The Young People’s Discussion of HIV – Full Transcript

queer bar in East London.

Ahead of World AIDS Day 2014, here’s the full transcript of our recent ‘Young People’s Discussion of HIV’

 

 

The Young People’s Discussion of HIV included porn star Kayden Gray, drag queen Baga Chipz, DJ Maximus Crown and DJ/club promoter Mark-Ashley Dupé, as part of 56 Dean Street’s Gay Men’s Wellbeing Campaign. Chaired by Patrick Cash. All stills here by Alejandro Medina. 

An ‘Older & Younger Discussion of HIV’ will be happening on Monday 1st December as part of ‘Let’s Talk About Gay Sex & Drugs – World AIDS Day‘ at Manbar in Soho (79 Charing Cross Road, WC2H 0NE) from 6.30pm. 

Patrick: We don’t have to talk personally tonight about our status, we’re talking generally about the gay scene and how we do perceive HIV. So just to start off, how do you perceive HIV, let’s go round first…

Mark: Everyone’s aware of it, I’m not sure if everyone’s aware how they can catch it or what they can do about it once they’ve caught it, or how their friends are going to perceive them once they have HIV, I feel there’s a lot of confusion about that still. It’s still quite a taboo subject on the gay scene, even though so many gay boys are catching it.

Maximus: I think on the gay scene it’s really easy not to perceive HIV, because it’s one of those things that’s a bit like Christmas, you never really talk about it until it’s around the corner and then it’s like ‘oh my god, shit, somebody’s got HIV’ and then it’s a bit like whispers in a dark corner. Situations like this don’t happen on the gay scene basically.

Baga: Well, it’s like what they said, if you don’t put something on it, and you’re shagging different people you’re at risk, aren’t you? I don’t really shag that many people to be honest [Laughter] I don’t! Like I said, it’s one of those things, when you’re young you don’t know what to say, you don’t know much about it, and I’m thick as shit as well, I don’t have a clue.

Kayden: Well, the gay scene is about fun first and foremost, and it seems like the subject of sexually transmitted diseases isn’t welcome to start off with and a lot of people, even though the awareness of the existence is there, they don’t really know the first thing of what HIV is. But they don’t necessarily know anything about it. A lot of people think you catch HIV, you develop AIDS, and you die. A lot of people around 18, 19, 20, and the education just hasn’t been there.

 

Patrick: Thank you, those were great points, and that was very formal bang, bang, bang –

Baga: Kayden put it across better than me.

Kayden: I preferred your version!

Patrick: That’s lovely, right so now we’ve all had a taste of what it’s like to speak in front of the lovely audience, let’s open it up and pretend the audience aren’t there for the moment. So in those points it seemed that there was a lack of knowledge about HIV, and to throw it open, why do we think there’s a lack of knowledge, is it to do with education in schools?

Mark: Yeah, definitely. At school I got 100% in my sex education test, and I was really clued up, but now that I don’t think back I don’t actually remember HIV being one of the main topics we spoke about. I remember like, somebody said it earlier, when you get taught about using a condom it’s usually to stop a girl having a baby but that’s as far as it went. So I left school ten years ago, and technically that’s not that long ago, but considering it’s not that long ago you would have thought that by then something like HIV would have been a topic that would have been discussed a lot more in depth. Because up until I was about 20, HIV was like the boogie man. I knew of it, and I was petrified of catching HIV, to the point that I could like open up a newspaper and if I had sex with somebody I’d just think HIV and I’d think I got it. It was really quite bad because there was nobody I could speak to about it, there was no elders, and I don’t even think my Mum and Dad really know that much about HIV, they more know about the AIDS dilemma that went down in the 80s. And to them if you’re gay, you’re gonna turn grey and get lesions and die within a few weeks and then that’s it.

 

Maximus: I think it does go back to schools, and I think in schools not much is talked about gay sex, let alone HIV. You’re taught that sex is between a man and a woman, if you don’t wanna get pregnant use a condom, and this is how babies are made, that’s the end of it. But as someone who’s gay, I’ve got no interest in making babies. I also think that even down to using a condom people were told in school that if you don’t want to get any diseases then use a condom and that’s it and nobody actually talks in depth about HIV. And when I was about 20, up until the age of 17, 18, the idea of HIV, that was like all the way over there. I came out at 18 and HIV came a little closer but it still wasn’t an issue and it’s only as I’ve gotten older and older that I was like ‘oh my god, this is real and it’s happening right now.’ Even now, I’m 25-years-old and I feel the only reason I know so much about it is because I went and I had to find out.

