Most people have no idea what it was like to be young + gay in the 80s/90s. When straight friends were holding hands in the playground I was in gay bars where there were guys in wheelchairs with KS on their faces. The 1st man I fell for had AIDS. That was my adolescence. #ItsASin

And being a child - 12,14 - and knowing you were gay at that time meant knowing you would very probably die of AIDS. I barely have the words to describe how crushing that was. Few straight people get that - and few under 40s. If Covid is your first pandemic you’re lucky. #ItsASin

What’s hard to convey now is the silence: silence in schools because Section 28 meant teachers couldn’t talk about being gay. And silence because most of society turned the other way. We lived in a pandemic and many died - as everyone else carried on as normal. Blackout. #ItsASin

Harder still is to describe adequately the fear - terror actually - that we lived under before treatment came along. Fear that your friends would die. How long they might have. Fear in case the condom didn’t work. Fear that it would get you. Fear that drove people apart. #ItsASin

But despite all that I was lucky; ten years older and I might not have made it. Many lost all their friends. Partners too.

And guess what? In Britain we still have no memorial to those who died of AIDS.

Long-term survivors are too often ignored. Time to change that. #ItsASin

(I should have said there’s no *national* memorial. There are regional ones in Brighton and Edinburgh but despite a campaign for years to have one in London - in line with many other major capitals, and the epicentre of the U.K. epidemic - it still hasn’t happened.)