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We are told that when Aids first struck, forty years ago, it caused the devastation it did because of the refusal of the conservative establishment to concede to the demands of gay activists about how this new disease should be fought. This was the narrative of a recent television documentary on RTE: “Memorial-the story of HIV/Aids in Ireland”. The programme was reviewed approvingly by the Irish Times which told us that it showed Ireland as “a country stuck in the sexual dark ages and thus unable to mobilise effectively against (the HIV) virus”. The Irish Independent likewise endorsed the programme’s view of “the early years of HIV/Aids, which found this small island with almost zero sex education… the ideal place to rampage”. So, we are supposed to believe, Aids wasn’t so much caused by the behaviour of gay men but rather was caused by everyone else, and the conservative establishment in particular, with gay men the innocent victims. I think this narrative is the opposite of the truth.
Nobody resisted facing reality about Aids so much as the gay activists did and, as I will argue, they still do. “We are all equally at risk” became the only public comment on Aids acceptable to the gay lobby along with the equally reality-defying assertion that “Aids does not discriminate”. Any journalist (I mean me) who stepped out of line and pointed to the obvious concentration of this illness in risk groups was denounced as a homophobe and a bigot. The idea of heterosexual Aids was relentlessly promoted by doctors and so-called Aids-awareness groups who set about spreading disinformation on this new illness instead of telling gay men what they needed to know. They may as well have told smokers that they were at no special risk of getting lung cancer.
So let’s recap on the facts about HIV infection. The most recent annual report from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre shows, for the year 2023, the same broad pattern of infection that has obtained since records began forty years ago. In 2023, there was a total of 991 people in Ireland diagnosed with HIV. Of these, 917 are immigrants and 74 Irish. Of the 74 Irish, 35 are recorded as homosexual men, 28 heterosexuals, 6 drug-injectors and 5 who say they don’t know how they got it. So the small portion of our population that is gay and male accounts for a massively disproportionate share of the total burden of infection. Aids discriminates.
Drill down into the figures and you will find that even the tiny amount of reported cases of heterosexual infection looks bogus. Too many of them are men. Of the 28 putative heterosexuals, 20 are male and 8 female. And this is despite the fact that women are far more likely to be tested for HIV (routinely during pregnancy) than men are. So what is going on here? Why, among Irish people, are women infecting men with HIV with far greater efficiency than men are infecting women? Is there something particularly dangerous about the Irish vagina? I think not. I think the more plausible explanation is that gay men lie about how they acquired HIV. A joke from early in the Aids era gets it right, in my opinion. Question: What do you call a man who catches Aids from his girlfriend? Answer: A liar.
And we can’t leave the subject of fake heterosexual HIV without noting that sex itself is no longer being recorded truthfully in medical data. Transgender ideology trumps biology in our health service. As the HPSC, in its latest HIV report, explains: “Unless otherwise stated, data are presented by gender. Gender is based on gender identity where it is provided, otherwise sex at birth is used. Gender identity refers to a person’s internal sense of themselves (how they feel inside) as being male, female, transgender, non-binary or something else. This may be different or the same as a person’s assigned sex at birth. All data presented by the gender male includes cis male and trans male and data presented by the gender female includes cis female and trans female.” All of which means that it is now possible for a homosexual man who is infected with HIV not only to choose to have himself recorded as a heterosexual man if he wants to but, if he prefers, he can now choose to have himself recorded as a heterosexual woman.
I first started to realise that heterosexual Aids was a no-show about 30 years ago, about ten years into the Aids era. Prior to that, I had believed everything the doctors and Aids educators had told me. The group of HIV-positive people I had got to know best through my work as a journalist was the injecting drug addicts, along with their spouses and partners. After a few years, I was noticing that many of the claimed cases of heterosexual infection, that is, infection from a drug-addict to his or her non-injecting partner, were at least dubious or simply false. “My Mary never took more than an aspirin” one mother told me, as she had told many other journalists, about her daughter who was dying of Aids. Mary’s sister, who also was HIV-positive and whom I had known for many years, interrupted her mother to tell her to stop fooling herself, and me, because “Mary has been turning on for as long as I have”.
