Journalism from the AIDS Years 1982-2003

By Adam Carr and Dr Hon Neal Blewett AC

By the beginning of 1982, Adam Carr had started to hear about a 'new' disease apparently affecting mostly gay men and his first ever article on AIDS appeared in GCN in February of that year. It carried the rather flippant title "Will We All Die of 'Gay Cancer'?" This reflected the scepticism with which Adam, like most gay activists and journalists, received the initial reports that there was an outbreak of cancer specific to gay men.
This article began a long journey of research, writing and activism around AIDS in the gay community, and in this part biography, part memoir, Adam looks back and details his years of writing about AIDS and the many impacts it had on the gay community of Australia during this time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922553928

Book preview

Adam Carr addressing the public meeting which formed the Victorian AIDS Council, December 1984

About the Author

Adam Carr at the Barcelona AIDS Conference, 2002

Dr Adam Carr was born in Melbourne in 1953. He was educated at Monash University (dropped out twice), Prahran College of Advanced Education (Diploma of Art and Design), and Melbourne University, where he completed a PhD in Australian history in 2002.

From 1979 to 2004 he wrote for and sometimes edited a succession of gay newspapers and magazines, including Gay Community News, OutRage, Sydney Star Observer, Melbourne Star Observer, Capital Q, BNews and Melbourne Star. He also wrote for Gay Health Update and the National AIDS Bulletin.

Adam Carr was a founding member of the Victorian AIDS Action Committee in 1983, the Victorian AIDS Council ¹ in 1984 and the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations in 1985. He was Vice-President of VAC in 1984-86, President in 1986-87, and Vice-President again in 1987-89. He was Deputy Chair of the Victorian Ministerial Advisory Committee on AIDS from 1989 to 1992 and a member of the National AIDS Forum. He worked at the Barcelona (2002) and Bangkok (2004) International AIDS Conferences as editor of the conference newspaper.

From 2003 to 2020 he worked (on and off) as an electorate officer, speech-writer, adviser and chief of staff to Labor politicians in Melbourne and Canberra. After enduring the 2020 COVID winter lockdown in Melbourne, he fled to his retirement home in Thailand, where he now lives.

Editorial Note

These articles are presented as they were published. In some cases they are not exactly as I wrote them, since editors occasionally made cuts or alterations, but I have not attempted to reconstruct the original text.

I have made minor edits to correct spelling and punctuation errors. In a few places I have cut out material which seems to me to be no longer of interest (particularly in the very long article The AIDS Epidemic of June 1983), but I have not removed material merely on the grounds that my opinions turned out to be wrong. Where I was wrong, and also where I want to point out that I was right, I have added footnotes.

Readers will notice that the expressions queer and LGBTI (and its variants) do not appear anywhere in this text. In the period these articles were written (1982 to 2003), these expressions were not in general use. In these articles the word gay is used to refer to self-identified gay men. The expression the gay community usually refers to the gay male community, although in some contexts it may refer to the community of gay men and lesbians.

eISBN: 9781922553928

Abbreviations

ACON: AIDS Council of NSW

ACT-UP: AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power

AFAO: Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations

AIDS: Acquired immune deficiency syndrome

ANCA: Australian National Council on AIDS

ARC: AIDS-related complex

ATF: AIDS Task Force

AZT: Azidothymidine, later Zidovudine

CDC: Centers for Disease Control

CMV: Cytomegalovirus

COVID: Corona virus disease

DDC or ddC: dideoxycytidine

DDI or ddI: dideoxyinosine

GCN: Gay Community News

GLNS: Gay lymph node syndrome

GMCHC, GMHC: Gay Men’s Community Health Centre, later

Gay Men’s Health Centre

HAART: highly-active antiretroviral therapy

HIV: Human immunodeficiency virus

HIV-Ab+: HIV antibody-positive

HTLV-III: Human T-cell leukaemia virus, Type III

KS: Kaposi’s sarcoma

NACAIDS: National Advisory Committee on AIDS

NH&MRC: National Health and Medical Research Council

PCP: pneumocystis carinii pneumonia

PEP: post-exposure prophylaxis

PKC: Peter Knight Centre

SAPA: Social Aspects of the Prevention of AIDS

SARS: Severe acute respiratory syndrome

TGA: Therapeutic Goods Administration

VAAC: Victorian AIDS Action Committee

VAC: Victorian AIDS Council

Guide to Contents

I don’t expect anyone to read this book from beginning to end. At 315,000 words, it’s longer than Ulysses (but not as long as War and Peace). What I hope readers will do is use it as a research resource. To be useful for that purpose, it needs a guide to its contents.

A traditional table of contents would be rather pointless in a book which has no sections or chapters, but which consists of more than 200 articles in chronological order, So instead I have provided an alphabetical list of topic headings, which are hyperlinked to the relevant articles. Some articles appear under more than one heading.

It would also be pointless to include a traditional index in a book which has no page numbers, and in which the text is searchable. But at the end of the book there is an alphabetical index of articles, which are also hyperlinked.

