I’ve got so many photographs of my old friends, of course they were young when they passed - I wonder what they would have been like today. Life has been a bit strange without them, because they all brought something different into my life, but they’re not there anymore. Families are strange things at times like that, they come and take over - boyfriends and friends are left to the side. Most of my friends that died, their families made sure that AIDS was never mentioned. There was always something else when you went to the funerals - they always died of something else like pneumonia or whatever - heart failure. It was never pronounced that they had AIDS. Most families just brushed it under the carpet and didn’t want anyone else to know. I always talked to my family and friends about it, not to everyone, but I don’t hide it.

When I was very young I used to get bullied a lot - lots of name calling. I haven’t been called names directly against my sexuality for many years, but at the time I suppose these things are hurtful. But gay men have adapted over the years, whenever we’re called hurtful names we adapt them, it’s like people used to call us queer, so we opened clubs called “Queer nation”, we put “Queer on our T-shirts, we would say “We’re queer and we’re here and we’re staying.” We just adapted these names and then they weren’t hurtful anymore and I suppose we just kept doing that. 

I never really knew my father as a father. He was just this sort of bossy figure, more of a boss. He never really accepted my sexuality. He found it very difficult when I told him I was going to die of this virus. Funnily enough, years later he actually really got on with my boyfriend Martin, and I sort of got to know him a bit better over the last few years of his life, but I sort of regret I didn’t have a bit more of a family feeling growing up. For example he never touched me in a sort of way like a father might touch his children - like lifting me up.