July 2022
‘For the greater good’ I read. Now, there was a phrase I hadn’t seen for some time. But, I found myself idly wondering, what exactly does it mean, for whose greater good?
Some quick and dirty searching on Google, told me that it is a saying usually attributed to Jeremy Bentham, (1748-1832), who, in 1789 presented the world with an ethical position that became known as utilitarianism. It is usually accepted that there are, or rather were, three key principles that served as the basic tenets of his position. Simply expressed, these were that pleasure or happiness is the only thing that truly has intrinsic value; that actions that promote happiness are rightbut wrong if they produce unhappiness and finally that everyone’s happiness counts equally.
You could of course, spend all day picking holes in these statements: their benefits, as it stands, are that they are pretty clear, simplistic notions, that can be easily understood, their problem being that they offer pretty clear simplistic notions, that can be easily mis–understood. How do we relate it to non-human activities for example, (should animals strive for the greater good as well?) and external issues, like the environment? The shareholders in a large oil company may be very happy with its profits, even when it’s despoiling and polluting the planet, for the rest of the animals living on it.
Bentham’s utilitarianism however went hand in hand with a concept usually called the social contract theory, which suggests that we should all try to live in a way that is essentially ‘for the greater good’ of the security of shared life ‘in a community’. So then we need to define how we are going to interpret the word ‘community’. On the whole, it’s an ideology which became less popular in the last century, as concepts like the development of self help rose to greater prominence in the dominant western world order.
I still feel that the ideas above seem ‘reasonable things‘ to strive for in the long term; whilst others seem to feel that it is more important to prioritise the things you have a direct responsibility for: your family, your job, your own future. However, it is nevertheless a phrase, that I had noticed some people had started using again recently, about looking after others around us, by ensuring we carry out social activities, such as mask wearing and following other practices that might help to limit the spread of the Covid virus in your locality or indeed, the world. And as befits the difference of opinion about it more widely, there was disagreement on the idea as it related to Covid prevention too. It ‘takes away from our personal freedoms and liberty’ people argued, to be ordered to wear masks. ‘Whatever next in our increasingly ‘Big Brother’ orientated society’?
When I was younger, collective responsibility meant everything to me and I tried to find positions that allowed self help to integrate with this responsibility, within the social construct. But I wondered if I too had drifted away from that, almost without realising, into something more personally orientated, more, dare I say, selfish? Is selfish always a dirty word?
One thing we can probably agree on at least, it’s been a difficult few years for us all. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) compilers decided, when looking for its usual ‘word of the year’ that there had been so many new words during 2020 that we were using to describe our changed circumstances, they wouldn’t pick one at all. It seems a slight cop out. I think Pandemic would probably have done. This is a word that has been a part of our history for a long time; it first appeared in 1666, the year the Great Plague ended; likewise self quarantine was also recorded for the first time in relation to the events in the ‘plague village’, Eyam, in Derbyshire that year, where the concept of quarantining all residents, to escape infection, was first introduced in the UK.
Yes, pandemics have been living with us for a long time and it should be no great surprise when another comes upon us. And yet it usually is, and it’s no easier to live with, to struggle against, each time it occurs. We are reminded of our own mortality, as we see others around us, relatives, our loved ones, good friends, struggling to overcome infection caused by the virus, which seems to particularly affect the eldest amongst us.
Of course, there comes a time in everyone‘s life when they realise the clock is ticking, fast.. faster. As a youngster, I used to imagine that, as old age came, everything slowed, slowed down to a crawl:, physically and mentally. As we get there though, we come to realise that it doesn’t feel like this at all. You adapt and things seem to speed up: the minutes, hours, days fly past. The seasons race past you, one Christmas blurs into another. There comes that time when you accept that there are things you’ll never do and never do again. Birthdays become a gentle reminder of the inevitability of it all, as keeping some sort of good health becomes the key concern, as your body flails and fails around you. And looking after yourself (and your most immediate loved ones) starts to take priority. We can become very dogmatic as we get older, perhaps because it’s easy, it’s less effort, to take a known path, rather than set foot on new ones, to actively look for new ways forward, new challenges. We become ‘set in our ways’, we say.