Patrick: I remember exactly the same.

Mark: I started having sex at a really young age, that’s the truth. And there are a lot of young boys out there who are having sex at a really young age –

Patrick: Especially with Grindr.

Mark: Especially with Grindr because once you’ve got that iPhone you can download any app. So I think it’s really important that gay sex and HIV is taught at a young age because between the ages of 14 and 18 I didn’t really go to the clinic but I was having sex with guys, now I find out, twice my age.

Patrick: With condoms?

Mark: With condoms and without condoms, so at fourteen I could have easily caught –

Kayden: You’re very impressionable.

Mark: Obviously you’re young and you’re going from one world which you’ve been kind of pre-programmed to, to having discover this whole new world. You’re like a toddler when you go into this whole new gay world. And there was no one there to hold my hand, or show me the ropes, I had to teach myself everything and ended up in all types of situations that still to this day, I don’t understand how I didn’t catch it. Some people took advantage, I think, but then a lot of the time it was what I wanted, I wanted to have sex, I wanted to meet these older guys but I didn’t realise necessarily what risk I was putting myself at. So I think it’s definitely important that from a teenage age, boys – and I think it’s easier for boys to go out and get caught up in drama – that should be pushed forward.

 

Pat Cash introducing; event organiser David Stuart in background right

Patrick: Definitely. There’s a kind of initiative going on at the moment to make both straight and same-sex Sexual and Relationship Education statutory in schools… When we come on to the gay scene as young men, as twinks, happy and going to Heaven and stuff, and we can be happy with who we are, why don’t we talk about HIV and educate one another?

Baga: When you’re young and you first come on the scene, like a lot of gay lads at school are quite repressed and bullied and then we come out they just want to get a bit of cock, don’t they? They’re like ‘ooh, I want to go clubbing and get a bit’ and when you do clubbing, you’re not going to go up to someone and the first thing you say is ‘have you got HIV?’ You want to take them home don’t you?

Patrick: Exactly. So the sexual urge really overtakes.

Mark: Well, straight boys in the playground wouldn’t be like ‘have you got HIV’? So I do think it’s a bit unfair that being a gay man you have to think of all these other things because it kind of takes the fun out. When you’re young you want to have fun but we live in such a small microcosm of the world that our community isn’t as big as the whole isle, not everyone is gay, so it’s gonna be a lot easier for us to transmit these diseases. Because we’ve got three districts, I see it as, we’ve got Vauxhall, Soho and Shoreditch, and we kind of bounce between the three. Whereas as a straight guy you can kind of go anywhere can’t you, and do whatever you want.

 

Kayden Gray & Baga Chipz

Maximus: I feel when you’re young and you’re coming out to the gay scene your priorities are slightly different. I’ve been in school and I’ve had to dress this certain way and it’s like fuck that, I want to go out and be fabulous, the last thing I want to do is go ‘so guys, who’s got HIV?’ Like that’s not my priority, that’s not what I went to G-A-Y for, I went to get drunk!

Patrick: I guess that leads me on to the next point of discussion which is the prevention campaigns themselves. The prevention campaigns are going on and a lot of them are aimed at us, at young gay men on the scene. How effective do you think they are?

Kayden: I think they’re becoming more and more effective. In the past when you heard jargon, there was a person who didn’t understand what we were talking about here, because it all sounds like it doesn’t affect you, it sounds like something that has nothing to do with you, until someone says, I think it was the Terrence Higgins Trust, who got their flyers out and they were using words like ‘arse’ and ‘dick’ and that actually makes sense, to a lot of people.

 

Mark-Ashley Dupé

Patrick: It’s the language.

Baga: The long words, you can’t understand it.

Kayden: Like rectum, a lot of people don’t even know what that means.

Baga: It’s like when [the doctor] said with the cum up the arse and all that, I understood.

Kayden: You need common language.

Mark: Most people are common –

Maximus: That’s why it’s called common, common language.

Mark: I know that some people like to believe that they’re not common. It is arse, dick, cock, tits, you know what I mean. I feel like most people do talk like that now, with music and how people are, and social integration, people don’t talk ‘la-di-dah’ anymore. And if you do, you think ‘yeah you’re an arse’. I feel like if you’re gonna do a campaign you should definitely use words that our gay community are using.

