'Archives of Feeling': The AIDS Crisis in Britain 1987

Mark Ashton found posthumous celebrity in 2014 in the film Pride, the story of a group of gays and lesbians from London who campaigned in support of striking miners and their families in 1984–5.¹ Many from the mining community were moved to reciprocate that support – travelling to London in July 1985 to lead off Gay Pride with the colliery band. This – the film suggests – was an emotional encounter between apparently very different groups of people who mobilized in each other's interests in a show of political solidarity articulated and perhaps experienced in terms of anger, compassion, empathy, and indeed pride – one of the emotions commonly if unevenly wrapped around ideas of gay identity and community for the last forty years

In this article I show why we need to take such emotions in the past seriously, especially when trying to understand moments of crisis in which – as Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940 – 'there can be a replacement of polity with an excitation of feelings'.² I hone in on a particular crisis – the AIDS epidemic in the UK; and a particular year: 1987. This was two years after the encounter of those 'Pits and Perverts' (as The Sun newspaper had it) and six years after the first known AIDS-related death in the UK. AIDS in Britain had by this time become most associated with people with haemophilia who were infected through contaminated blood products, with drug users who had shared needles, with babies infected by their mothers, and with gay men infected through unprotected anal sex. There were cases of transmission through heterosexual vaginal sex, but this was widely seen to belong to the crisis as it was unfolding elsewhere – in parts of Africa and Haiti, for example. The British press distinguished between 'innocent' haemophiliacs and babies on the one hand, and drug users and homosexuals on the other. Of the latter pairing, homosexuals were the most frequently associated with the virus and its devastating effects. This was because it was gay men who had been infected in the largest numbers in Britain and because they were already a demonized minority – and one which was developing a strident communal voice in part because of previous political organizing (in the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and Gay Liberation, for example). It is this group I focus on here.

By the end of 1987 around 2,500 people were known to be HIV-positive in the UK; roughly seventy percent of these were thought to have contracted the virus through sex with another man. Six hundred and ten people had died by this time – half in that year alone, signalling a marked escalation in the crisis. Among them was Mark Ashton, who died in February 1987 aged twenty-six. A few months later (in May) the Mass Observation social research project asked its panel of 1,300 'ordinary' people for their views on the intensifying crisis. Six hundred and thirty people responded, with 1,386 pages of largely handwritten testimony – forming an archive which gives us some shadowy sense of the emotional tumult surrounding AIDS in and around that particular year.

Of just two gay men among this 633 one, Mass Observer (MOer) 1108, was a friend of Mark's. Before I say more about the AIDS crisis and 1987, before I shape my argument via this and other archives, I want to cite the testimony of this 28-year-old London local government worker at some length because it maps out the emotional terrain I am seeking to navigate:

A mutual friend [of Mark's] who works in the same building as me asked me to go out to the corridor with her. … She waited until no one was around and then told me that Mark had been taken into hospital in the final stages of the disease. … I went back to my office and telephoned my partner to tell him that Mark was very ill. When he asked me what was wrong with him I did not say because I was afraid that the others in my office, hearing that I knew...