Richard Leaf: The Real Stories from the AIDS Pandemic

Richard Leaf, an English writer, pursued his education in San Francisco and then embarked on a career in theatre. His journey led him to the Royal Shakespeare Company and appearances in notable films such as Braveheart, Hannibal Rising, The Fifth Element, and Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix.  In the early 80s, he bore witness to the challenges of the AIDS pandemic in San Francisco, and in the 1990s, he devoted himself to volunteering at the Mildmay Hospice, an experience that left an indelible mark on his heart.

He says the shared struggles of having HIV/AIDS fostered generosity and encouragement between individuals at the Mildmay hospice.  Their shared experience of facing a terminal illness and stigma brought them together to support each other through difficult times, which Richard Leaf admires as an embodiment of unconditional love.

This podcast series features stories taken from our first book, a collection of essays, reflections, and testimonies also entitled ‘Love, Loss & Life’ which you can buy here.

An audiobook is also available here.

Visit the National HIV Story Trust website

Transcript

Christopher Ashman: 0:06

Love, Loss & Life: Real Stories from the AIDS Pandemic. This is Richard Leaf's story, read by Christopher Ashman, with an introduction by Anita Dobson.

Anita Dobson: 0:34

Richard Leaf is an English writer who went to University in San Francisco and lived there from 1978 to 1983, working after he graduated in theatre. He returned to the UK in 1983 to go to drama school, and then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has appeared in films such as Braveheart, Hannibal Rising, The Fifth Element, Harry Potter, and the Order of the Phoenix. Richard Leaf witnessed the early days of the AIDS pandemic in San Francisco in the early 1980s as an outsider, a straight man. In the 1990s, he began volunteering at the Mildmay Hospice, and the memory of the people he encountered there will remain with him forever.

Richard Leaf (read by Christopher Ashman): 1:27

San Francisco at the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s was the most wonderful, freeing place to be. It was a revelation. Joyous, confrontational, liberal, terrific fun. My girlfriend at the time hung out on the fringes of the gay scene and took me to Polk and Castro. You would go down to Castro on Halloween, and I'd never seen anything like it. It was incredible street theatre. I remember one guy dressed as a Pan Am stewardess waltzing down the street, "please fasten your seat belts," doing the whole routine, or the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of gay men dressed as nuns who raised money for charity. I was completely naive about gay sexuality at the time, being straight and essentially monogamous. I had a job for a while painting the front of a toy shop owned by two gay guys who were a couple. They gave me carte blanche to make it as colourful as I could - gold and green, yellow and blue and purple. Every lunchtime, one would leave the shop and go up to the park for lunch. Then he'd come back and the other would leave and go to the park. I thought it curious. And it was only when my girlfriend explained it to me that I understood. That was San Francisco. A tangible atmosphere of anything goes. But there were also pockets of redneck prejudice in the city. People with long hair and beards who would spit in your face if they thought you looked different. I had short hair and an earring and wore suits with skinny ties. And I would be called faggot and have stones thrown at me. Not long after I arrived in the city, Harvey Milk, a local politician and gay activist was assassinated, along with the Mayor, George Moscone, who'd signed a bill outlawing discrimination against gays. Then one day, people you worked with in the theatre there suddenly stopped coming into work. They would disappear into a black hole. We didn't know what was wrong with them. People died very quickly, and horror stories began to circulate about the lesions, emaciation. people's skin falling off. I remember sitting in a friend's house having my hair cut. A TV evangelist appeared on the screen and said, "AIDS is God's vengeance on the gay community." It made me feel sick. The men dying might have had the kind of lifestyle I didn't, but they didn't deserve this. After my visa and my money ran out, and I went home, letters from friends in San Francisco kept arriving. Telling of more illness among people we knew, more deaths. There was a palpable sense of fear to among the gay people I worked with in UK theatre. We were all shocked when in 1990 the actor Ian Charleson died. I was between acting jobs and my first marriage had broken down, so I started doing voluntary work, almost as a kind of therapy really, to take my mind off my own problems. After a stint at a homeless hostel, I became involved with the Mildmay Hospice in Shoreditch, where a friend of mine had a job. The Mildmay had a daycare centre where I spent most of my time, but they also had inpatient rooms for respite care, or when people were reaching the end, I'd make cups of tea, give people their lunch, fetch their medication from the pharmacy and hear their stories. At that time, having AIDS and HIV was a terrible stigma. People tried to hide that they had it because rumours circulated among the public about how it could be caught from tears or sweat, which was rubbish. For our clients to come to a place like that day centre where they could be open and recognised for who they were, was a release. I was a churchgoer. And Mildmay was a Christian organisation. But the real embodiment of Christ, that unconditional love that transcends everything, was in those people who came to the day centre. They were staring at a death sentence. Because there was no cure. It was only a matter of time, and they all knew it. They had the lesions, they grew thin, then they were gone. But their generosity towards each other was without parallel in my experience. AIDS has its peaks and troughs. And whenever someone hit a trough, the friends they'd made at the Mildmay would do whatever they could to help them through. They were indefatigable in the service of each other, they would walk across town to encourage and support each other, cooking their food, sitting holding their hands, they were all on benefits, because they could no longer work. So to save money, they would walk everywhere, instead of taking the bus or tube. And it took its toll on their feet. I admired them for their bluntness. They would come in and say, I'm having a shit day. Can someone please come and bathe my feet. It was a privilege to do it. As well as gay men, there were also women, drug users, or Africans, or simply people whose partners had passed the virus to them. That's when it hits you that this is not some ghetto condition affecting just one group of people. This is everybody. We are all in this. One of my jobs was to go round the wards and ask people if they'd like a priest to give them Holy Communion. I remember knocking on one door to see an African gentleman in his pyjamas shaving his cheek to try to maintain some sort of dignity, some fading sense of the person he had been before his illness. He turned and looked at me with his face full of awful shame because of the way he looked. His whole lip was peeling off. Like someone's sloughing their skin, a horrific sight. He told me yes, he would like Communion. But I'd never witnessed someone so caught between their struggle to be seen as human and their fear of what was happening to them. Another time, I knocked on a door and went in to find pitch darkness. Like a pit. You could sense the rage in the room. When I asked if the person there would like to take communion. A howl of raw anger came from the bed. "Aghhhh, f_____ ooooooff...." Furious, terrified. That sort of moment never leaves you. Many, many people have done much, much more than I did, more tirelessly, more selflessly trying to find a cure so people can have hope and get better. But what I took from my experience at the Mildmay is that our value isn't dependent on our bank account or our status in society, or the job we do. Our value is our humanity shared with other people. In the face of equally insurmountable troubles, especially these days when times are strange and turning, the thing we can all do is the thing right in front of us to hold out our hand to the next person who needs help. If you're blinded by the tsunami of horror coming at you, you will be nothing more than driftwood. Those examples of unconditional love at the Mildmay have stayed with me forever. I've forgotten almost all of their names, because I'm hopeless at names. But those faces, they never leave me.

Christopher Ashman: 9:46

Thank you for listening to this story from Love, Loss & Life, a collection of stories reflecting on 40 years of the AIDS pandemic in the 80s and 90s. To find out more about the National HIV Story Trust, visit nhst.org.uk. The moral rights of the author has been asserted. Text copyright NHST 2021 Production copyright NHST 2022.