Colin Clews woke up one day in March with a cough and immediately started worrying that it was the coronavirus. It was a false alarm, but his fear triggered something awfully familiar. “You ask yourself—if I've got the virus where would I have got it from?” Clews said “How could it be? I've always been careful, how? That is exactly what it was like in the early days of Aids.”
In the 1980s and 90s, Clews was involved with LGBT groups across the UK, including Terrence Higgins Trust and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. In 1983, when Aids was just starting to be talked about in the UK, he ran Gay East Midlands, an LGBT magazine in Nottingham.
These days Clews is a 67-year-old retiree living with his husband in Cambridge, gardening and running his blog, gayinthe80s.com. He’s had friends, gay and straight, reach out to him during the Covid-19 pandemic, worried that it would trigger old memories. “One of the reasons I do the blog," he says, is because he "had this enduring sense it's all going to happen again.”
The Aids crisis and coronavirus pandemic are very different, and lazy comparisons risk downplaying the systematic discrimination against LGBT people that made the former so deadly. But for the thousands of people across the world who lived through the height of the Aids epidemic, it is impossible not to be remembering those years.
In early 1984, Sir Nick Partridge was 28 and living in Amsterdam, immersed in the local LGBT community. He’d been there for almost two years, but as reports of deaths coming out of the US grew increasingly dire, Partridge knew he had to go back to London. He returned to the city and began working on the helplines at Gay Switchboard, providing sexual health advice to worried men. In 1985 he became the first paid employee of Terrence Higgins Trust, now the largest HIV charity in Europe. He then served as the Trust’s chief executive for 28 years.
“For many of those of us who lived through the Aids epidemic, and lost lovers, friends, colleagues, it did change how we thought about death and illness, and reflections of that are coming back to people,” Partridge said. “I certainly know that it's bringing back memories of the loved ones that I lost.”
But the key difference, Partridge said, between Aids and Covid-19, is speed: speed of transmission, speed of symptoms, speed of response. “Those who died early in the HIV epidemic were invisible,” he said. “They died quietly and slowly.” But Covid-19 was quickly spoken about publicly, and was made clear that anyone could catch it—it could be your grandmother, your accountant, or even your prime minister.
“The government responds aggressively to a mainstream pandemic,” Partridge said, “because Covid-19 threatens everyone, including rich people, powerful people, straight people.”
A horrific number of people have died of Covid-19—scientists currently map the death rate to be anywhere from 0.66 to 5 per cent. Though with AIDS, Clewes remembers, "particularly before we knew what caused the virus, it was just—you get this thing and then you die." Partridge is almost matter of fact about it: “I stopped counting the number of funerals I went to, after it got to about 50.”
*** In 1987, Clews moved to Australia and worked as a social worker on the Aids unit at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. It was a Catholic institution so—despite scientific evidence pointing to their benefits—hospital staff were forbidden from giving out condoms, and resorted to distributing them in unmarked brown envelopes. He laughs at the memory—“We could have given them cocaine more easily!”
But it wasn’t funny. The world was still years away from any effective treatments, so all Clews and the staff could do was manage the symptoms of their patients and discharge them, knowing it wouldn’t be long before they were back again. “One of my guys died, on average, about once every two weeks,” Clews said. He worked on the unit for two years before he left, burnt out.
Hospital staff and social workers, not politicians, bore the brunt of the mental burden then, and the same is true today. And with Covid-19, frontline workers take on greater risks too. Those who are lowest valued by the government are now deemed “essential” and asked to put their health on the line, often without the appropriate protective equipment, or appropriate wages.
But the science is inextricable from the politics. It’s not enough to have the answers. There needs to be sufficient resources and the political will.
Nowhere is the link between scientific research and political will clearer than in the early response to the Aids crisis. A test for HIV wasn’t approved for use until 1985, four years after the epidemic was first identified in the United States. But the test was not designed to help the thousands of gay and bisexual men, sex workers and drug users infected. As Time reported in 1985, pressure to develop these initial tests came not from concern for the health of the 9,600 people who had Aids, but rather from fears of HIV in blood donations, which had infected just 142 people.
And even after testing became available, a positive diagnosis was seen as a death sentence. The stigma put people at risk of employment, housing and social discrimination. A 1994 article in the Independent noted that the Terrance Higgins Trust had seen a 68 per cent increase in its housing caseload, with landlords forcing their tenants with Aids onto the street. The stress and poor living conditions would only exacerbate their condition.
Over three decades later, as Covid-19 continues to spread, we are seeing drug trials progress at hyper speed, and billions of dollars poured into research across the world. The investment in businesses, wages and transport, while still lacking in areas, is still mammoth compared to the support provided to those affected by Aids. The crisis has also seen an overwhelming unity in the community response, with mutual aid groups springing up across Facebook. When the NHS launched its GoodSAM app to help people with food and medicine deliveries, they had more than 750,000 sign ups.
“Coronavirus affects everyone: those who are white, those who are straight, those who are rich,” Partridge said, “We are seeing the scale of response I would have wanted for Aids.”
Most frustrating for him, Partridge says, is how the Aids crisis did help build a public health infrastructure to cope with epidemics, which allowed for widespread testing and contact tracing across the UK. But subsequent government cuts to public health funding and local authorities have compromised those systems, he says. So now, when the country needs them most, we aren’t prepared.
“We are seeing the consequences of the austerity that we've been living through over the past 10 years,” Partridge said. His voice stays level, but how does he feel, stuck at home, watching the same patterns play out over again? Is he hopeful? Angry? “No. It's more despondent, I suppose,” he said. “I look with a very wry sense towards those who are now saying we need to learn lessons from Covid-19,” he said. “Because I know that we haven’t learned and taken to heart and changed structures in the way that we thought we might at the height of the response to HIV.”
“We always say we're going to learn lessons, but somehow we rarely do.”
