David Menadue

Geoff Parkes

Having recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday, David Menadue is an AIDS survivor, living with the illness, the deaths and discrimination since the 1980s. Bent caught up with David as he released Positive, his chronicle of his life from small town country boy to international activist.

You separated your book into 3 parts, starting with the 80s, then the 50s and the 90s to now. Why this anti-chronological order?
The editor and I decided this was the best way to go. Apart from the opening scene when I had a severe psychological reaction to finally being diagnosed with AIDS, I had written the book in a chronological order. The editor suggested that the reader needed more about my HIV experience to understand why I was writing the book. After all, I’m not a famous person, and he thought that people might wonder what was so special about my story. This way people get to understand something about the difficult time I had in the 80s learning to live with my HIV diagnosis, the experience of growing up in a rural Victorian town in the 50s and 60s, the feeling that I was different from other boys and the last ten years of my life, dealing with a likely terminal prognosis, the treatment advances of the mid-nineties and how I felt on reaching my fortieth and now my fiftieth birthday.

Why did you feel compelled to share your story in this form?
I have been out to my family about being gay and having AIDS since 1989 when I first got sick. I didn’t have a choice then and had initially feared telling them my news. While they took a few months to adjust they became incredibly supportive - including my father who had been a shearer and had very masculine interests and thinking - and they didn’t even mind being public about my status in the media. I have been involved with People Living with HIV/AIDS Victoria since the late 80s and the support of my family and friends allowed me to be the organisation’s spokesperson on a number of issues. We need people to speak up on behalf of the positive population to get our issues addressed. It’s really one of the reasons I wrote the book - to help people in the broader community to understand the experience of living with HIV and to help positive people feel more comfortable about having the virus - and their chances of surviving it.

Barebacking appeared in the mid-nineties – why do you think it’s taken so long for HIV-AIDS organisations
to respond adequately instead of
until recently denying it as an American phenomenon?
I think AIDS Councils have been aware of barebacking for some time and different AIDS councils around the country have been trying to get space on Internet chat sites to discuss safe sex issues with the punters. The Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations has developed an interactive website to click into the cyber culture but it has been stopped by government authorities.
There has also been a feeling that barebacking was largely an American phenomenon that developed out of a less sex-positive culture in a repressed and religious mainstream society. It was hoped that Australian gay men had access to more explicit and honest messages about HIV than is available in the States.
Even so we have to acknowledge that it does happen in Australia, that there are neg guys out there who want to be nonconformist and snub the safe sex culture with their defiant protest, “No condoms!” I’m upset about their ignorance of HIV and know that they won’t enjoy the things the virus does to their bodies or the side-effects from the treatments. I don’t think AIDS Councils can stop that defiance totally - but I believe they are trying to the find the right messages for the range of gay sex cultures that are developing these days.

What did you get from writing this book and what do you think readers will get from reading it?
I learnt why I chose to pick out certain episodes in my life rather than others. Some things just poured onto the page and I realise they were largely the episodes of illness and deaths of my close friends. They had to be in the book as they were amongst the most intense and moving experiences I’ve had in my life.
Equally though I had to balance the text from the readers’ point of view with some humour and light touches. I looked to some of my wacky past boyfriends for some of that. I also thought the book needed a bit of sex and I really wanted to make the point that positive people should have intimacy and loving (and a bit of lust) in their lives like anyone else.
by Geoff Parkes

Published by Allen & Unwin.