Kayden: Yeah, like Nicki Minaj!

 

Baga Chipz, Maximus Crown, Mark-Ashley Dupé & Pat Cash

Patrick: And how do you find the prevention campaigns, do you see them in the magazines, out in the bars, in the sexual health clinics?

Kayden: I use to work in Ku Bar and there were quite a lot of leaflets and in every magazine there was something about HIV and prevention, and information. That’s what I think is needed.

Mark: Technically it’s like an epidemic at the moment, isn’t it?

Patrick: It’s supposed to be a syndemic with chemsex.

Mark: In the last forty-five years, the rise in young gay boys with HIV has spiked, hasn’t it? I don’t think there’s enough [in terms of prevention], what I do see is a lot of topless men in the magazines, and the back pages of QX and Boyz promoting saunas and escorts. So it’s like you can’t put a little campaign on p.37 and then cover the magazine with half-naked men and men at Sweatbox posing with a towel. It kind of defeats the object.

Patrick: So it’s conflicting messages?

Mark: It’s definitely conflicting messages. I feel like as a gay man, I feel like what’s promoted to me is get muscles, get a tan, find yourself a Brazilian man and then get really high, go to Vauxhall and flex those muscles… And take a picture, because that’s the most important thing remember, you haven’t gone out to listen to music, you’ve gone to get a picture and most people leave after they’ve got a picture and then go to a three-day chem party. It’s the wrong picture to be pushing forward.

 

Patrick: Chems is definitely something we want to get onto, but first, I just wanted to ask Baga, is it the same on the drag scene?

Baga: We don’t shag each other! [Laughter] Sandra probably would…

Patrick: In terms of effectiveness…?

Baga: To be honest, these three they like to go out and have a good time, I’m boring. I do my gig, go to G-A-Y Late, have a few drinks and then go home and have a wank, that’s what I do. Catch up on British Bakeoff and go to bed, that’s what I do. Sad but true.

Patrick: Is there anything in the UK gay scene that markets towards that?

Baga: Well, with the drags we get free drinks so we don’t have to buy drinks, and like I said I go home alone and I’ve got a fellah as well.

Mark: I don’t think there’s a difference, that’s not the problem of whether you’re a drag queen or gay. It’s about the fact that nobody’s really been educated about it. When I educated myself I found that the highest rate of people catching HIV were like Indian women, that’s not a gay man. So it’s got nothing to do with what your sexual preference is or how you go out or how you operate when you’re out within your scene it’s just about not being clued up. I definitely think chems has got a lot to do it, because if you’ve taken mephedrone, mephedrone makes you really horny. And once you’ve had that, the story’s over really, until that bag’s finished or the dealer hasn’t got anymore you’re going to end up getting yourself into a situation sometimes that the next day you’re gonna regret. If anyone read the newspaper two weeks ago there was Paul Ross’s wife claiming that the reason he was having gay sex was because he was on mephedrone. Now whether that’s true or not, I definitely believe that on that drug a lot of people – labels go out the window. People just want to have sex.

 

Greg Mitchell, PrEP advocate

Patrick: Can we just go on to chems, do we think chems is a problem?

Kayden: A huge problem.

Patrick: And people in the audience are saying it as well.

Mark: Men have high sex drives don’t they –

Maximus: Gay or straight, men like to have sex.

Mark: I’ve always said that men will try to get their end away if they can. When you’ve got men who fancy men I think that’s heightened and then you’ve got men who fancy men on a drug that makes them even more into that whole sex thing it’s gonna go out the window and it’s gonna be out of control.

Maximus: Do you feel there’s this whole ‘gay men are having sex on drugs’ thing and we’ve been doing it since the dawn of time. We did it in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s and we’re doing it now. The point I’m making is that nothing has changed, what has changed is that now we’ve got Grindr and we’ve got Facebook so that people can monitor how much sex men are having when high. It’s not that it’s gone up or gone down, it’s that people can see it more now. And I feel that everyone’s so judgmental about you shouldn’t be having sex when you’re high, why? I’m not in love with you and we’re not married. It doesn’t really matter whether I remember it the next day. So I think if you’re having sex sober – to me, sober sex is for lovemaking. I’m not saying that every time I’ve had sex with somebody that I’ve not been with I’ve been high, I’m just saying that if I’m going to be going out of the way to have sex whilst I’m sober, you better be sure you know it’s a privilege. I don’t know if it’s more or less of a deal than it has been before, I’m not saying it doesn’t contribute to the rise of HIV positive men. I just don’t think correlation and causation are one and the same.