AIDS Councils

Victorian gays act on AIDS - OutRage, August 1983

Resolution of a public meeting of the Victorian gay community, 6 December 1984

We deserve to live - OutRage, February 1985

Proposal for dealing with the issue of sex venues - Paper for the VAC Committee, 10 April 1985

Victorian AIDS Council meets new challenges - Media release, 11 June 1985

VAC Committee requests resignation of Treasurer - Gay Health Update, 9 August 1985

Making VAC work better: for its members and for those it serves - A Statement by the VAC Committee of Management - (Gay Health Update, 27 June 1986

Time to put up or shut up - Melbourne Star Observer, August 1986

Surveyed up to here - Melbourne Star Observer, January 1987

VAC and GMCHC: where we came from and where we are going - Melbourne Star Observer, October 1987

Memorandum on VAC-GMCHC integration - Presented to the VAC Committee and GMCHC Board, 2 October 1987

The Victorian gay community and its role in the fight against AIDS - National AIDS Bulletin, May 1988

Motions for VAC/GMCHC Joint Board - 1 June 1988

Why we have AIDS Councils - National AIDS Bulletin, March 1989

AIDS Councils: who’s in charge? - Antibody column, OutRage, December 1989

VAC after ten years - Melbourne Star Observer, July 1993

Ten Years of the Victorian AIDS Council, 1983-93 - Commissioned article for VAC, July 1993

A dangerous decade: Ten years of the Victorian AIDS Council, 1983-93 - Written for the 1993 VAC/GMHC Annual Report

ACON, the press and the truth about AIDS - OutRage, November 1995

The rise and rise of O’Reilly - OutRage, November 1995

A chance to make a difference - Melbourne Star, July 2003

The courage of our convictions - Speech on the 30th Anniversary of the Victorian AIDS Council, July 2013

Alternative therapy issues

Gay good health in the age of AIDS - OutRage, April 1985

Quacks, cranks and frauds - Melbourne Star Observer, March 1986

Some matters of faith - Melbourne Star Observer, April 1986

Vitamin C as HIV treatment - Antibody column, OutRage, February 1991

Ozone therapy: where is the evidence? - OutRage February 1993

Antibody testing

Gay men should ignore this test - OutRage, February 1985

Once again, the antibody test - AIDS Action, Victorian AIDS Council newsletter, July 1985

VAC responds to Task Force on antibody testing - Gay Health Update, 14 February 1986

Antibody testing: our case on the table - Melbourne Star Observer, July 1986

Your antibody status is nobody’s business - Gay Health Update, September 1987

A testing time for gay men - Melbourne Star Observer, September 1988

Treatment, testing and discrimination - Antibody column, OutRage, October 1989

Finding the infected but untested - Antibody column, OutRage, November 1989

VAC and ACON on HIV testing - Antibody column, OutRage, March 1990

Dramatic proof of benefits of HIV testing - Antibody column, OutRage, June 1990

HIV testing: the ethical balance - OutRage March 1992

AZT (azidothymidine, Zidovudine)

VAC warns that AZT is not a cure for AIDS - Gay Health Update, 26 September 1986

Best chance drug not here till mid ’87 - OutRage, November 1986

AFAO to act on AZT crisis - (Gay Health Update, 4 September 1987

AIDS drugs: a year after AZT - OutRage, January 1988

Zidovudine and its critics - Antibody column, OutRage, May 1989

Zidovudine slows onset of illness - Antibody column, OutRage, October 1989

Drug trial special - Antibody column, OutRage, February 1990

Words of caution on AZT - Antibody column, OutRage, July 1990

Is AZT poison? A question of evidence versus anecdote - OutRage April 1992

Is ddI better than AZT? It seems so - OutRage August 1992

AZT: who to believe? - OutRage May 1993

Berlin: new AZT doubts - OutRage June 1993

No concord on AZT study - OutRage, June 1994

A short history of AZT - OutRage, October 1995

Reality check: what is the truth about HIV/AIDS treatments? - OutRage, April 1996

Blewett, Dr Hon Neal MP

The gay community meets the challenge - OutRage, December 1984

Warnings for future in Blewett statement - Gay Health Update, 24 May 1985

Blewett on kneejerk AIDS legislation - Melbourne Star Observer, November 1985

The man with the golden tongue - Antibody column (Julian Gold), OutRage, June 1989

Conferences

AIDS: the Australian response - Speech to the First National Conference on AIDS, Melbourne, November 1985

Blewett on kneejerk AIDS legislation - Melbourne Star Observer, November 1985

The outlook from Paris: hope remains present - OutRage, August 1986

AIDS global crisis, conference told - Melbourne Star Observer, November 1986

Home truths for all at AIDS conference - OutRage, December 1986

President returns from Washington Conference - Gay Health Update, 26 June 1987

The Washington AIDS Conference: optimism amid the ashes - OutRage, August 1987

AIDS community forged at Hobart conference - Melbourne Star Observer, August 1988

Out in the cold in Canberra - OutRage, October 1990

Berlin: new AZT doubts - OutRage June 1993

Congress puts epidemic into public view - BNews, October 2001

ICAAP’s friendly invasion - BNews, October 2001

HIV/AIDS, progression of epidemic

Will we all die of gay cancer - Gay Community News, February 1982

AIDS in Australia - OutRage, June 1983

The AIDS epidemic - OutRage, June 1983

AIDS: new theories, more panic - OutRage, July 1983

New US-related AIDS case in Melbourne - OutRage, October 1983

AIDS virus research breakthrough: have American scientists found the long-sought AIDS virus? - OutRage June 1984

