In time for HIV Longterm Survivors’ Awareness Day 2025, my work published this feature-length article, ‘The Middle Children of the Epidemic,’ in our in-house publication Positive Living. It is a follow-up to my piece for the same occasion two years earlier, titled ‘The Last of Their Number.’ It seems that in two years I will need to write something elegiac about young people with HIV to complete the set!
I’ve been so grateful for the warm response this piece has gotten both within and outside the HIV response. Particularly grateful to Bobby Goldsmith Foundation and Living Positive Victoria who reposted the piece on their organisational Facebook accounts. The latter felt especially meaningful because LPV employed me from 2006-2010 and helped me pick up the pieces after the events I write about in the article.
Readers are advised this piece contains descriptions of HIV seroconversion, illicit drug use and suicide. Support options are available at the end of the piece.
Excerpt
In English, ménage a trois has come to mean ‘a threesome.’ In French, ménage just means an arrangement. In English, ‘arrangement’ sounds like a consciously planned design, but in French it can have a looser sense, the way one might talk about an arrangement of limbs in a bed, in a sparely furnished one-bedroom flat in the suburbs, circa 2000. It was the year after I had graduated high school, found a job and moved out of home. The tangle of limbs includes my boyfriend James (28yo) and our boyfriend Alix (18yo), and we are entangled in so many different respects: we are both lovers and combatants.
Reflections
Briefly and in no particular order:
- I came home from that work planning day in a huge mess and knocked out the first draft, really just a series of narrative fragments from different time points.
- I pitched the piece as a proper feature with quotes from other people, while knowing it was emotionally radioactive and ‘too hot to handle,’ i.e. I wasn’t capable of giving it the kind of sustained structural work a feature demands. A pitch is a promise and sometimes you promise more than you’re capable of.
- As a person with ADHD I often need a sense of urgency to overcome paralysis and in this case I waited until the absolute deadline to rework the piece. At that point it was easy; I just chopped out everything that needed more work than I could give it, and I was left with the skeleton of the piece, a bare account of the events.
- Instead of quoting others I drew the piece together with a normative reflection on the way the ‘middle children’ were treated and how they should be treated now.
- But — BUT! — this is important: people know me. It’s inconvenient and I hate it, but people shared in my life story and remember people I write about. So I had to do some thinking about how to rearrange the details so that someone who knew me at the time couldn’t instantly recognise who I was writing about.
- Some of the timeline was fixed; Alix died in 2005, for instance, which aligned with my coming unstuck in my role at the Victorian AIDS Council. But I was in relationships for nearly seven years before that, so I had scope to rearrange partners and fictionalise the timeline.
- All I can say is, if you think you know who I mean, (a) you might not, and (b) please respect the privacy of the people concerned. And please regard this piece as — at least in part — autofiction rather than autobiography.
- CODA: I’ve since been advised that both of the people I wrote about have now died. But even in death they deserve to have their reputation and privacy respected.