 

Professor Sheena McCormack from 56 Dean Street

Patrick: Okay, what about chems and condoms, what do you think of that?

Maximus: Again, I’m not sure. I don’t know if there have been studies into this thing, I just think that no matter how high I am, if something’s in the back of my mind it’s in the back of my mind. If you have sex regularly and you use condoms regularly, no matter what level of inebriation you have, unless you are so drunk you can’t see, I don’t think there’s any excuse.

Patrick: I don’t want us to get too lost in chemsex, but just to add in to the conversation, gay men have been using drugs since their reputation in the 70s and 80s of everyone being on ecstasy, but the drugs have changed and they’ve changed relatively recently –

Baga: There’s a lot of shite in them now as well.

Kayden: They’re available and cheap.

Patrick: It’s G and crystal meth and all of these drugs. They’re disinhibitors, they’re designed to disinhibit the man, and why have we seen this development with their arrival?

Mark: Well before 2009 when mephedrone came on to the scene, basically if you had the cash to buy coke you bought coke or you bought MDMA, I didn’t even know about G, I’d never heard about G until I was about 22 or 23 and coming out to Vauxhall and half of them were going into rigor morits and being taken out by a stretcher and I was like ‘what is this?’ And mephedrone came onto the scene, and to be honest, anybody could be a meph dealer and people that didn’t take drugs originally, because it was a legal high originally, they started taking it. And now you’ve got this whole generation of people who are addicted to this drug. And from that, people who didn’t take drugs before are now taking drugs, and they try coke and MD and – I’ve never done it – but they can go on to harder drugs like crystal meth. And I think the more we go through time and time moves on, it’s easier for boys to come out as gay. Maybe before people weren’t coming out until 40, they already had kids and were married, but you can come out now at 14 and your Mum and Dad don’t really care about it. Then you’re pushed into this new world and you’ve got this group of elder men who are kind of grooming these young boys into their idea of how they see the gay scene. And that’s because they want to have sex with young boys, they don’t care about the fact that they’re 16 and don’t have any idea of what’s ahead of them. You’ve got these young boys who have taken drugs and a year later or however long later, they are HIV positive because it was just fun.

Patrick: Because they weren’t looked after? I mean that links into education in the gay scene, I guess. Do we think when we come on the scene that the people already there, the older men could have a responsibility for education or is entirely upon ourselves? Let’s go round again and ask: what’s your favourite method of prevention?

Kayden: It would be a condom.

Baga: Condom. But like I said I don’t really get it that much.

Maximus: Using a condom but that’s because it’s the most easily accessible.

Mark: Yeah, condom.

Patrick: So if PrEP, the idea that Sheen and Alan were talking about here of taking Truvada, which is a daily pill and might be a preventive measure against HIV, would you take it?

Kayden: I think PrEP when it finally does come out, it will be given to some people but that will create a problem because obviously when you take a condom you don’t need to communicate anything to anyone. But when you’re on PrEP a discussion opens, then you are faced with a situation where part of your prevention is communicating with other people and that’s what people have a huge problem with. Because it basically creates and supports stigma, or maybe it’s because of stigma that people don’t want to be ashamed, and they don’t want to be rejected in an environment where they’re having fun.

Baga: I was just going to say the same as that. It’s good if it prevents HIV and all that, but people shouldn’t rely on it. Oh, we’ve got PrEP now, to not rely on it.

Maximus: It’s too late for me to take PrEP now, but if I was to go back in time and PrEP became available I feel as if taking a tablet every day isn’t easy. And I remember when I was 18 and I was diagnosed with an iron deficiency where I had to take these tablets and for a week it was fine, two weeks it was kind of fine and then it got to four weeks and I was like ‘fuck this shit’. This isn’t easy at all, and if there’s no need for you to do it then you’ll slip into the habit of ‘I don’t actually have to do this so why am I doing it?’, do you know what I mean? So taking PrEP when you don’t have to, you’ll eventually fall into the habit of there’s really no point. I know people who are allergic to condoms and latex, so for someone like that PrEP would be useful or people who are in negative/positive relationships PrEP again would be very useful but if you’re someone who just likes to have sex then just use a condom because it’s so much easier.