AIDS: the coming crisis - OutRage, November 1984

Firm link between AIDS and sex practices established - OutRage, December 1984

Will AIDS become a heterosexual plague? - OutRage, June 1985

The forecast is: stormy weather ahead - OutRage, July 1985

AIDS: the Australian response - Speech to the First National Conference on AIDS, Melbourne, November 1985

Seeing the wood for the trees - OutRage, April 1986

Luc Montagnier’s charm and optimism - OutRage, September 1986

Our prospects for 1987 - Melbourne Star Observer, January 1987

Firm evidence on how virus is transmitted - Gay Health Update, 24 April 1987

AIDS: here is the very bad news - OutRage, May 1987

Continued fall in Victoria’s gay-related STD figures - Gay Health Update, 7 August 1987

Fooling the AIDS virus - Melbourne Star Observer, February1988

What to do till the doctor comes - National AIDS Bulletin, June 1988

Time for some good news - OutRage, June 1989

AIDS: It’s World War III - OutRage, January 1990

HIV and young gay men - Antibody column, OutRage, January 1990

Is AIDS peaking among gay men? - Antibody column, OutRage, March 1990

"No relationship between latency and survival" - Antibody column, OutRage, January 1991

The history of HIV/AIDS: a tenth anniversary reflection - OutRage January 1992

The news is there is no news (well, not much) - OutRage June 1992

HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis - Antibody column, OutRage December 1992

TB or not TB? - OutRage November 1993

The paradox of history - Melbourne Star Observer, February 1996

Meeting HIV’s new challenge - BNews, March 2001

Twenty years of HIV/AIDS - BNews, March 2001

Coming soon: condomless sex (maybe) - Melbourne Star, September 2002

AIDS and SARS: the past revisited - BNews, May 2003

Victoria’s AIDS crisis: who’s to blame? - Melbourne Star May 2003

International

Jim Curran: the man without the answers - OutRage, October 1985

US gay movement faces difficult future - OutRage, December 1985

Luc Montagnier’s charm and optimism - OutRage, September 1986

Lyndon LaRouche is talking to you - Melbourne Star Observer, November 1986

Up the Volga without a paddle - Antibody column, OutRage, July 1989

Apocalypse close up: the AIDS crunch in New York and San Francisco - OutRage, August 1989

Thailand’s looming AIDS disaster - Antibody column, OutRage, August 1990

How ACT-UP cracked up - Antibody column, OutRage, April 1991

Kinsey stands the test of time - Melbourne Star Observer, May 1993

TB or not TB? - OutRage November 1993

The Asian sex trade: dangerous work - Melbourne Star, October 2001

World AIDS Day: do you care? - BNews, November 2001

The politics of denial in San Francisco - BNews, December 2001

Where are the billions? - BNews, July 2002

Falling behind on AIDS - BNews, November 2003

HIV crises near and far - Melbourne Star, November 2003

Medical controversies (see also AZT)

Drugs and AIDS: the controversy continues - OutRage, May 1985

Will AIDS become a heterosexual plague? - OutRage, June 1985

The car-crash syndrome - Melbourne Star Observer, May 1986

Will there be a vaccine against AIDS? - Melbourne Star Observer, May 1986

Luc Montagnier’s charm and optimism - OutRage, September 1986

Mosquito lobby buzzes again - Melbourne Star Observer, September 1986

AIDS: here is the very bad news - OutRage, May 1987

HIV and deadly denial - Antibody column, OutRage, March 1989

The mystery of KS - Antibody column, OutRage, May 1990

Evidence on co-factors for progression - Antibody column, OutRage, July 1990

AIDS voodoo link horror - Antibody column, OutRage, May 1991

New debate on the causes of AIDS - OutRage February 1992

The news is there is no news (well, not much) - OutRage June 1992

Loopy theories special - OutRage October 1992

Clash of the giant theories - OutRage, February 1994

Penington, Professor David

Professor Penington’s crystal ball - OutRage, March 1985

Is there an AIDS cover-up? - Melbourne Star Observer, November 1985

US evidence contradicts Task Force - OutRage, November 1985

VAC responds to Task Force on antibody testing - Gay Health Update, 14 February 1986

Antibody testing: our case on the table - Melbourne Star Observer, July 1986

Home truths for all at AIDS conference - OutRage, December 1986

Penington off NACAIDS after Buttrose speech - OutRage, December 1986

Vital issues for all gay men in proposed legislation - Gay Health Update, 15 May 1987

No gay conspiracy, says VAC President - Gay Health Update, 7 August 1987

How the gay lobby hijacked the AIDS debate - OutRage May 1992

People Living with HIV/AIDS

Prospects for people with HIV - Antibody column, OutRage, July 1989

Fairfield: is it an open and shut case? - Melbourne Star Observer, July 1991

The invisible wall - OutRage, November 1991

The trouble with Fairfield - Antibody column, OutRage, November 1991

Alfred promises broken, say PLWHAs - Melbourne Star Observer, July 1997

Political issues (national)

AIDS, gays and the blood system - OutRage, September 1984

The gay community meets the challenge - OutRage, December 1984

Governments come good with AIDS funds, services - OutRage, April 1985

In defence of the sexual revolution - Melbourne Star Observer, October 1985

AIDS: Social and Political Issues - Extracts from the Media Worker’s Guide, written by me for the Victorian AIDS Council, November 1985

