It's a Sin - AIDS in the 80's - Real life examples

[smellywellies9]

I have just finished watching It's a Sin and it's really hit me hard, I was born early 80's and had no idea how AIDS victims were treated back then, I feel like this has almost been hidden from us.
I would be really keen to hear some real life stories from people older than myself who lived through this. Things that have shocked me:
They were imprisoned in hospital wards with no one allowed in or out.
Homosexuals were not allowed a mortgage in the 80's and possibly 90's?
People use to destroy all cups etc that homosexuals had touched for fear of catching it.
The general ignorance from the government on this.
The attitude from the general public, were people really that cruel??

I though they used to use entrapment as part of the sporadic attempts to arrest gay men?

From wiki so probably BS :) but... and they definitely did entrapment in the States to arrest

1952 – Sir John Nott-Bower, commissioner of Scotland Yard began to weed out homosexuals from the British Government[71] at the same time as McCarthy was conducting a federal homosexual witch hunt in the US.[72] During the early 1950s as many as 1,000 men were locked into Britain's prisons every year amid a widespread police clampdown on homosexual offences. Undercover officers acting as 'agents provocateurs' would pose as gay men soliciting in public places. The prevailing mood was one of barely concealed paranoia.[citation needed]

I was born in 1985, so I’m now 35. When I was about 9 or 10 my dad took me to see a theatre production of Two Weeks With The Queen, a play adapted from the Morris Gleitzman young adult novel. I’ve never forgotten it and it helped me learn a lot at that young age. I’d recommend the book, OP. I haven’t watched It’s a Sin yet, but I want to.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Weeks_with_the_Queen

How? If you were a gay man and were or had been in a relationship with another man, you could be arrested

Where are you getting this from? Men were arrested in public bathrooms and on Hampstead Heath, there were vast numbers of people in relationships who had no fear of the law, it was cultural condemnation that was the real issue. Nobody was arrested for having been in or being in a relationship.

People need to stop saying things like "being gay was a crime". For one thing you're forgetting every single gay woman that ever existed.

What you have stated is, frankly, bollocks. The AIDs epidemic was a major factor leading to being gay no longer being taboo. Only very ignorant/prejudiced people would think they could catch AIDs from a gay person. There was a lot of sympathy for those people whose health was ravaged by AIDs. There was a massive public health campaign at the time too.

This is yet another example of someone younger thinking the 70s and 80s were the dark ages. It wasn't.

Wowfudge

After doing a lot of research on this topic in the last few days and hearing how accurate it was portrayed in It's a Sin and reading a lot of the posts above, I believe your views on this are hugely incorrect.
I, like you, was very ignorant on this topic also, hence why I asked the question on this thread. I would recommend doing some more research.

I lived through it, and I agree with wowfudge in the main. Do I need to do more research as well?

ODFOD - you don't know what you are talking about. I've got gay friends of my own age and we had gay relatives of older generations. And we knew they were gay and accepted them although some people were prejudiced and didn't. I was old enough to fully understand the public education programme of the time and read articles about AIDs patients and their treatment in, I think it was Lighthouse, hospices.

The people who thought you could catch AIDs from using or touching something a gay person had used or touched were idiots or prejudiced. A bit like today's Covid deniers.

It wasn't just people contracting AIDS from sexual contact there were children and adults with conditions such as hemophilia getting it from infected blood transfusions. DH lost 2 teenage friends that way.

Btw - if your research is based on Wikipedia, you need to up your game and do some proper research. Read actual news articles of the time, watch actual TV programmes, etc.

@ThisIsNotARealAvo

There was definitely issues with getting mortgages or life insurance if you had had an HIV test.

Yes, my friend who's now in his late 50s had to have an AIDS test prior to getting a mortgage

Arthur Ashe the US tennis player died of an AIDs related illness due to contracting HIV from blood transfusions during heart surgery. Blood donations were screened due to lack of knowledge of HIV and AIDs. It's one of the reasons anyone who has a blood transfusion can't give blood today.

Erm we haven’t just been using wiki, which is the reason for the links I provided eg to interviews with people affected at the time as well as contemporary newspaper articles. I don’t doubt you and your circles were accepting, but the vast majority of the country was not in various degrees of severity, as evidenced by the legislation in place and fact you could be fired for being gay. The reason the teacher at our school was fired was because him being gay was seen as a “perversion” as if it made him a paedo. I would hazard a guess that acceptance varied by area at least. I’m aghast at how gay men were treated but it seems that yes in the 70s and 80s you could still suffer prejudice for being gay, as you can now.