Then came the Dungarven Aids hoax in 1995 in which, it was reported, five young men in that County Waterford town had been HIV-infected by a vengeful young woman. The myth of rising heterosexual Aids was being widely promoted by our medical profession at the time so it’s not surprising that many people believed the Dungarvan story to begin with. By 1995, I had formed the view that I hold still that if Aids is a venereal disease at all then what is inescapable is that it is one that is at least difficult to transmit between heterosexuals (what is called Aids in Africa, as I have long argued, is defined and measured in a different way from what is called Aids in the rest of the world). Reporting from Dungarven, I told RTE’s Drivetime programme that the Aids story in that town was not true because it implied an impossible level of heterosexual infection, a view I repeated in a weekly column I was then writing in the Irish Examiner.
Taking a dissenting position on Aids made me a lot of enemies. I was repeatedly told I was “stigmatising” people with Aids, a comment which puzzled me at the time but which, decades later, I think I’m finally coming to figure out as I will explain shortly. The publicly-funded free publication Gay Community News called me “Goebbels-like” and I became, and remain, a hate figure for gay activists in Ireland. Even just before I retired from RTE three years ago and I made a lap-of-honour series of radio programmes from my archives, I found myself under attack from those activists. One Trinity College academic took to social media to opine, in a post now deleted, that I should not be allowed on public radio at all because of my past “science denial” on Aids. When I challenged him he retreated to the position that, as someone who was involved in support groups for people who were HIV positive, he could tell me that I had “caused hurt to gay men”. That pleased me. I had only ever reported on Aids as I did because, as a journalist, I saw it as my job to tell the public what was going on. But now I know that I was causing gay men to face the uncomfortable thought that maybe they were at special risk after all and that what the doctors and so-called support groups were telling them was dangerous lies. So perhaps I saved gay men’s lives.
And the dangerous lies go on. We have a sexual health crisis among gay men in Ireland. Not only do they continue to contract HIV in massively disproportionate numbers, they also carry a huge burden of other sexually transmitted infections, largely driven, I would argue, by the perverse public health policy of encouraging unprotected sex between gay men through the provision to these men of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis. (I have written on Prep here)
You might think that, given this crisis, our health educators would tell gay men that they need to change their behaviour. You might think that it could be good to have a gay man who is HIV positive to front such a campaign. Such a man could tell other gay men, from a position of experience, not to do as he did if they want to stay healthy. You would be wrong. HIV Ireland tell us that their Glow Red campaign, announced on World Aids Day this year, “is led by TV presenter and activist Rebecca Tallon de Havilland whose work amplifies the voices of women and marginalised communities impacted by HIV”.
De Havilland is a trans-identified man. He was infected back in the early days of Aids when, he says, “we were told it came from Africa or that you had to be into seriously sexual things. And I thought, ‘I don’t do that stuff, I’m a middle-class girl from Ranelagh’”.
I take it that “middle-class” is code for “doesn’t inject heroin” in which case de Havilland would be right that the number of such women to have ever got HIV infected is vanishingly small.
The focus of the de Havilland-led campaign is, we are told, to combat HIV stigma. Speaking ahead of the launch, Chair of HIV Ireland, Steve Lynam stated: “Stigma remains one of the most significant barriers to ending the HIV epidemic”.
There’s that word again: stigma. I remember a few years back the reality TV star and current chair of the National LGBT Federation Anna Nolan expressed the view that people should be prepared to be as open about HIV positivity as much as about any other health condition. So if Anna Nolan ever contracts HIV we can reasonably assume that she will tell us about it. And then if she gets genital warts, will she tell us about that? What if she got rectal gonorrhoea, will she tell everyone? And if not, why not? Why is it that HIV, uniquely among sexually transmitted infections, is something that people are told they shouldn’t keep to themselves but should be telling everyone about?
Chlamydia is the most commonly reported STI in Ireland. I have never heard anyone say that in order to combat chlamydia, we have to combat chlamydia stigma. Chlamydia, like HIV and like all STIs, is spread through people being careless about their sexual health. Stigma is nothing to do with it.
But gay activists now, as ever, are not prepared to tell gay men that they should take responsibility for their own behaviour . It’s much easier to blame stigma for the spread of HIV. That way everyone else is to blame. Don’t tell gay men that they shouldn’t be having unprotected sex with multiple partners because that would be to stigmatise them.
Gay activists are in denial about how HIV spread among gay men at the beginning of the Aids era and they are in denial about how it is still spreading now. We do them no favours by participating in their delusions.
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