Is there an AIDS cover-up? - Melbourne Star Observer, November 1985

Who’s dragging their feet? - Melbourne Star Observer, May 1986

Waiting for the backlash - OutRage, July 1986

AIDS in the mind of Australians - OutRage, April 1987

Facts, not moralising VAC, GMCHC respond to national education campaign - Gay Health Update, 10 April 1987

No gay conspiracy, says VAC President - Gay Health Update, 7 August 1987

AIDS budget crisis hits home - Melbourne Star Observer, January 1988

The man with the golden tongue - Antibody column (Julian Gold), OutRage, June 1989

Application rejected: AIDS carrier - OutRage, November 1989

Whatever happened to the backlash? - OutRage, April 1990

Howe’s bad start - Antibody column, OutRage, July 1990

Changing behaviours: will gay law reform help stop the spread of AIDS? - OutRage, August 1990

Heterosexuals and AIDS: why do we bother? - Antibody column, OutRage, November 1990

The age of hard choices - OutRage, February 1991

Outbreak of reason at AMA - Antibody column, OutRage, April 1991

Once more unto the breach - Antibody column, OutRage, June 1991

Franca Arena’s politics of guilt - Antibody column, OutRage, November 1991

How the gay lobby hijacked the AIDS debate - OutRage May 1992

Playing politics with health - OutRage December 1993

Privacy v public health - Melbourne Star Observer, January 1994

Honouring our AIDS heroes - Melbourne Star Observer, February 1994

AIDS and breast cancer: some facts - OutRage, May 1994

Meeting HIV’s new challenge - BNews, March 2001

Where is our AIDS strategy? - BNews, August 2003

HIV crises near and far - Melbourne Star, November 2003

Political issues (Victoria)

Vital issues for all gay men in proposed legislation - Gay Health Update, 15 May 1987

New AIDS legislation tabled in State Parliament - Gay Health Update, November 1987

The Victorian gay community and its role in the fight against AIDS - National AIDS Bulletin, May 1988

Victoria’s new AIDS laws: your rights and responsibilities - Melbourne Star Observer, September 1988

The recruitment trap - Antibody column, OutRage, September 1990

Kennett slammed for AIDS comments - Melbourne Star Observer, August 1997

A wake-up call on HIV/AIDS - BNews, March 2001

Victoria’s AIDS crisis: who’s to blame? - Melbourne Star, May 2003

Prevention, safe sex

Assessing your risk factors for AIDS - OutRage, December 1983

Firm link between AIDS and sex practices established - OutRage, December 1984

The ins and outs of condoms - OutRage, March 1985

Study shows low sauna risk - OutRage, March 1985

Proposal for dealing with the issue of sex venues - Paper for the VAC Committee, 10 April 1985

Their priorities and ours - Melbourne Star Observer, October 1985

A safe sex summer - Sydney Star Observer, December 1985

1986: no time for complacency - Melbourne Star Observer, January 1986

Oral sex: is it safe to swallow? - Melbourne Star Observer, January 1986

Time to revise safe sex guidelines - Melbourne Star Observer, August 1986

Adventures in condomland - Melbourne Star Observer, March 1987

Adventures in condomland, part II - Melbourne Star Observer, April 1987

Facts, not moralising VAC, GMCHC respond to national education campaign - Gay Health Update, 10 April 1987

Fatal delusions: why are gay men still catching AIDS? - OutRage, October 1987

HIV and deadly denial - Antibody column, OutRage, March 1989

Shock finding: gay men like sex - OutRage, December 1989

Safe sex update - Antibody column, OutRage, March 1990

Friendly divergences: safe sex education in Sydney and Melbourne - OutRage, July 1990

Changing behaviours: will gay law reform help stop the spread of AIDS? - OutRage, August 1990

The recruitment trap - Antibody column, OutRage, September 1990

Is oral sex (or anything else) safe? - OutRage, January 1991

Sex now: facing the realities - OutRage March 1993

Does education work? - OutRage April 1993

Are we relapsing? - OutRage October 1993

Culturalising the problem - Melbourne Star Observer, August 1998

HIV and young gay men - Antibody column, OutRage, January 1990

Oral sex and HIV infection - Antibody column, OutRage, January 1990

More on oral sex - Antibody column, OutRage, February 1991

Oral sex and HIV (again) - Antibody column, OutRage, August 1991

Meeting HIV’s new challenge - BNews, March 2001

When the condom breaks - Melbourne Star, March 2001

Zero risk of HIV from oral sex - BNews, September 2001

After only 20 years, guidelines for gay men - BNews, May 2002

Barebacking: the unprotected truth - BNews, August 2002

Coming soon: condomless sex (maybe) - Melbourne Star, September 2002

Self-referential (that is, stuff about me)

In the shadow of AIDS - The Age, 26 October 1984

We deserve to live - OutRage, February 1985

The Victorian gay community and its role in the fight against AIDS - National AIDS Bulletin, May 1988

Antibody - OutRage, December 1988

Keeping AIDS in the news- The Age 13 October 1990

I don’t believe we’ve reached the limits of what we can do. - My National Library oral history interview, April 1993

Goodbye to all this - OutRage, June 1994

The courage of our convictions - Speech on the 30th Anniversary of the Victorian AIDS Council, July 2013

