Looking Back

Looking back always meant looking into chaos, a slipstream where the pleasures were isolated in the cold. The aridity had set in now, the result of years of introversion. Live a long and happy life, they said, waiting outside people's houses, looking into darkness, skating on thin ice. There was warmth, in the tasks and the business and survival in a hectic city, but too often he settled quietly into the gloom and didn't know where it was coming from.

Craig had his 40th on the weekend and the music pumped through the neighbourhood. The wind is gusting today and the heaters have been hauled out and turned on as winter finally hits. There were moments when everything went well; when he wasn't turned inward, when achievements were made. He crawled through all the darkness and he could find no content. He laughed at things he shouldn't have laughed at and was never satisifed.

Richard Carleton has died at the age of 63 while on assignment. The Age: Veteran Nine Network reporter Richard Carleton has died after suffering a suspected heart attack at Tasmania's Beaconsfield Gold Mine. Carleton goes out asking the hard questions. Carleton dies on the front line. A life less ordinary. He asked his last question, characteristically aggressive and uncompromising, but already red in the face; about how management could justify sending miners into such unsafe conditions - the fate of two miners trapped underground for almost a fortnight has gripped the attention of the nation; but is clearly driving the television crews mad as they run out of things to report. I'm going back to the summer days.


Here's some notes we cobbled together when Col was down last week for a talk he's giving on "Positive Sexuality" at a workshop.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t got any teeth right now, it’s because I lost them in the surf in February. It’s absurd. It’s even been funny. My face changed. It’s been a journey within itself, because having been sick for a while, I learnt very quickly to just hold my head high and face the world right in the eye.

Just surviving on a disability support pension I have had to negotiate through the public health system, the Hunter regional health service. I haven’t had the resources to just go and get a new set of choppers. You have to learn to live with poverty, but you still want to look your best. Let’s face it girls, we’re all princesses on a expedition to becoming dowager duchesses.

I just want to tell some of my story.

I became HIV positive in 1992. I remember the exact night. I had met a man through an ad in Brisbane’s gay rag called Pride. He came to my office where I was interviewing men who had sex with men for a health research project.

I heard him arrive, dressed in black leather astride a black motor bike. To me he looked so horny and engaging – had my knight in shining armour had arrived. I went down and opened the main door answered his call. He took off his helmet. He had a brood smile and eyes screaming out for a sexual encounter.

He was ready for action. After we introduced ourselves and as I tried to vainly introduce the project I found myself listening to his Yorkshire accent and found myself willing to have sex on the floor with him then and there.

We cleaned up and went out to eat. Two hours later we had sex again in my motel room at Nobby’s Beach on the Gold Coast. You could hear the passing traffic on one side and the sound of the surf crashing on the beach on the other. We had another shot of speed each.

We were both as horny as the universe. He had a taut muscular body with a tattoo of a black panther on his right shoulder. The sex was terrific, absolutely terrific.


I became much more adventurous than usual, willing and accepting. We used condoms but we had an accident. One slipped off. It was too late to stop.

I didn’t feel bad after it was over. In fact I was glowing. I trusted him. I felt safe and secure entwined with his body. Those were the days my friends, we thought they’d never end. I also knew that the virus had entered my body. He had told me he was HIV. We had negotiated safe sex. We did what you were meant to do. This was a subject I had taught in class. We practised what I considered safe sex.

A week later I developed bronchitis like condition; one of the classic symptoms. I went to a doctor before the window period and my first result was negative. I knew that I had become infected so I waited a further six weeks and retested.

The day I got my results, as part of work had I travelled to Brisbane for a meeting with corrective services and the health department about HIV and Hep C provision prevention within the jails.

The head of the aids medical unit came up to me and gave me a big hug. He said he knew it was me from the south coast who had recently tested and knowing the result he further said to me that he would do everything within his power to take care of me. That was reassuring.

I kept seeing Howard for the next three years before he died of a golden staph infection picked up in a hospital. We kept having sex. He was as horny as ever. I didn’t hate him, God no. I accepted that my becoming positive was fifty per cent my responsibility. We were like soul brothers. All we did was get out of it and go to bed and have hours and hours of sex. Hours and hours.

