It's a Sin- HIV/ AIDS pandemic

Some programmes have a lasting effect on you and It’s a Sin was one of those. Why? Because I was born in the 80s and to me that seems recent and yet I have been completely ignorant to how it was for people who were Gay and had AIDS in the 80s. I know it has been so raw and painful for some of friends having to relieve those memories as the programme has triggered this. I often wonder who choses what we study in schools and why. I never learnt about the British Raj, how Wales became part of the U.K. or the pandemic of AIDS. It’s part of the things that the U.K. got ‘wrong’ yet instead of teaching it in schools it’s been buried under the carpet. How are we ever meant to learn from those mistakes if we don’t revisit history? Watching It’s a Sin echoed what is happening now with COVID, the only difference, is that it was seen as the gay plague, men who had to quarantine against their will and for no reason. If AIDS were a disease that primarily happened to straight men, it would have been sorted out in no time. How could society turn they’re back knowing everyone in town was just disappearing and why?

I have been ignorant as I felt for a gay person so ‘come out’ meant that they might be disowned from their family but it was so much more than that. The gay community were shunned and made to feel ashamed and for what? Just because they loved someone who happened to be the same sex as them. For most of the Eighties and a considerable portion of the Nineties, gay men were Britain’s enemy within! They were targeted by the police as physical intimacy was deemed imprisonable under the age of 21, yet heterosexuals could be intimate from the age of 16, a five-year age difference! They couldn’t adopt or serve in the military, and there were no rights for partners who had been together for many years as legally recognised partnerships between them was decades away. It couldn’t be taught in schools as it was seen to promote or encourage people to be gay. They were scandalised by the tabloid newspapers, ostracised from the church, invisible in competitive sports and vilified on television. The shame was doubled down on anyone with Aids back then. The lies that families told their neighbours, friends, kith and kin to disguise an already stigmatised way to die. The funeral directors who refused to bury the bodies. The hospitals that sent them packing from their loved ones’ wards.

How can people, even today claim it’s a life choice. If it was, you wouldn’t choose to live a life like that. How can talking about the LGTBQ community influence someone to be gay or a couple of the same sex raising a child will confuse them about their gender. People who think like that have no clue. My daughter has three grandads. Grandad Ashok, Shaun Taid and Uncle Paul. However, the last few months she has come to realise that Uncle Paul isn’t an uncle as he is not the same age as Uncle Nitin but the same age as the other two grandads in her life so now she says he is my grandad too. Has it confused her? No. Has it encouraged her to be a lesbian? No (Not that it would matter) She hasn’t even asked why both Shaun and Paul are not married to women but to each other. To her it’s ‘normal’ and it is as it does not define them as a people. For her it’s two men who love her very much and unconditionally. I want my daughter to love and see beyond colour, race, gender, religion and class. However, I do think that when taboo subjects on HIV is talked about just like another illness which is manageable, that slowly chips away at the stigma.”