Medical postscript I - Facebook post, 12 June 2018

Medical postscript II - Facebook post, 22 March 2020

Treatments (other than AZT), drug trials

In search of the AIDS wonder drug - OutRage, April 1985

Australia to pioneer AIDS drug trials? - OutRage, June 1985

Pentamidine spray okayed in US - Antibody column, OutRage, April 1989

Time for some good news - OutRage, June 1989

The battle for Q - OutRage, October 1989

Parallel-track for anti-HIV drug - Antibody column, OutRage, January 1990

DDI safe for most people, despite deaths - Antibody column, OutRage, August 1990

AIDS treatment agenda for the ’90s - Antibody column, OutRage, September 1990

Cutting the HIV treatments knot - OutRage, November 1990

DDC and DDI approval near? - Antibody column, OutRage, March 1991

HIV drugs: Howe fails the big test - Antibody column, OutRage, March 1991

Once more unto the breach - Antibody column, OutRage, June 1991

Waiting for the breakthrough - Antibody column, OutRage, July 1991

A balancing act: the Baume report and the art of compromise - OutRage, August 1991

Post exposure vaccines: a new approach to HIV/AIDS therapy - Antibody column, OutRage, September 1991

Is ddI better than AZT? It seems so - OutRage August 1992

HIV treatment: the earlier the better - Melbourne Star Observer August 1992

Trials in whose interest? - OutRage August 1992

New cells for old - OutRage September 1993

Treatment dilemmas - Melbourne Star Observer, March 1994

When the condom breaks - Melbourne Star, March 2001

Foreword

Dr The Honourable Neal Blewett Ac

This is an extraordinary work: an archive of the journalism of the AIDS journalist and activist Adam Carr. Carr was undoubtedly the most prolific, and among the most authoritative and articulate, of the writers on AIDS in the first quarter century of the epidemic in Australia. His first article on the disease, a rather flippant and sceptical argument (his words), on AIDS in the USA appeared in Gay Community News in February 1982, at a time when most of us were as yet unaware of the disease. His final essay, a lament for complacency about the disease amongst young gays, was in November 2003. In between those dates a stream of commentary flowed from his pen. In all we have here over 250 articles, a total of over 300,000 words, as Carr notes in typical laconic fashion, longer than Ulysses but not as long as War and Peace.

Not all are newspaper and journal articles. Speeches and memoranda reflect his activism. Carr held among other offices executive positions on the Victorian AIDS Council in the mid-1980s, was a member of the National AIDS Forum, and rapporteur at a couple of international AIDS conferences. He was uneasy at times about this dualism. This juggling act between activist and commentator meant that sometimes he had to write about himself in the third person, not, as he observes, a good journalistic practice. Yet he managed to keep his balance. Although always passionate in his defence of the gay community he was unflinching in telling them the bad news and fully prepared to castigate gay errors and failures.

My attentions was first drawn to Carr’s writings around mid-year 1983 with his publication in OutRage magazine of a long article, The AIDS Epidemic. Which provided an authoritative account of the international epidemic, with the focus on the USA, and a sophisticated appreciation of the likely impact of the disease on Australia. This article compared favourably with both material in the Australian medical press and advice from my own officials. We learn now that the authority of the article derived from an intensive self-education process. This included photocopying every relevant article in the Brownless Bio-Medical Library, the purchase of four key medical texts as the basis for a crash course in the relevant disciplines - immunology, virology and epidemiology - and mentoring by a Melbourne venereologist. The article made him in his own words an instant authority on AIDS, and in wider circles than he guessed. It also gave him the resources to challenge both the political and the medical establishments on their approaches to AIDS.

There is a degree of arrogance, but also some truth, in his comment that, at least in the early days of the epidemic, I and other gay journalist-activists around the world knew as much about AIDS as any of the medical specialists who were charged with treating and preventing the disease, and in many cases a good deal more. Many doctors were challenged by this claim and the work provides many examples of the resulting confrontations. The clashes between Carr and Professor David Penington, chairman of the National AIDS Taskforce, and Dr. Julian Gold, Director of the Albion Street Clinic, became legendary and there are accounts here that capture the relish with which Carr joined in these battles with the medical gurus.

Carr provides a guide through the labyrinth of his archive. Articles are grouped thematically and arranged chronologically within each theme. The original headlines of the articles are retained and whet the appetite: Your antibody Status is Nobody’s Business, Will AIDS Become a Heterosexual Plague?; A Testing Time for Gay Men, Coming Soon: Condomless Sex (Maybe). I must confess that I am accorded a theme in which my stewardship is given generous treatment. Carr and I had, of course, our differences. We disagreed at the margins over the issue of testing for the virus and over aspects of the long-remembered and controversial Grim Reaper campaign. But I always found him a rational and responsible disputant whose arguments demanded responses.

However it is a comment on David Penington, with whom he had much fiercer disputes, at the First National Conference on Aids in Melbourne in 1985 that best captures the spirit of this man and this work. It deserves a full quotation:

I… have had my run-ins with David Penington… but taken on balance… he has been a steadying influence of great importance, and I think his role in the ongoing public debate about AIDS has been enormously positive. He has not calmed people by lying to them, but by telling the truth. His absolutely unyielding commitment to speaking the truth, while occasionally discomforting to those of us who found ourselves from time to time on the receiving end of it, is ultimately our most valuable asset, because in our battles with the ignorant and the malevolent, the truth is our greatest ally.

