Love, Loss & Life: Real Stories from the AIDS Pandemic: Jonathan Blake

Actor Jonathan Blake describes the excitement of his youth when he first encountererd the gay scene in London and San Francisco. His story is both delicious and dangerous and life was joyful. He tells how he had to rally against ‘a terrifying disease’ and the world stopped. Jonathan reveals how the impact changed his behaviours, but his humour and exuberant love of life continues.

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

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'Love, Loss and Life' - Real Stories from the AIDS pandemic. This is Jonathan Blake's story read by Christopher Ashman with an introduction by Anita Dobson. Born in 1949, Jonathan Blake went to Rose Bruford drama school, worked in theatre during the 1970s and later became a costume designer with English National Opera, after being diagnosed HIV positive in 1982. Jonathan in 'Pride' was based on him, a film which told how a group of gay political activists supported the miners strike in 1984 with a mining community in South Wales. Actor Jonathan Blake describes the excitement of his youth when he first encountered the gay scene in London and San Francisco. His story is both delicious and dangerous, and life was joyful. He tells how he had to rally against a terrifying disease and the world stopped. Jonathan reveals how the impact changed his behaviour. But his humour and exuberant love of life continues. When I watched 'Pride' for the first time, it felt as if I had all the people from 'LGSM'(Lesbian and Gay Men Support Miners) who were no longer here sitting on my shoulder. And all I could do was think of them. It's not a film about AIDS, but it's impossible to separate that time in the early 1980s from what was happening in the gay community then. The film is full of images of people clasping hands, and its message is that when communities come together, they can do anything. Which is also for me the story of how the gay community itself responded to HIV and AIDS in those early years. We came together and we made a difference. I knew very early on in life that I was different. As a small child, I had a crush on the school caretaker. I couldn't get enough of the scent of his body odour. Later, I went to a boys boarding school, and it was like heaven. Homosexuality was still illegal then, but the Sexual Offences Act in 1967 allowing homosexual acts between consenting adults came in, just as I was heading to drama school. The age of consent for gay men was set at 21, but I didn't let that stop me. I spent every weekend around the Kings Road in London, in gay pubs, the Colville, opposite the Duke of York's barracks, the Coleherne in Earls Court, a hangout for the leather brigade. There was Hyde Park, there was Hampstead Heath, there were parties and saunas and Turkish baths. I was a young actor, and everybody wanted a slice of youth. It was all so exciting, but still very much on the edge, which was part of the frisson. The law only allowed homosexual acts between consenting adults in private. If you were at a club like Mandy's in Covent Garden, the bouncers would prise you apart if they considered you were dancing too close because the club was afraid of losing its licence. If you took more than one person back to your flat, the police had the right to break down the door. And there were frequent raids on Hampstead Heath and other gay haunts. I decided to come out to my parents only once I was 21 - I feared they might shop me to the police for having underage sex - and on my birthday, at breakfast, I sat them down and told them. My mother said calmly, 'But darling, we knew'. My acting career was one of fits and start with long periods of'resting' and waiting tables at Joe Allen's restaurant in Covent Garden, which employed out-of-work actors. In the early 70s I had some success in a BBC television series 'The Regiment', so when some rich Americans I met invited me to New York, I could afford several months there, sampling the delights of the bath houses, at one point living in an apartment above the 'Continental Baths' where Bette Midler started. The gay scene in the States was so much bigger and brasher and more hardcore than ours, and I was having a ball. But in my heart of hearts, I knew I wanted to be an actor and to do that, I would have to return to London. By the early 1980s, I was still working at Joe Allen's in between acting jobs. Then a friend of mine was getting married in San Francisco, so I flew over for her wedding and spent a couple of weeks there, rooming with George Hodson. Although the first cases of what came to be known as AIDS had already been identified on the West Coast, no one really talked about it, and the life of the bath houses seemed as extravagantly exciting as ever. But back home in London, in September that year, every lymph