Marknow wrote:
What was the story with Montsy when he stopped her drinking from his glass? This was post diagnosis around Easter'87 was it?
Many people who may have been exposed in the early 80's hid from it and got on with life until it became obvious they had Aids and finally got diagnosed. It was a strange phenomenon but it did happen, quite unbelievable by today's standard.
Yes they hid from it in public, and that was very understandable. It was a huge, huge stigma.
Even "innocent" victims like Ryan White, and the Ray brothers, faced extreme stigmatisation, although they were hemophiliacs and essentially entirely blameless for getting the disease (blood products weren't screened for HIV until 1985, and unfortunately a huge percentage of hemophiliacs became infected).
But there is a very important difference between hiding your HIV status from the public/friends and so on, and hiding it from your lover. The latter is criminal, because it means you are knowingly exposing that person to what was at the time a 100% fatal virus.
Oh, and all that crap about Jim not knowing who infected whom stems from Jim's ignorance - with all due respect to him (I don't mean to insult the dead). Freddie slept with an innumerable number of men, whilst Jim would have slept with a relatively small number. And Jim never developed AIDS, which means he still didn't have AIDS in 1996 when HAART became available, which in turn means he was infected much later than Freddie. In other words, Freddie infected him when they met.
But let us just for the sake of argument depict a scenario where Jim already had HIV when he met Freddie. He obviously would not have known he had it (he got to know in 1990). On the other hand, Freddie knew he had it, and yet he left Jim none the wiser about this.
Quite a furore erupted when it came to light that Liberace infected three men, knowingly, with HIV. But not much is ever said about how Saint Freddie knowingly put Jim at risk.
The only explanation I can give to Freddie's behaviour which goes a small way towards exonerating him is this: by the time Freddie got to know he had HIV - i.e. 1985 - he had already been sleeping with Jim. Hence, he might have thought that whatever harm could be done, had already been done by then, so it would be useless to tell him at that point. This sort of rationalisation does in a way lessen Freddie's blame (from a moralistic if not from a criminal standpoint). But it still stands that he had the ethical duty to inform his lover immediately once his HIV status became known - not wait two bloody years till he did the KS biopsy. It really shows that Freddie didn't give much of a shit about Jim. He only became sentimental about him when he had lost all his looks, all his sex drive, etc, and he needed someone stable by his side.
Freddie was a generous, funny, kind, highly emotional and fun guy to be around. But he had absolutely no morals whatsoever. He was frankly a depraved, ultra-hedonistic, perverse sex addict. I'm ok with that. I still love him, despite that.