For the gay community the very immediacy of the material will recall a period that was both tragic and heroic. For the growing number of historians writing on HIV/AIDS this work will provide a treasure trove. And for all Australians, shadowed now by the COVID pandemic, this book provides an opportunity to see how Australia coped with a very different pandemic four decades ago. And in the contemporary arguments over vaccines, it is worth remembering we still do not have a vaccine for HIV.

Neal Blewett gained a doctorate in political science from Oxford, and was professor of politics at Flinders University of South Australia from 1974 to 1977. He was Labor MP for the South Australian seat of Bonython from 1977 to 1994. In the Hawke Government he was Minister for Health from 1983 to 1987, Minister for Community Services and Health from 1987 to 1990, and Minister for Trade and Overseas Development from 1990 to 1991. In the Keating Government he was Minister for Social Security from 1991 to 1993. After leaving politics he was High Commissioner to the United Kingdom from 1994 to 1998. He was also a member of the Executive Council of the World Health Organization.

Introduction

In May 1983 I was 29, and had just been employed as Assistant Editor of OutRage, a gay magazine published in Melbourne. OutRage’s first edition had appeared in April. It was the successor to Gay Community News (GCN), which had been started in 1979 by a group of gay men and lesbians who had come together at the Fifth National Homosexual Conference, in Melbourne. At that time the only substantial gay press in Australia was published in Sydney – the monthly Campaign and the free newspaper Sydney Star. We felt that Melbourne needed a gay paper of its own, and also one that better reflected our gay liberationist politics. GCN was published on a volunteer basis, carried no advertising, and always struggled to pay its bills.

When GCN was founded I was completing a graphic design diploma at Prahran CAE, and my initial involvement was as a designer, but I soon also began writing. I had already had some journalistic experience as co-editor of Lot’s Wife, the Monash University student paper, in 1975. My main interests before 1983 were gay history and politics. I wrote articles about the gay law reform debate in the Victorian Parliament, about Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited and the TV series based on it, about the novelist Mary Renault, about the gay spies Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, and many other subjects.

I don’t remember when I first heard about the appearance of what later became AIDS. In the days before email and the internet, of course, we had to wait for copies of foreign publications to arrive by post. In Melbourne we often didn’t see articles even in the Sydney gay press, let alone from the US. So I doubt I knew about the June 1981 report in the Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, ¹ or Dr Michael Gottlieb’s article in the December 1981 New England Journal of Medicine, describing the first appearance of unexplained cancers and opportunistic infections in gay men in California and New York. ² I don’t recall seeing the first mention of AIDS in the Australian gay press, a piece in the Sydney Star in July reporting on the MMWR report. ³ I probably saw news reports of the December article.

By the beginning of 1982, however, I clearly had heard about these reports, because my first ever article on AIDS appeared in GCN in February. It carried the rather flippant title Will We All Die of ‘Gay Cancer’? This reflected the scepticism with which I, like most gay activists and journalists, received the initial reports that there was an outbreak of cancer specific to gay men. I didn’t know much about medicine at that point, but I knew enough to know that a cancer which selectively attacked gay men was extremely improbable. My sources for this article were Time and Newsweek, and a report of an article in the London Sunday Times.

During 1982 reports of this new disease continued to appear in both the mainstream press and in the overseas gay papers we were receiving in distant Melbourne. The tone of papers such as the New York Native and San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter became increasingly alarming. First dozens and then hundreds of gay men in these cities, and many other places, were coming down with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, Kaposi’s sarcoma and other infections and cancers. There seemed to be no treatments for these illnesses, and previously healthy gay men in their 20s and 30s were dying within a few months of diagnosis.

In April GCN’s medical columnist Dr Simon Quest (Dr Rex Melville) wrote a piece about the prevalence of Kaposi’s sarcoma in the US. In November Gary Jaynes wrote a longer piece, mainly focussing on the sensationalist media reporting of the new diseases. ⁴ The use of expressions such as the gay plague naturally made us all very unwilling to believe that there really was a problem for our community. Was this not just more homophobia, more media misreporting?

Over the summer of 1982-83 we were concentrating mainly on the transition from the rather amateurish GCN, which folded in December, to a new and more sophisticated national gay magazine, OutRage, which was launched with the help of a state government employment grant in April. Danny Vadasz was editor, and I was employed as assistant editor, with general responsibility for news and political content. By the time I got back to concentrating on what was going on, it had become apparent that AIDS – as it had now been officially named ⁵ – was going to be a very big story indeed for our readers.

So it was that I set out in May to write my first big article on AIDS. I went to the Brownless Biomedical Library at Melbourne University and I photocopied everything that had appeared in the medical press about AIDS up to that point. I went home with a pile of photocopies perhaps two centimetres thick. When I sat down to read the articles, I found that I couldn’t understand most of them. So the next day I went to the Academic & General bookshop and I bought four books: the Concise Medical Dictionary; An Introduction to Modern Virology by Dimmock and Primrose; Immunology Simplified by Tula Bowry, ⁶ and, best of all, Macfarlane Burnet’s Natural History of Infectious Diseases, a wonderful and very enlightening book by a great Australian scientist.

