Show Stopper

It was World AIDS Day at the beginning of December — as it has been every year since 1988, when it was first created to raise awareness of the AIDS pandemic.

I was a young, closeted gay man when the so-called “gay plague” tore through our community. It’s no exaggeration to say it left an indelible mark on me. Perhaps my most vivid memory is of the 1987 Don’t Die of Ignorance television campaign. The message that etched itself into my mind was brutally simple: sex = death. The result was a complex and deeply unhealthy relationship with intimacy — one shaped largely by shame — that lingered with me for decades.

Nearly forty years on, something both sobering and strange has happened. My friends who are HIV-positive are all much younger than me. In their thirties, they sit on the other side of a cultural fault line — between the fear-saturated AIDS propaganda of the late 1980s and the widespread availability of PrEP in the UK by 2020. That gap matters more than we like to admit.

Queer culture quite rightly continues to reference AIDS, and I doubt it will ever — or should ever — be forgotten. HIV is not, of course, uniquely a gay condition; more than 40 million people worldwide are living with it today. And yet, perhaps because of my own lived experience, I usually shy away from HIV-themed dramas, television shows, and films. I know how they’re going to end.

So when I began working on a musical theatre project that presented an opportunity for an HIV storyline, I made a quiet decision early on: mine was not going to be that story.

The musical — working title When Harry Met Larry (yes, you can probably guess the premise) — is ultimately about hope, connection, and possibility. It’s still very much a work in progress, but I want to share a song I’ve written that’s set in the mid-1990s.

The character is a drag queen (she hasn’t revealed her name to me yet) who has just stumbled into an unexpected, unlikely romance with the man of her dreams — and has decided to take an HIV test. End of Act I maybe? Let me know what you think.