Mark: Yeah, I agree with you because obviously I know that men, we’re not actually designed to wear rubber, I get why people don’t want to use it. You shouldn’t feel bad for getting to the height of the moment – and at the end of the day we’re humans, we walk on two feet, but sex is a very primitive, animal-like feeling, and I’ve been in situations where I haven’t wanted to wear condoms. And I’ve been thinking ‘must keep this condom on, must keep this condom on’ and by the end it’s disappeared somewhere or its broken. And just because I’m designed to enjoy it without, however because of the society we live in and because of the diseases out there, you do have to use one, what I do think is we shouldn’t rely on a pill. That money that we’re going to be using, £400 per person per month, that’s a lot of money, that money should be into the homeless on our streets, not so that you can’t get your end away without a condom. If you are allergic to latex, but I don’t think I know many that are so sorry if there’s anyone who is then by all means go to your doctor find out what alternative methods there are to latex condoms. But I’ve been offered at the clinic PrEP to go onto this scheme because I’m someone that I fall off the wagon, I’m very well educated, I know what I have to do, but every now and again I have to go to the clinic within 72 hours. Sometimes the person’s negative, I just don’t know because the test is only up to six or four weeks, so what were you doing in the last six weeks, just because you were negative six weeks ago doesn’t mean that you’re negative now which means I’ve now got to go to the clinic and get PEP.

Kayden: That’s a good point but PEP isn’t 100% effective, it’s about 80%.

Mark: I’m not saying I’m going to rely on PEP but I do know that humans make mistakes.

Patrick: Do we think that everyone knows about PEP on the gay scene?

Kayden: No, no. It’s a word that people have heard, but as long as you haven’t been in a situation where you’ve been at risk, it doesn’t affect you.

Mark: But you can be a gay man that’s not on the scene. That’s what we forget, there’s a lot of men out there who are gay who live their lives outside the scene, it’s only us who go out and have a socialise with our gay friends that will most probably be exposed to that type of information but if you live in the styx of Kent and that’s not really your thing, you just get up, go to work and hang out with your normal, straight friends, how would you know about that? But you’ve still got Grindr on your phone.

Patrick: Something that came up earlier was about the stigma surrounding HIV, do we think that’s still there?

Mark: There is a stigma. I dated someone when I was about 21, I met the most beautiful boy in the world, fell in love with him and we had the most amazing month and after a month he just disappeared on me. I cried and didn’t stop crying until he came back, and everyone was like ‘what’s wrong’ and I said ‘well, everything was so good, I don’t understand why he disappeared’. The only reason he can have disappeared is because he must have HIV. And then after about 3 months we started speaking again and he decided to tell me he had HIV, and up until that moment and that point I would never have dated anybody that was HIV positive, but I ended up being with that person for four years. I feel like at one stage I actually had HIV, because it was my boyfriend, it was who I lived with, and he still now, he’s really quiet and he doesn’t like anyone to know and people do know about it but if they come up to him it throws him off-guard.

Patrick: How did you navigate sex with him?

Mark: To be honest, we didn’t really have that much sex because he felt dirty and didn’t feel clean and he didn’t want me to become ‘dirty’.

Patrick: Have we heard people use the word dirty to do with HIV?

Mark: I think it’s wrong, you know. If you’ve got HIV it doesn’t mean you’re dirty, it’s a virus like any other. I don’t think this whole dirty ‘concept’ – even when you’re having sex with somebody and they go ‘oh, are you clean’?’ With my ex, his responsible part of the brain would come back in and he’d be like you’ve got to go to the clinic and he’d take me to the clinic, but it’s because of him why I’m actually sitting here. Because he opened up my eyes to so much and made me change my perception on how you do look at somebody with HIV. There’s a stereotype for every type of person in the world and I feel the stereotype for someone with HIV is definitely not true. Anybody could catch it, you could look like anybody, you could have any type of job, not necessarily because you were out being an idiot and being slutty, some people catch HIV because shit happens. I know people who’ve caught HIV the first time they’ve had sex.

Patrick: Thank you, that was a lovely story about your ex-boyfriend and how you combated stigma. But what about you guys, how do you see stigma about HIV on the gay scene?

Baga: I don’t know how other people think but for me personally I’ve got a lot of friends with it from the 80s, proper from the 80s, and I just see them as my mates and if anybody ever said ‘dirty’ or anything they’d get a smack in the gob from me, they would, they really would.

