20 February

I remember 1990, when Freddie Mercury looked shockingly gaunt. Best estimate of his infection with HIV is around 1982. So he’d lived for 6-7 years looking and possibly feeling quite normal, but infection was destroying his immune system that whole time. By 1991 he was dead, just under a decade after his HIV infection, which he may not even have noticed, it was possibly quite mild. It was vast numbers suddenly dying that led to the discovery of HIV, nobody knew it was even there the whole time. As Hemingway said about bankruptcy, death by chronic infection comes in two stages. Gradually, then suddenly. The people around me are lining up for infection with something really nasty right now. They see me as odd, because I refuse to. To me they’re Freddie in 1982.