Margaret

“Thank god somebody invented the remote control,” thought Margaret, 60, sitting at home in 1987. It was a big black remote kept in a plastic cover with fake fur on the underside. Andrew, the youngest of her five kids, had given it to her the Christmas before last. Her other kids had laughed when she unwrapped the silly furry present. So had her two sisters, but Margaret thought it very practical. “This blessing is worth protecting,” she said to herself, aloud, after switching off the ad, yet again.

“A woman can’t watch Sale Of A Century in peace anymore, damn it,” she said. Margaret rarely cursed. She felt attacked, as though the Grim Reaper was coming for her. Margaret’s eldest son was HIV positive. The image of Death claiming children and grandmas with bowling balls was too much. She’d wept the first time she saw the ad, now she refused to let it into her home.

“It made me feel as though my son was contaminated and dirty,” says Margaret, twenty years later. “He’s still alive, though,” she says. “He takes medication and looks after himself. He looks after me too. He hasn’t been knocked over yet.”

Jan

Jan, 42, used to dream a lot. He dreamt of travelling, of living abroad, falling in love and being accepted. Australia is a long way from Munich. He lives in Sydney with his boyfriend, Jamie, in a small apartment where they like to throw parties for their many friends. Jan has achieved his dreams. And he misses them.

He misses the quiet, safe space his dreams provided, his parallel world of endless possibility and fantasy. “I feel condemned to the present,” he says.

“Sometimes Jamie and I talk about buying a house together. But then I think, fuck, how long will he be able to live there? Why pay for something that will never be his – never be ours?”

Jamie is HIV positive. He takes anti retro-viral drugs, but his viral load is high. Jan and Jamie are both aware of his fragile mortality. “I already grieve his death, sometimes,” says Jan. “It’s horrible and I feel guilty. I have to live in the present to avoid living with death. The future makes me sad.

“My life is going to change dramatically one day. That used to excite me. Now it scares the hell out of me. I feel like all my dreams are slipping through my fingers, and they’re like water. I can’t grab them.”

Angelica

A word was written on her wrist.
The needle pierced her smooth brown skin through the dot of the letter ‘i.’ Angelica, 26, watched as the syringe vacuumed the blood from her body. She didn’t flinch.

She was already grieving two mortalities. Love. Anger. Bewilderment. Fear. Her feelings were exhausted. The needle might have been a mosquito.

Johnno looked at the tattoo and asked what it meant.

“It’s something I never want to lose,” she said.

Angelica loved her boyfriend. They’d lived together for three years, in an apartment in Sydney’s inner city. She never suspected he was bisexual, never thought to use a condom. The pill was easy and sex was great. “I’m HIV positive,” he told her one night.

Johnno looked at her arm again, his green eyes teary, and pressed the word with cotton wool. “Faith.”

Johnno

“Sorry I’m late,” says Johnno. I moved house on the weekend and I had a bit of a bender. I’m living with one and a half prostitutes.”

It’s a good introduction.

We sit in a café on Oxford Street near the community health clinic where Johhno works as a nurse. “There wasn’t any one moment I can think of,” he says. “It was more a process of realisation. I grew up near St Maries – I was a Westy – and I got engaged right after I left school. I only called it off two months before the wedding. I had to. I kept hanging around men’s toilets at pubs. I never went to any gay bars because, you know, if you go there, you’re gay. But in the gents at the local, you just liked sucking cock.

“I can’t believe that was 20 years ago. You know what’s really amazing, though?” he says. “I’m 39 and I’m still HIV neg. I can still see the Grim Reaper ads so clearly. They scared the hell out of me.”

Most of last year Johnno juggled his career as nurse and councillor with an addiction to crystal meth. “I was really lost,” he says. “It speeds everything up. An hour feels like ten minutes, and it makes you horny as hell. I just wanted sex.”

Johnno says he can talk under water. I believe him. He’s a handsome bloke, six foot something, broad shoulders, slim waist, furry chest, well groomed. He greets a dozen people on the street in the course of an hour. He happily sweeps you up into a world he knows is wild and wacky. “I love being me,” he laughs cheekily.

