By Alan Spink, Community Services Manager, The Sussex Beacon
As a gay man who has lived in Brighton for most of my adult life, I have experienced a profound amount of death and grief, balanced by immense joy, colour, excitement, and passion. Recently, however, the focus seems to have shifted back towards how it felt in the 1980s and early 1990s: a world once again centred on loss, and one that reminds us of the vital importance of our chosen families when our biological families are unable, or unwilling, to support us.
Later in my own life, I acquired HIV and had to navigate that reality myself. For me, and for many others diagnosed at that time, there was a wealth of support, care, and community. Some of that support still exists today. But there is another group, largely forgotten and consisting mainly of gay men, whose experiences are rarely acknowledged.
They shared the same grief and witnessed the same losses as those of us who became HIV-positive. They visited the same hospital wards, attended the same funerals, and stood at the same gravesides. They too believed they had no future because, for many of us, life felt like a waiting game: waiting to become positive and then waiting to die. The difference was that there was little support for them then, and there is very little if any support for them now.
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