I had been working in HIV and Hep C prevention since the mid 1980s as a health promotions officer. Quite often my projects were specifically targeted to at risk groups. Over the years I had an accumulation of loss and grief due to the many people I had known both socially and professionally who had become positive and died before combination therapy came in. They were unsung heroes a lot of these guys, the way they died.

Over the three years Howard and I, as well as being sexual partners, had a relationship not just based on sex but highlighting the beauty of intimacy. The year Howard died I had buried my father on my birthday and travelled north to present a eulogy for a guy I had known since his late teenage years. On seeing Howard I said to him, don’t you die, because I feel couldn’t handle it.

At this stage Howard had a porta-catheter that was attached to his heart. His good looks and personality and spirit were still as gorgeous as the day I met him. We continued to have clandestine sexual encounters, his place, my place, all over the Gold Coast.


Unfortunately, he had become infected with golden staph. He died within three days of diagnosis. On the morning of his death I was preparing to visit him in hospital and I had just finished ironing my clothes when the phone rang. I was devastated. We had discussed dying. One of his issues about that was becoming very emaciated. The golden staph stopped that from happening because it was so quick.

He was my soul brother to me. I hadn’t known that sort of intimacy with anyone else since my first lover in my teenage years, who himself had died of AIDS in the 1990s.

In those days being gay and being publicly gay was a bold statement which carried with it a certain ridicule - it required courage.

Months after my diagnosis there was a Worlds Day. I was nominated for an award for my work in the field. As part of my speech of acceptance I told the audience of a hundred or more health professionals, government ministers and high level public servants that I had become HIV positive. You could hear a pin drop. It was a very public coming out. I had done that because I had always been very public about my sexuality.

Coming out publicly about my HIV status was much more difficult and had a greater impact than coming out as a poofter, but to be true to my views on social justice principles it had to be done.

Howard’s death affected me greatly. I decided to leave employment and travelled overseas; a kind of purging. During this time my urge, my desire, my lustfulness, had completely diminished. I didn’t feel safe. I was overly concerned about having sex, partly for fear of infecting others.

After Howard’s funeral I attended a loss and grief workshop held in a seminary in Brisbane. I found that basically I needed the touch and feel of other humans who I trusted and who I knew cared for me. . . ,

The next serious relationship I had was with another HIV positive man, so there was nothing to negotiate in terms of safe or unsafe sex. I had in fact been having a casual but intense relationship with Patrick for many years; which finally developed into a very good friendship.

On returning to Australia after travelling overseas I moved back to Brisbane and became involved in management committees of both the Queensland Aids Council and Queensland Positive People. This absorbed much of my time and energy. I knew that I was becoming increasingly tired and often exhausted. I had scans, MRIS, ultra-scans, life became a round of doctors surgeries and hospitals.

I lost my libido. I just didn’t want sex anymore, partly no doubt due to the medication I was on. This is a really common experience amongst positive men who are taking anti-depressants on top of their HIV medication. Your desire for intimacy becomes high, your desire for sex low. I had never been a full-on beat or backroom queen, but now my interest was non-existent.

It wasn’t that I felt ugly or diseased because of my HIV status, it was simply a physical thing.

I thought I was going to die in 2003, after diagnosis of kidney cancer. The kidney was removed; I moved to the country with an old friend, nursing myself and waiting to die.

But then slowly I developed a great sense of hope that I was in fact going to live. The depression and I grief that I felt over having lost so many friends, lovers and people that I cared about lifted.

A lot of my generation are dead. One of the reasons I am still alive is that before I was diagnosed with kidney cancer I went on to combination therapy, which built up my immune system. I had the cancerous kidney removed and the day of release from hospital I packed my bags and headed to Sydney.

For me positive sexuality involves so much more than just the sexual act itself. I’ve developed a stronger sense of myself, I enjoy the intimacy between people I have met since I moved back to the east coast; and I have met somebody who I immediately identified with; with whom I have developed an intimate and close friendship. As part of my journey I have discovered that positive sexuality is more than just about cocks and butts. It’s about spending that most precious commodity of all, time, time with another human soul.