right from The Star, 4 May 1984. Sydney’s (Australia’s?) first AIDS fundraiser and the genesis of the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation.

I interviewed Bobby Goldsmith’s former partner, Ken Bryan, for a story in PL in 2002:

Bobby’s diagnosis came at a time when HIV-specific support services were non-existent. “There was nowhere to go, there was nobody to talk to,” Ken recalls.

After telling the news to their housemates, “it got very uncomfortable,” so they moved into a place of their own. Their housemates never spoke to them again.

Before long the news of Bobby’s diagnosis spread, and the two had to bear the reaction of a community chilled by fear. “Friends would come in [to the Oxford Hotel, where Ken was now working] and say, more or less, ‘it’s your own fault’,” he remembers. “And I was thinking, ‘what have you been doing, and what are you doing now to make this different?’”

“The fear was the biggest thing, and Bob handled it so much better than I did.”

As Bobby’s health deteriorated, the two had to deal with ignorance on the part of hospital staff, too. “The hospital people wouldn’t put his meals inside. They’d leave them outside and they’d get cold, and I’d get there after work and they’d be sitting there.”

By Bobby’s 38th birthday in March 1984, the doctors admitted there was no more they could do. Bobby didn’t want to stay in the hospital, so he came home to die. By the end of April, Ken realised that he could not manage alone.

“I went into the Oxford one night and there was a group of Bob’s friends there, a couple of guys that I’d only just met really. I said to them, ‘look, I need a hand, I can’t do this on my own, I really need to have some help with this.’” Within a few days a group of friends had formed to care for Bobby.

Then the group realised that they needed money as well. Bobby was increasingly frail and in an upstairs bedroom in a house with a downstairs toilet. They decided to try to raise some cash to buy Bobby a commode and a video player. Terry Patterson, one of the owners of the Midnight Shift nightclub, offered to host a fundraiser.

“And thousands of people turned up,” Ken remembers. “We were just staggered; we just didn’t know how many people would turn up and we raised thousands of dollars.”

We had a bit of a clean up over the weekend and I came across a few nice things which I’ll share over the coming weeks.

Front page from the (now defunct) Sydney Daily Mirror, 21 December 1984.

AN ADVERTISING campaign which says that mosquitos can’t spread the deadly AIDS virus has sparked a major row among experts.

One said that no one was 100 per cent sure that a mosquito which took blood from an AIDS victim could not pass the virus on to the next person it attacked.

• FULL STORY PAGE 3

Those were the days.

Blood test results back today: 361 CD4s, undetectable. Generally good news. My cholesterol level remains a little high (7.0 mmol/l)