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Owen
‘I'm not as scared now, so it's easier to be angry...’

Owen

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Life before HIV: I was far unhappier than my friends, I know I was, and far less confident. And so my way of dealing with that was to drink more, take more drugs than they did and to just be stupid and loud and fall over and shout and get arrested and just be stupid, and that was what I did. When you're a teenage boy, and you want a girlfriend, you've got to be a man. It's as simple as that. And if you bleed - you're not.

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Finding out: Before I was told I knew, because it was in the media. There would be stuff on the TV mainly, I remember, and in the newspaper. Basically what it was saying was - there was this thing and it was killing gay men and it was horrible and awful and it was a killer - and oh, it might have got into some medical treatment for people with haemophilia. And it was so scary...

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Intimate relationships: It screwed up my sex life, because I didn't dare have sex with anyone. And when I did, I had to get really, really drunk to have sex with them, because I wanted to tell them I was positive and I didn't. So I used to end up just getting drunk and not having sex.

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Secrets and stigma: People are discriminated against now, but nothing like! You just wouldn't dream of telling people in those situations 20 years ago. You just wouldn't dream of it, because people were losing jobs, people were losing homes, people were losing families, you know. It's hard to grasp if you weren't around, or you weren't involved then, how frightening it was. It was frightening because you thought you were going to die; but it was just as frightening because you couldn't tell anyone.

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Help and support: I remember seeing one doctor. I'd gone up about something else, which was a very small thing, but what I think I had done was I had gone up there because I wanted to talk to somebody. I asked him about AIDS and what he thought, and he said to me: 'Look' he said, "They're telling you you might die, you might not. They might find some sort of treatment for it, so hang in there and try and think as positively as possible". And that's all he said, and I remember saying, "Really?" Because up until then I'd just been told you were going to die; the media tell you, the doctors tell you, everybody tells you. But I will always, always be grateful to him because he actually did give me a bit of hope.

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Sickness and treatment: As far as HIV goes, I feel pretty good. I've been on the combination therapy for only 14 months. I was very ill before I went on it, but I'm not now. I do get side effects, which aren't nice. It's summed up to me by someone, who said they were talking to a young boy and he said, "Every time I look at my cabinet with pills in it, it reminds me of what I've got and I feel sad and depressed", which must be every day of his life. And my mate who told me this said, "Well, every time I look at mine I think they're keeping me alive." And that's what I do.

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Anger and blame: Some people say it was a tragic accident. It wasn't a tragic accident. It was a series of fuck-ups. It was a series of mistakes by pharmaceutical companies in America, by the people who collected the blood, and bought and sold it in America. By the American government, by the American haemophilia associations...it was a screw up by our government, by the Department of Health, by our doctors, by our haemophilia organisations, it was a real screw up, all the way along. You can see it wasn't a tragic accident. People should have stopped it; it shouldn't have been allowed to happen.

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Telling this story: I think that the history of people with haemophilia and HIV is being re-written by the Government. That makes me very angry and I would like, in the future, for people to actually understand what happened to us and what is still happening to us and what's happened to the people who've died. From my perspective - and not the Government's or my doctor's or anyone else's!