So it was, that at some point in this ongoing deliberation, I realised that unless I threw my balls up into the air, (so as to speak), it would soon be too late to even imagine that catching them, as they fell, was any kind of option. A natural ending to some of my life chapters, seemed like an opportunity to open new ones, before my own narrative ran its course to a definitive conclusion.
A move to Almeria, about as far south east in Spain as you can travel, before the sparkling Alboran Sea comes into view, into the driest depths of the desert of Moorish Andalucia, had seemed like an opportunity to create something different again: challenges, a fresh start, an exploration using knowledge gained from a long history of dipping into Iberia, in the past. Calling it ‘semi retirement’ didn’t seem quite so harsh as admitting that this was perhaps something approaching the final chapters. Walking over oranges? Yes, it had all been done and documented before but it seemed a reasonably fitting adventure for a gay, sixty plus year old man, with a lifelong hispanophilic bent.
And yet, just three months into this new chapter, as it does, and because it can, the world decided it had other plans and, like you, we went into lockdown in the city, confined to a rented house and allowed out only for vital shopping and pharmacy trips, as military police strolled around arresting people for feeding the cities wild cats, that my lifelong friend Joe and I had ourselves taken to feeding, by a scrubby patch of wasteland, on the seashore. Restriction piled onto restriction; the world held its collective breath, as the tale, the drama -now so familiar to us all -played itself out. We all became armchair experts in discussing the pro’s and cons of the logarithmic curves plotting infection and mortality. As we all binge watched streaming media content and spent most time indoors curating our -suddenly vitally important- social media content, it had seemed like one of Netflix’s many dystopian drama series, was playing out, in front of our own eyes. The content of such series, suddenly seeming rather tame by comparison with our day to day reality, even if the monotony of it all soon became tiresome.
And yet, and yet: for some of us, it took us back to the beginning again. To the days when another pandemic was making the headlines. In the early eighties a ‘dreadful new disease’ was roaming the streets, as the actor John Hurt told us in sombre tones. The TV showed us huge monolithic gravestones, reminiscent of some B movie zombie horror flick and, for some, this narration was both cliched and distressing. AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) and HIV, (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) the virus that causes the related symptoms, had already been a talking point within the gay communities scattered pretty much around the globe, for some time. Where was the targeted government action to combat the disease, which like the Covid virus initially had no vaccine or cure, and was already killing hundreds, soon thousands of gay men?
As I write this, in 2020, HIV’s estimated death toll has been around 36 million people… that’s roughly half the population of the UK. And that’s the death toll, not the numbers infected. From when it was initially identified, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as far back as 1976, HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has become a global pandemic. Now, there are around 33 million people living with HIV, the vast majority of these in Sub-Saharan Africa ( where around 5% of the population is infected: that is roughly twenty one million people). Whilst the treatments that have been developed, now make HIV a manageable illness and many of those infected are able to continue leading worthwhile, productive lives, there are many who do not have access to a health service that can provide those drugs. At least medics now understand the disease and why it affects people in the way it does. However, when it was first identified, the medical establishment knew virtually nothing about the disease, which, at least initially, seemed to disproportionately be affecting men who identified as gay or those whom were ‘having sex with other men’. For many of those people and their friends and families, it was a frightening period to live through and there were many- very many, who did not manage to complete that journey.
Edmund White, the American writer, who survived through those times, penned an article in 2020, suggesting that as a gay man who had lived through the AIDS pandemic, ‘many people have asked me to compare that crisis with the one we now face‘. He thought that the main difference between the two was that AIDS at first appeared to afflict specific populations, while the coronavirus was ‘an equal opportunity malady’. Things have become a little more complicated since then, as we understand more about its transmission and that certain groups are more likely to be severely affected by the virus but I think the essential point he was making still stands.
Another article I read recently, asked us to consider if living through 2020, the year of Covid, had possibly ‘rewired our brains’. It’s not an unreasonable thing to be asking ourselves. Most of us, from where I’m writing this from, in Europe, have probably not been personally involved in a global pandemic of quite this magnitude before. Although, it’s worth reminding ourselves that this is not a pandemic of the same nature throughout the world; for example whilst in much of Africa,` Covid infection rates have remained relatively low, many on that continent nevertheless exist daily with the knowledge that a range of illnesses that us Europeans barely give a thought to, are still rampant: malaria, dengue fever, diptheria and of course HIV- to name just four of a longer list, are constant causes for concern. Putting that important caveat aside for the moment, the article went on to suggest that the way in which we now approach others and share societal values may have changed. It suggested that in a continent like Europe, the amount of mental illness that is being caused by the pandemic may create ripples all the way through this coming decade, that we will all have to learn to recognise, accept and heal, whether it is our own trauma or that of others, that we have to face up to.