Armed with this crash course in the three disciplines central to understanding AIDS – virology, immunology and epidemiology – I set out again to read my pile of articles from the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, two publications with which I was soon to become very familiar. I was helped by several discussions with Dr David Bradford, a leading venereologist and the director of the Melbourne Communicable Diseases Centre, who was to be at the front line of the medical response to AIDS in Melbourne over the coming decade, and who was always ready to share his knowledge.

The result of this process in self-education was a 10,000 word article called The AIDS epidemic, a heading which Danny Vadasz sexed up a bit by adding the subheading What the straight press won’t tell you. In this article I covered just about everything that was known about the symptoms of AIDS, its supposed origins and its rapid spread, the various theories about its cause, and the many possible treatments which had already been tried or suggested. In the version of the article that appears in this book, some of these sections have been omitted, since they are no longer of any great interest.

The process of researching that article was very unsettling, and indeed gave me nightmares that recurred intermittently for several years. At that point in the United States AIDS had already affected nearly 1,500 people, of whom over 70% were gay men, and of whom 40% had already died. In 1983, those seemed like alarmingly large numbers. The number of cases was doubling every six months, and the average time from diagnosis to death was less than a year. The cause of the disease was unknown, and none of the treatments that had been tried so far had had any effect.

AIDS, in short, was an untreatable disease with a high mortality rate, which selectively targeted gay men, and which was rapidly spreading. There was no reason to suppose that gay men in Australia would not be affected by it. This was obviously a catastrophe about to happen. I wrote: Given the realities of travel and the realities of gay life in Australia, it is only a matter of time, and probably not a long time, before AIDS starts to kill gay men in Australia in significant numbers.

Just as this article appeared, Australia had its first confirmed AIDS case – a gay man who had returned to Sydney after living for some time in the United States. It was obvious that he had acquired the disease in the US, but this news nevertheless brought home to us the reality that AIDS would soon come to Australia. Many in the gay community came to this realisation while I was still writing this first major article. The ALSO Foundation, a gay community social and fundraising group, called a public meeting on 16 June to discuss the situation. ALSO’s health committee consisted of Phil Carswell, Chris Carter, Ian Dunstan and Peter Knight, all of whom would play important roles in the Victorian gay community’s response to AIDS. ⁷

The meeting was held on 16 June at the Royal Dental Hospital, and attracted 400 people. The edition of OutRage carrying my article had just appeared, which was one of the factors which triggered such a large response. As a result, I found myself an instant authority on AIDS. When the Victorian AIDS Action Committee was founded the following month, I became a committee member, and then the media spokesperson. For the next three years I juggled the roles of AIDS activist and commentator, sometimes writing about myself in the third person – not a good journalistic practice, but unavoidable in the urgent circumstances of the time.

Over the next few years OutRage pioneered discussion on issues such as safe sex, condoms, antibody testing, drug trials, alternative therapies and the relationship between the gay community and government. For a while we were dubbed the Journal of AIDS, but I think our intensive coverage met the needs of the gay male community at that time. During this period, I and other gay journalist-activists around the world knew as much about AIDS as any of the medical specialists who were charged with treating and preventing the disease, and in many cases a good deal more. This was a difficult thing for some (though not all) of the doctors to accept, and it led to a good deal of conflict.

For example, in February 1985, the National AIDS Task Force, headed by Professor David Penington, put out a press release claiming that between 20,000 and 50,000 gay men in Sydney had already been infected by HIV, the virus which by then had been shown to be the cause of AIDS. Given what was then known about progression rates of HIV-infected people, the press not unnaturally used these figures to claim that there would be 16,000 AIDS deaths in Australia by 1993. I had severe doubts about these figures, which were based (as we now know) on estimates made for the Task Force by Dr Julian Gold. ⁸

So I spoke by phone to Dr Andrew Moss, an epidemiologist at the University of California. Moss told me about studies aimed at finding the proportion of gay men in San Francisco who had HIV infection, using a properly-constructed random sample. These studies found infection rates radically lower than those previously reported. The previous figures had been based on samples drawn from VD clinics, or from self-selected groups of volunteers. These studies always contain a bias in favour of those who are at very high risk, and therefore give a heavily distorted result.

This was exactly the error made by the Task Force. The Sydney figure supplied by Julian Gold was based on a study of gay men recruited through hospitals and clinics. It was clearly a heavily biased sample, and produced the same misleading results seen in San Francisco. In March I published an article called Professor Penington’s Crystal Ball, in which I said that the Task Force’s public statement was not only wrong but irresponsible, which didn’t make me very popular in some circles. But I was eventually proved to be right. ⁹

I was elected President of VAC at the end of 1986. As a result I left my job with OutRage, since the two roles were increasingly incompatible, and was employed first by the Health Promotions Unit of the Victorian Health Department, based at Fairfield Hospital, and then by the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations. But I continued to be a regular contributor to OutRage. It was in fact during this period that I wrote what was probably my most controversial article, called Here is the very bad news, in which I set out the evidence for the very unwelcome prospect that everyone infected with HIV would eventually progress to an AIDS-defining illness in the absence of an effective treatment. This was of course very distressing news for people living with HIV infection, but I did feel I had an obligation to set out these facts, to make it clear to gay men how high the stakes were in terms of practising safe sex and avoiding HIV infection.

