Nadine Porchette, identified as the black woman who lied on her ex-boyfriend and Saint Augustine’s University student, Jonathan Hanes, for having and infecting her with HIV/AIDS Airbnb |Angela Bassett |Jada Kingdom |Top G |Bruno Mars
Nadine Porchette, identified as the black woman who lied on her ex-boyfriend and Saint Augustine’s University student, Jonathan Hanes, for having and infecting her with HIV/AIDS Airbnb |Angela Bassett |Jada Kingdom |Top G |Bruno Mars
was National Aids Week, the first of its kind, and all the channels had given up airtime to support the government's unprecedented public health campaign. Everywhere one looked, there was a nervous health minister explaining that we were all at risk and how best to protect ourselves. In the ad breaks, there were images of icebergs and tombstones and the voice of John Hurt imploring us not to die of ignorance. And as the country sat down to dinner, it was greeted with the sight of an agony aunt with a condom in one hand and something else in the other.
"She had been sent a very peculiarly shaped wooden phallus by a fan," Grimshaw recalls, "and she was trying to get this condom on to this very fat phallus. First take, she couldn't get it on. KY all over the place. She had this blouse which she was getting black marks on because of the KY. Second take, she couldn't get it on. Third take, she finally forced the condom down on this wooden monstrosity."
Claire Rayner, alas, is no longer with us. And nor are almost all of Jonathan Grimshaw's friends from that time. But at the age of 56, Grimshaw is still in fairly good health, one of this country's longest-surviving, HIV-positive men. After a period of retirement, he is once again engaged with HIV work and, as we approach the 30th anniversary of the first Aids case in the UK, he finds himself reflecting with a mixture of sadness and wonderment.
It's so horrific looking back. I don't look back very often. It's hard to conceive that it was actually all happening – you'd get phonecalls to say, 'So and so is ill', and it wasn't that they were ill – they were dying. And you would see them dying. Over the course of a couple of years, you would see them wasting away, you'd go to see them in hospital and you'd go to their funerals. And it was one after another. I don't know how we did it. Most of the people I knew, most of my friends, died. I was talking to another friend of mine recently who's also got HIV, and who's also one of us long-term survivors, and he said that although we're well and there are treatments, there isn't a single day that goes by without you having been affected by it." Grimshaw laughs, as he often does, as a release. He adds: "That's all I can say about it really."
became more personal in 1983. "An ex-partner of mine called me up and told me that somebody who we'd both slept with at some time in the past had got this new disease. And the doctor who was treating him had suggested that all of his sexual partners should attend the clinic just to be monitored. At that time, the cause wasn't known, but it was thought there was a sexual transmission element."
He attended the St Stephen's clinic, which became part of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. He seemed to be fine, but was asked to come back every three months.
didn't have a partner at the time. I told my parents and I said I wanted to go home for a few days to see them and talk about things. I was in a pretty bad way emotionally. But they didn't want me to go home. I had a younger brother who I think at the time was 13 and they just didn't know if there might be some kind of risk to him from my going home. It was terrible. On one hand, I could understand what they were saying and even sympathise with it. On the other, I was dreadfully upset. It really felt like a rejection. I told a very helpful nurse at the clinic what had happened and he said, 'Do you want me to talk to them?'
"My parents lived in the north-east, so they came down, and this nurse took them through the risks and how it could be transmitted and not transmitted, and for them being able to hear this with a medical hat on reassured them. So after that I was able to go home."
Grimshaw learned that the Terrence Higgins Trust was about to set up a support group for people who were infected but evidently healthy. "I made sure I was in it – I really was not coping at all well. Drinking quite a lot and completely not knowing what I was going to do."
"So I kept going back. Then on one visit later they said they had tested my blood for this new virus which was thought to be the cause of Aids and the test had come back positive. I think I was one of the first people to be tested in the country. You just think, 'Oh Jesus, I'm going to die. I've got this disease, and if I have intimate sex with somebody I can kill them.' You can't really take in much more than that. The doctor was saying, 'Will you be able to cope?' and I was saying, 'Of course I'll be able to cope', and then I left the clinic reeling.
But of course there is more. Grimshaw lives with his long-term partner in an elegant, 18th-century, beamed house in Tunbridge Wells. He says that he first became fully aware of HIV the same way many of us did – by watching a 1983 BBC Horizon programme about the epidemic in New York. He had lived in New York a few years before and not long after his return to London he began to see stories about a mystery illness in the newspaper Capital Gay. "But I didn't know anyone personally affected by it. It seemed to be in America, remote, and it didn't seem like anything that was going to affect me very much."
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