Memory is an unreliable guide, so they say, and as Joni Mitchell (1975) put it: ‘Every picture has its shadows, and it has some source of light.’ I write as a White HIV-positive gay cisgender man, born and living in Aotearoa New Zealand, approaching my sixties. New Zealand is geographically part of the Global South and today much more aware of its Indigenous culture and our place in the Pacific than in my youth, but economically and culturally more aligned to the Global North, to Europe and North America rather than to Africa, Asia or South America. This fact also shapes my experiences.

In my late teens, I lived in Australia; in my twenties, I spent eight months in the United States and then eight years in Turkey. AIDS nearly killed me a couple of times. I am aware of my privilege, and I frame my writing here with that background. I do not pretend to tell a universal story, but believe there are aspects of my own story that will resonate with others. I hope what I am exploring here will add to our understanding of how we as gay men got to where we are now, from the pre-AIDS days and through the worst of that catastrophe to the world we are in today. I want to write about sex, about HIV, about culture and ageing within it.

There used to be a Pride centre here in Auckland, that had a library, a big library. It was largely made up of books from men who had died of AIDS.

There were multiple copies of some books, and I still have some of these on my own shelves.

The Front Runner. Faggots. Dancer from the Dance. Maurice. Lovers: The Story of Two Men. Giovanni’s Room. Our Lady of the Flowers, to name a few.

One younger gay man I know recently said Faggots blew his mind. He’d never realised such a world existed. He found it and loved it.

One reason there were multiple copies is that in New Zealand in the 1970s these books were so hard to get, and one place you could get them was the Out! bookshop, attached to the office of the magazine of the same name.