Reading the article made me pause for a moment though and go back, mentally, three or four decades. I pondered whether ‘mainstream society’ in the developed world ever really conceived of the emotional trauma that HIV and AIDS caused to those it most affected in that period and has indeed, since then?
Clearly, in the UK there was a great deal of counselling done, that the specialist support groups that sprang up offered us in that period. Organisations like the Terence Higgins Trust, (THT), London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard (LL&GS) and for a time the government funded ‘National Aids Helpline’ (NAH) took tens of thousands of calls (and more..) from those emotionally involved in the effects, trauma and outcomes of coping with HIV and AIDS. It is probably fair to say that initially, those answering those calls often knew as little about its effects as those who were seeking the information. I worked on long, often gruelling phone shifts at both LL&GS and the NAH in that period and I recall how we scoured the medical papers and journals for evidence that helped us understand more clearly what exactly was happening to those who were getting seriously ill, as their immune systems seemed to rapidly malfunction, to collapse.
‘Eventually the viral nature of the disease became known and we discovered the only two significant modes of transmission were blood and semen, but in the early days people feared physical contact, mosquitoes, kisses and coughs’. Whilst the corona virus is very much more easily transmitted than HIV virus ever was (and still is), does it make any difference?
Edmund White went on to write that ‘AIDS bore a badge of shame, even in the gay community – if you were infected it was your own fault for not practising safer sex – whereas everyone feels sympathy for coronavirus victims’. Whereas HIV/AIDS was, in its initial decade, pretty often a death sentence for almost all those who were afflicted, it seems that most people afflicted with the corona virus show only mild symptoms and even those who are hospitalised mostly recover (with some important caveats in relation to what we now call ‘long covid sufferers’). Whereas doctors and nurses did not get HIV/AIDS from working with patients (except for a few unfortunate healthcare and lab workers, who were accidentally contaminated with infected blood) health workers are highly vulnerable to corona virus, and shortages of protective equipment only serve to increase this vulnerability.
The Corona virus is the first ‘super pandemic’ of the social media era, and misinformation, conspiracy theories and racist slurs flood various public gateway sites. Whilst the rumour mill might be taking the same approach, official pronouncements during 2020 from the White House took a different tack. Remarkably, (shockingly, in retrospect), President Ronald Reagan only ever mentioned AIDS once in his presidency, whereas ex- President Donald Trump turned his daily televised briefings and re-election campaign into self congratulatory rallies, even after contracting the virus himself. Which was worse? Presidential indifference or the politicisation of the bully-pulpit (not to mention Trumpian rumours)? Remember when Trump said there were just a few cases in America and those were being cured, that the virus would vanish miraculously? Or remember when he wouldn’t let the sick passengers disembark from a cruise ship because that would augment “his” numbers? Both pandemics have had their folklore “origin” stories. Just as AIDS was first dubbed ‘Gay-Related Immune Deficiency’ disease (GRID), the president initially worked hard to dub the Corona virus the “Chinese Virus” (and appears to have stuck to that idea, even when out of presidential office).
Randy Shilts, in his seminal 1987 book ‘And the Band Played On‘ about the AIDS crisis claimed he was forced by his publisher St Martin’s Press, to pin the American spread of AIDS on “patient zero”, a handsome Canadian flight attendant, just as the proliferating American Covid outbreak was at one stage being traced back to a mythical Wuhan businessman. At least, aside from contact tracing, most educated people don’t try to locate the person who “gave” them corona virus, whereas many AIDS patients were initially encouraged to blame a particular sexual partner. Now, for Americans, the contacts are ubiquitous and might be your granddaughter or nephew or your murderous teen who’s still playing basketball or enjoying a spring break in Florida.