“I tried a lot of really kinky stuff on ICE. Leather, whips, fantasy, you name it. But I always made sure. There had to be a condom. I’ve had to be really disciplined. When I was in a long term, monogamous relationship a few years ago, I had to practice masturbating with a condom to feel the same pleasure. My partner was HIV positive.”

Johnno sees and hears a lot of first hand accounts of how HIV/AIDS affects people’s lives, and how people relate to the disease.

“A lot of young gay guys think it’s like having diabetes, or any other medically treatable disease. A lot of them actually seem relieved when they get infected. They want to have open relationships and enjoy sex. They want to feel accepted. There’s a common saying in some parts of the gay community, ‘planting the seed’, or ‘give me your seed.’ There are ‘gifting parties’ where HIV negative men go to get infected. It’s like an initiation ceremony.”

Johhno says sometimes he feels sexually discriminated against for being HIV negative. “I was first knocked back by a man in a bar earlier this year because I’m HIV neg. It’s happened to me again since then,” he says.

It would be unfair to suggest this relationship to HIV/AIDS is common to gay men, but it’s a growing trend, says Johnno, and something that concerns him. “I tell so many young guys who come in for a check up to be careful. A lot of them are on ICE. It changes personalities and makes you do things you wouldn’t normally do. Sometimes they arrive high to the clinic, and you can just tell. They’re really flirtatious. Some of them pull their dicks out, and of course afterwards they’re really embarrassed.”

Johhno agrees that the Grim Reaper adds had a big impact in Australia, and suggests that something similar is needed now. “I’m sure I’d be HIV positive now if it weren’t for those adds,” he says.

We pay for our coffees, and I ask a final question. “What do you mean, exactly, that you live with one and a half prostitutes?”

“Oh. One of them’s only part-time, God bless her.”

Frankie

Frankie, 22, sat in the sterile little space while Johnno strapped her arm tightly, preparing to draw blood. “Guess what my porn name is,” he said, grinning cheekily… “Slugo Monfarvel.” They both laughed. Johnno was a tall, masculine nurse with a Merv Hughes moustache. And he was a queen. Frankie relaxed, and thought again about what the doctor had just told her. The rate of HIV infection in Morocco is very low. She would probably be fine.

Morocco was the last stop of a three-month European trip with her best friend, but when she arrived home, Frankie spoke of little else: the four o’clock prayer call that brought Marrakesh to its knees, the acrid smells of camel leather and tanneries, the laughter of children charging for photos in narrow, moon-blue streets.
And Sam.


Sam who looked like Ben Harper and spoke four languages. Frankie had spent two unforgettable weeks with him, and fallen in love.

In Sydney the waves and traffic stopped. Life revolved around the next SMS, next email, next phone call. Old photos blue-tacked over her iron bed-frame were replaced with new ones. Life had taken on new meaning. Frankie felt loved, desired, wanted.

Soon the time between calls increased. Sam became less reliable. Frankie began to feel the distance between them in her belly more than she had on any map. He lived in Melbourne, he said, he’d be coming home soon. He had an amazing opportunity, 3000 per cent profit on the saffron. He already had a buyer. “The money’ll be yours too, babe. It’ll be ours.”

Frankie sent him $1500. Two weeks later she made an appointment at the clinic. She felt stupid, abused, used, disappointed, angry and scared. Tears followed tears. Always the same wet path down her face. Her best friend thought Sam had been high on cocaine. “I don’t know how many women I’ve had,” he’d said one night, and Frankie realised how little she knew about him. Only what they’d shared, and it still seemed so much.

Could it really have been an act? He’d said so too… it was love, a connection. They’d both felt it. Two weeks condensed into one night in Frankie’s mind. Pleasure turned to anguish. Nobody could have resisted. A tiny town in the desert, a rooftop bedroom.

The pregnancy test came out clear. Now she wondered if she could ever have a baby at all. Three months to wait. Three fucking months. And the waves crashed again at curl-curl, the traffic crawled past the apartment at peak-hour. The phone sat still.