Btw... I intentionally excluded gay women! Other than the Radclyffe Hall novel, did most of society even believe women could be gay or bi? I think they wrote it off, and were pretty shocked/ confused by those who didn’t conform. A sign of the ignorance at the time

A sign of the ignorance at the time

Which time are you referring to?

If anyone thinks the Bloomsbury group or small numbers in urban/ affluent areas are representative of a whole country, I’ll choke

I was asked in 2010 when buying life insurance if I’d ever had an HIV test. I was pregnant and of course had been so I explained that and they told me to say no...I was pretty horrified they were still asking in that day and age.

Wowfudge

How do you explain this article about Freddie Mercury that was printed in the Daily Mirror? Surely this is not just representative of a tiny proportion of the population??

www.thepoke.co.uk/2019/02/18/matt-lucas-shared-daily-mirror-column-day-freddie-mercury-died-shows-just-far-weve-come/

So you're talking 1907-1925? Well yes, a lot of people would have been fairly naive about lesbianism, but honestly it wasn't as little understood as you think. There were single women of a certain age all over the country, households of 2 women who "shared a little flat to save money". You'd be surprised what people knew but pretended not to, and how many people lived somehwat openly as such things just weren't mentioned.

How do you explain this article about Freddie Mercury that was printed in the Daily Mirror? Surely this is not just representative of a tiny proportion of the population??

The late 80's version of Piers Morgan. You surely don't think he was any indication of the majority of the population?

You’re really into the idea that most people turned a blind eye/ were accepting of gay people? Not in this area I’m afraid, maybe yours and you must live in a paradise!

I mean all time, pretty much to the millennium (and now in some ways). The only period I’ve formally studied on it is Georgian England when it wasn’t fun trying to be in a gay relationship, unless you were a duke basically. For numerous religious and social reasons I don’t think most of the country were accepting, even if there were a small amount of “safe haven households” as you describe. The very fact these women couldn’t just live openly, couldn’t marry, is evidence of the fact they weren’t properly accepted.

Anyway I must say the 80s and before are so interesting for this history! They never taught us this stuff in school, hope they do things differently now

I was born in 1975 and am from a small town. I remember the adverts, my mum just said it's a disease that you have to wear a condom to prevent and told me what a condom was. There were a few gay people and cross dressers in my town / extended family. People knew them and talked about it. They were talked about as eccentrics. It wasn't all secrecy. Yes people knew about lesbians too People knew celebrities like Kenneth Williams or Larry Grayson were gay. It wasn't out in the open the same, but people would say 'they are two bachelors you know' or 'he lives with his mum'. So there was shame and prejudice, but people weren't thick!

Watching Philadelphia is shocking now. I remember seeing it at the cinema when it came out. I cried all through the credits. But it seemed normal. I watched it recently and was shocked how awful the prejudice was then. Society feels different now, but at the same time that doesn't mean all of society was homophobic then.

I guess it's similar to misogyny then and now. I had to wear a skirt in my first job, benny hill was on tv and thought of as suitable for kids, there were page three girls up on the walls everywhere. It wasn't that everyone was sexist, just more sexism bubbling away everywhere.

I just dislike the idea that everyone before some arbitrary year was ignorant and prejudiced. That's simply not true. OF course lots of people were, but lots of people weren't.
Gay people have always existed, we've always been a part of the population. We've always bought houses, had jobs, had families. Been accepted by some and not by others. I think you'd be surprised if you actually knew some real life stories from the past.

Freddie Mercury died in 1991. I was at uni at the time and remember the news of his death very clearly. That Daily Mirror article is the work of a columnist. They are paid to spout controversial opinions and generate interest, discussion and sales. Yes, others will have agreed with him, however huge numbers of people will have been appalled by it at the time. We have freedom of
speech and freedom of the press in the UK. Equally appalling opinions and articles are still published today on all sorts of topics. You only have to look at Katy Hopkins and some of anti-immigration views espoused by some UKIP and Brexit supporters.

www.google.com/search?q=bbc+news+freddie+mercury+death&oq=&aqs=chrome.0.35i39i362l3j46i39i362j35i39i362...5.-1j0j7&client=ms-unknown&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#

Watch this OP in the interests of balance.

OP, "Don't Ever Wipe Away Tears Without Gloves" a Swedish three part drama was better, in my opinion.