gland in my body erupted. I couldn't bear to hold my arms to my side. My legs were agony. I had to give up my job at Joe Allen's and my GP referred me to the 'special' clinic at the Middlesex, suspecting syphilis. It wasn't. Shunted onto a side ward where they put the gay men, in the bed next to me was an actor I'd met on tour, and he was at death's door. I was told I had a virus called HTLV-3, later renamed HIV, and that there was no treatment for it. It was effectively a terminal diagnosis. I turned in on myself. By December, I decided I might as well commit suicide. I'd cut myself off from my friends and was completely isolated. Everything I'd heard about AIDS convinced me I die a horrible death, so I planned to pre-empt it, and slit my wrists in the bath, suitably medicated to avoid any pain. But I'm my mother's son, obsessively fastidious and tidy. And the thought of someone having to clean up after my messy death was so appalling that I couldn't go through with it. I thought I would never reach 40, let alone pension age. So how did I survive when others didn't? So many died so quickly. Mark Ashton, the gay activist whose character also appears in'Pride', lived for only 10 days after he was told he had AIDS in 1987. Maybe it was sheer bloody-mindedness that preserved me. I reasoned that, since I couldn't kill myself, I'd better get out and live. I made myself go out again to gay bars and'The London Apprentice' pub. Then I saw in a gay newspaper that gay activists were organising an anti-nuclear protest around Greenham and Aldermaston. I'd always been politically committed, and though I feared I wouldn't know a soul, I hauled myself down to'Gay's The Word' bookshop to catch the hired coach. The first person I saw was a guy in ochre and crimson pantaloons and wellington boots, with a shock of black hair. His name was Nigel young, and he eventually became my partner. By now I'd realised it was important to keep busy, because the more I kept busy, the less I thought about the virus. If you were out of work and claiming benefits, as I was, you could pay a pound and the GLC (Greater London Council) would fund you to do as many adult education classes as you wanted. I learned to make trousers and took a course on pattern cutting - which eventually led to a job with the wardrobe department at English National Opera. And it was Nigel who persuaded me to join 'LGSM', which became in my case a kind of displacement activity to help me outrun AIDS. But at the same time, I felt passionately that the striking miners deserved our support. They were being harassed by the police, just as we gays had suffered constant police oppression. To offer friendship and support is something very precious. When communities get to know one another, prejudice disappears. It still blows me away that it was the South Wales miners who later pressured the National Union of Miners to use their block vote to put gay rights onto the Labour Party agenda, which brought about the lowering of the age of gay consent to 16 and civil partnerships. How extraordinary is that? Even more amazing to think we had a hand in it. I refused to take part in the early drug trials for AZT in the 1980s, which the pharmaceutical companies were putting forward as a possible treatment. And I believe that too, was a factor in keeping me alive. So many people were made worse by AZT, because doctors hadn't yet worked out how it could be used successfully. And I watched friends dying in agony. 15 years later, I finally gave in and underwent combination therapy, which made an extraordinary difference. Within a month, I went from being barely able to peel myself off the sofa to having the energy of giants, though like many others, I paid a price. Brutal side effects, such as peripheral neuropathy, where the nerve endings are shot. Looking back to the 1980s, there was something really precious in the way the gay community came together in those years, to help others and to rally against a terrifying disease. The drop-in centres like The Lighthouse, Body Positive and The Landmark where I volunteered, the extraordinary dialogue between patients and doctors that helped push forward treatment, the sharing of information that eventually gave us power over the virus. The genius of Steven Beresford, who wrote the screenplay for 'Pride', is that my character, a man with HIV comes across in no way as a victim. And I'm proud of that. In too many dramas, the character with HIV is portrayed as the victim who is on their way to a sad end. But the more we can see people with HIV as normal, leading positive lives, the more we remove the stigma. For almost 40 years now I've been HIV positive. I'm a good Jewish boy, and "L'Chaim" is a toast in Hebrew that means 'to life'. To survive is not enough. You have to get out there and live. 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