The Virus You Couldn't See

If I ever tested positive for HIV, I was going to tell everyone I'd caught it in a dentist's chair.

I had that worked out in my twenties, in the early 90s, and I carried it around for years like a spare key, ready for a result I never got. What strikes me now is how much planning went into the conversation with my parents, and how little into making sure I never needed to have it. I was more frightened of that virus than of anything in my life, and I hardly ever practised safe sex.

Those two facts lived side by side in me for the whole decade, and I wasn't unusual. Most people I knew danced hard on a Saturday night and carried the fear around with them on Monday morning.

I relied on my eyes. I genuinely believed I'd be able to tell if someone was sick, and that belief was the whole problem. You can see full-blown AIDS. You can't see HIV. Someone can carry it for years looking and feeling perfectly well, and pass it on without knowing. People caught it through one-night stands, through a new lover, through cheating on a partner, and through two people falling deeply in love and trusting each other. There's no shame in any of those, and there was shame anyway. My odds were bad and I was lucky. Plenty of people made the same calculation I did and weren't.

I'm South African, so I watched what it did at home. It went through villages and towns and left a country where a huge share of children were being raised by their grandparents, because the generation in between had died. When Europe and America were still calling it a gay disease, I knew from home that it wasn't. It didn't care who you were. I grew up on the AIDS adverts that ran between the videos on MTV, and people now say they were too harsh and fed the panic. I disagree. They were brutal because the virus was. It moved through communities faster than anyone could talk about it, and by the time a community was ready to talk, it had usually already lost people.

Here's how far fear had got ahead of the facts. In 1992 I was living in Portugal for a while and asked a man I was dating to get tested. His doctor told him I was the one who should be tested, because I was from Africa. That was a medical professional in Europe.

A year later I got talking on a bus to Amsterdam with two gay men from London who had both just found out they were HIV positive. They weren't going to Amsterdam to mourn. They were going to dance, and to have as much life as they could before the world took more of it. We swapped addresses and wrote for a while. I still wonder what happened to them, and I hope they kept dancing.

I understood them completely, because the dance floor was where I'd spent the decade too. If you weren't in those warehouses it's hard to explain. Gay and straight, people who'd never have spoken anywhere else hugged each other and danced for hours and took whatever pills got them through the night. In a decade when everyone was afraid of other people's bodies, it was the one place strangers held each other without thinking twice. When the worst news of your life arrives, you go where you feel most alive.

Nearly thirty years later I wrote a novel set in that world, and when I started on the hospital side of it I expected shelves of material. I found almost nothing. Gideon Mendel's The Ward is one of the very few sets of photographs taken inside a London AIDS ward in those years. The picture everyone knows is Princess Diana shaking a patient's bare hand at the Middlesex Hospital in 1987, and it's famous because it was so rare. Patients didn't want to be seen. Families told the neighbours it was cancer. People died and their deaths were recorded as something else. The Middlesex has since been pulled down, and whole lives went through those wards and left almost no trace.

So when the archive ran out, I went to people.

One man, who with his husband found out he was HIV positive early in 1987, gave me three hours. At that point nothing could hold the virus off for long and a positive result was understood as a death sentence. Both of them are still here. He took me through what he felt and what he did when the result came, in more detail than I'd dared hope for, and with his permission his account became the foundation of the scene where Steven finds out.

A nurse who worked on the ward told me about the grief, and then about the laughter: the jokes, the love, the fun in the middle of so much loss. She told me about the women, too. The mothers, sisters and friends who came onto the ward and looked after these men when plenty of other people stayed away.

All of it went into Whole of the Moon, written under my pen name Jessi Morris. Steven studies law during the week and raves at weekends. In 1994 he finds out he's positive, and before he can tell anyone he disappears into a two-month bender, warehouse after warehouse, and kisses a beautiful man called Basil on the dance floor one night. Two years later he's on the Broderip ward at the Middlesex, and Basil is there too. The drugs that changed everything arrived in 1996, in time for some people and too late for others.

You can purchase the paperback, ebook and audiobook at https://www.simpaticopublishing.co.uk/jessi-morris