Ironically, the same doctor, Anthony Fauci who was the “villain” of the AIDS epidemic (the activist group Act-Up accused him of not releasing life-saving drugs), has generally been considered a ‘hero’ of corona virus (the voice of scientific reason in the recent Trump administration). In both epidemics he has insisted on running studies of new drugs. In that crazy Trumpian far right world, that we recently went through, he was also accused of undermining the president’s oddest pronouncements.
In his article, Edmund White continued with:
‘AIDS‘ was surrounded from the beginning by moral opprobrium in America, especially because the disease was linked with perversion and sexual excess; coronavirus is already associated with maskless renegades who don’t keep their social distance. ‘Whereas I became positive for AIDS in 1985, I survived because I was a “slow progressor” and my T-cell count fell very, very gradually. Now I’m going into my third week of coronavirus quarantine – I wonder if I’ll survive this one‘.‘
As I write this, he has. So many others were not so ‘lucky’. And the books about that period and this period will still be being written, for years to come.
And yet, and yet: again now, some of us remember and remembered a time well before HIV; another chapter, closer to the start of the book, when the days seemed long, the nights longer, the future not yet mapped out by viral timelines, and its accompanying curves of infection and death. These were days when liberation was our watchword, freedom our mantle and the ‘age of consent’ that was being metaphorically and sometimes literally fought for, mattered. It wasn’t for nothing that mid eighties gay pop group Bronski Beat’s first album was titled exactly that.
In many ways though, we found and still find, that it is often struggle that brings communities together, brings people together. When it first appeared in our lives back then, in ways we didn’t yet know, HIV would create new communities of support, new ways of loving each other, bring with it new thinking, create new ideas and ideologies to combat oppression and fear and offer us, as a community, new allies and ways of developing an agenda combating racism, sexism and of course homophobia.
Make no mistake, although communities before then had marched and fought and to some extent conquered, this new disease that proliferated in the 1980’s eventually brought frank discussion out into the open like never before, as society was forced to confront the reality of the number of gay men (and women) and others affected by it, in their own lives- friends, brothers, sons, fathers, partners, work colleagues and the great and good of the glitterati in showbiz and the arts. In the next few decades things would change, in at least much of western society, as tolerance and understanding took over from prejudice, fear and- let’s get real- loathing.
The story is a complex one; the script wasn’t written in advance and the ending .. well the story continues to this day, albeit deeply overshadowed at this moment, as I write, by the new pandemic, that is caused by the coronavirus and its many mutations.
It is a story that has of course been told before: scripts, films, books, plays: all have deftly woven the shared narrative of those decades together, some full of hope, whilst others concentrated on the negative effects on a frightened community: for there were indeed many who were very frightened.
To better understand, to perhaps tell the tale again in a fresh light, I think we need to go back to the time before those days though. For some, including myself, they were heady days, full of optimism, hope, determination: putting ‘two fingers up’ in the face of the fear that had existed in the past, deciding that the future would be, had to be, different. It is a tale born of the optimism and energy that only youth can bring and a naivety that only youth offers, yet it is something I now look back on with relief. For many of us, whilst the tale has seemingly had some kind of happy ending, it was nevertheless an experience that was mixed with a great deal of pain, loss and tears, as we wove our way through its narrative path. One half of the music group the Pet Shop Boys, writer Neil Tennant (of whom much more later) summed it up- almost perfectly- I often think, when he sings in their late 1990 song ‘Being Boring‘ of the influence of ‘a cache of old photos’ and ‘bolting through a closing door’,
Someone said if you’re not careful
you’ll have nothing left and nothing to care for
in the nineteen-seventies
But I sat back and looking forward
my shoes were high and I had scored
I’d bolted through a closing door
and I would never find myself feeling bored
and he goes on, that now, of his friends whom he had thought would continue that journey with him, ‘some are here and some are missing’. Neil described “Being Boring” as “one of the best songs that we’ve written”, and explained that “For me it is a personal song because it’s about a friend of mine who died of AIDS, and so it’s about our lives when we were teenagers, how we moved to London, and I suppose me becoming successful and him becoming ill.” Understandably, it is they say, their most loved song, with its tale of youthful naivety and innocence lost, perhaps lamented.
So what of those wild, heady days, before our innocence was snatched away from us young things and lost forever?
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