Kayden: But I think that’s because you’ve [Baga] had experience just like you’ve [Mark] had experience but a lot of people out there have not ever met someone, especially young people with HIV, so the first time that they are faced with, or before the face, it, they act like it’s a different race of people with HIV.

Mark: At some point in their life, everyone’s met somebody with HIV. Just because you don’t know, it’s about opening your mind.

Kayden: Of course. But then if you open your mind up, there will be no stigma. But I think there’s a lot of fear and that’s what causes it. People are scared of what they don’t know anything about.

Maximus: I think part of the problem as well is that people who are diagnosed don’t talk about it because they are scared of being rejected and because people aren’t talking about it it means that nobody else actually knows that’s going on. And because nobody knows it just becomes this hush-hush secret society of people with HIV. But I think the more things like this happens, the more people are able to find out information and knowledge is power at the end of the day. So I know that before my diagnosis I had dated three people with HIV and all three of them were very different. One of them was topsy-turvy, loopy-loo, it drove him insane. The other was very stable in terms of how he viewed himself. But it’s just really interesting to see that if affects so many people differently: for example you might meet someone who just seems like they’re always depressed and upset and not very happy and on the surface it just looks like they’re a crazy person because they don’t ever speak about their HIV and because it’s not something that would ever come up in discussion, that’s the end of it.

Mark: People should talk about it more.

Patrick: Definitely. Communication is coming up again and again here as a big key. Maximus, you mentioned just then your diagnosis and you completely don’t have to if you don’t want to but do you want to talk a little bit about your personal experience. Like, have you found stigma yourself?

Maximus: I haven’t found any stigma but that’s because I’m a really scary person. It’s one of those, like, ‘I dare you to say something’ situations. But in terms of having sex I think the most shocking thing I ever experienced was this guy that I met ages ago at a party, he must have sent me a message on Facebook asking if I wanted to stay round and have some fun, and I was like ‘yeah, that’s cool, but you do know I have HIV?’ and he was like ‘yeah, I know, that’s not a problem’ and that for me was the biggest shock because that was the first time I had sex after my diagnosis with someone who wasn’t positive. Then I actually came to realise there’s a lot less of a stigma now than there was, and prior to that moment, I was putting on a front ‘I’m fierce and I’m fabulous, I don’t care if I’ve got HIV’ but that fear of rejection was always there. But then I realised that people aren’t dumb, have a little bit more faith in humanity. You kind of realise that all you have to do is talk about it.

Mark: Can I talk about when you told me?

Maximus: Sure. This was in 2011, about a month after I was diagnosed.

Mark: And we were going out for a normal night at the Shadow Lounge, and he came over and said ‘by the way…’ and dropped it on me. Obviously I’d already been with my partner so it wasn’t a shock like ‘oh my god’ but I admired that he just came over and just told me. And he brushed it off, because I thought ‘everybody should be like that’. And our friend was like ‘oh my god, I can’t believe you told him’ and I’m like, well, why shouldn’t he?

Maximus: But I could talk about that because I’d seen your relationship prior, and I knew you could handle this shit. It’s nice to know that your friends can handle it, because if you can’t, then they’ll be there for you.

Patrick: In terms of communication, putting more communication into the gay scene, Baga would you ever consider incorporating HIV into a drag act?

Baga: Oh god, it’s a taboo thing to say on stage, because they wanna go out and get pissed. There are some performance artists at the RVT and stuff who say that, but I just sing a bit of Cilla Black and a couple of jokes.

Maximus: The thing is it is a heavy subject, a really heavy subject, and there’s a time and a place and sometimes it can be hard.

Baga: And you don’t want to offend anyone as well.

Mark: If someone’s recently been diagnosed and they’re going out to get away from it and then Baga comes on and starts making jokes about it, I don’t think that would go down.

Baga: We actually say you don’t say any jokes about race, about HIV, you don’t want to offend anyone and you want everyone to have a laugh. That’s why I take the piss out of myself.

Patrick: But there might be a way of using comedy as a tool of empowerment…

Mark: The gay scene’s full of performance artists, actors, singers, comedians, you could do something like that with HIV and QX, could you?

Patrick: Yeah, definitely.

Mark: For charity, it’s World AIDS Day on the 1st December.

Baga: There is actually a drag queen who said an HIV joke and she had a pint glass thrown at her.

Audience member: Was it a good joke?

Baga: I can’t say! You don’t have a pint glass on ya, do ya?!

Patrick: I think that’s been a great discussion, thank you guys.

 

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