After my term as President ended, I returned to Bluestone Media (the company which published OutRage) in various capacities – journalist, consultant and subeditor. In 1988 the then editor of OutRage, Chris Dobney, asked me to contribute a regular column on AIDS-related issues, which he called Antibody. This gave me an opportunity to range widely over many topics related to the AIDS epidemic, and some not related at all. I took a particular interest in the emerging field of anti-HIV drugs, and also in exposing some of the many scam treatments that characterised this period. The years from 1988 to 1994 were thus my most intense in terms of AIDS reporting and commentary, particularly after 1992 when I became news editor of Melbourne Star Observer as well as a monthly columnist and contributor in OutRage.

This period ended when I became editor of OutRage in 1994, creating responsibilities which required me to cut back on the amount I was writing. By then the focus of reporting on the AIDS epidemic in Australia had shifted away from the impact of AIDS on the gay community in general, and away from the urgent need for changes in behaviour among gay men to minimise the transition of HIV – although of course these issues did not go away. In the 1990s the dominant issue became the increasing availability of effective treatments for the large and growing population of people, mostly gay men, who had been diagnosed with HIV but did not yet have a life-threatening illness – the People Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). PLWHA activism, including its most militant forms such as ACT-UP, dominated our reporting ¹⁰. This activism was born of the frustrating knowledge that new treatments were becoming available, and were effective in stopping the progression from HIV infection to illness, but because of what was seen as bureaucratic obstructionism were not reaching the people who desperately needed them.

In 1995 I left OutRage and decided to return to university to resume my long-interrupted education. (I had dropped out of Monash 20 years previously without graduating.) My contributions became fewer and fewer after 1996, and in 1999 and 2000, the years when I was most heavily engrossed in researching and writing my doctoral thesis, I did not write for the gay press at all. During these years the nature of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic changed radically. From being seen mainly as a crisis for gay men and some other risk groups in western countries, HIV/AIDS was seen for what it had in reality always been – a global pandemic driven mainly by heterosexual transmission of HIV and mainly affecting women and children in developing countries, particularly in Africa.

Of course for the gay community AIDS continued to be a very personal crisis, and in Australia our community continued to carry the main burden of illness and death, even after the advent of fairly successful antiviral treatments in the course of the 1990s. But the attention of governments, global health organisations and the media increasingly shifted away from our problems and onto the global disaster that an unchecked HIV epidemic would represent.

Meanwhile, a localised disaster had struck the Australian gay media. In 1999 a Sydney gay hotelier and property developer, Greg Fisher, had bought heavily into the gay press in order to provide himself with an advertising and promotional platform to lure affluent gay men and lesbians and their pink dollars into investing in his property empire. His Satellite Group thereby gained effective control of OutRage, Melbourne Star Observer, Capital Q, Brother-Sister and several other papers. In July 2000 the whole Fisher empire went spectacularly bust, taking almost the whole of the Australian gay media with it. More than 20 years of accumulated effort and experience – along with the millions of dollars that the gay community had invested – was wiped out in a few weeks. ¹¹

One of the few to crawl out from under the rubble of the Satellite crash was Bill Calder, who had sold his previous paper, Brother-Sister, to Fisher – but wisely kept the money. In December 2000 he promptly stepped into the vacuum and started a new Melbourne gay newspaper, BNews, and hired me to be its news editor. By now the HIV/AIDS epidemic, although always present and never forgotten, was not dominating the lives of the Melbourne gay community in the way it had done through the 1980s and early ’90s. By this time also the PLWHA organisations had their own organisations and their own media, including online news sources – which of course had not existed when the epidemic began. So my reporting of AIDS-related stories was much more selective, and rather less focussed on local concerns, than it had been when I was at OutRage.

In fact the last phase of my career in gay journalism, in 2002 and 2003, was increasingly spent writing articles reporting warnings that both Australian governments and Australian gay men were becoming complacent and apathetic about AIDS, and that as a result government funding was falling while infection rates were starting to rise again. John Thwaites, Victorian Health Minister from 1999 to 2002, was quoted in several stories warning the gay community against complacency – a strange reversal of the situation in 1983. This has indeed been the paradox of AIDS in Australia and other developed countries in the years since 2000. As treatments have improved and as HIV infection has come no longer to be seen as a death sentence, the incentive to spend money on prevention programmes has declined, and the level of awareness among gay men has declined correspondingly, leading to higher infection rates and higher treatment bills for both people with HIV and the taxpayer.

By the end of 2003, when I had just turned 50, I increasingly felt that 25 years in and out of the gay press was enough. The days of high drama of the 1980s were over, and I was decreasingly interested in reporting on the worthy but less exciting doings of the Melbourne gay community. So in November 2003 I wrote my last article for the gay press, reporting on the difficulties VAC was having persuading young gay men that HIV was still a serious risk to them. The task of preventing HIV is much more complicated than it was in the early years of the epidemic, I quoted Colin Batrouney, then and now manager of VAC’s prevention programme, as saying: In those days we could just say ‘use a condom every time,’ and we knew that the whole community was listening to our messages. Today we have to battle against a culture in which awareness of AIDS has faded, and our messages have to be more complex. In the years since then, that problem has only grown worse.

In recent years the early history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Australia has become of increasing interest to academics and students, and to those still involved today with managing the epidemic – which has not gone away. In 2008 I gave all my collected gay media and books to the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (now the Australian Queer Archives). With their help I have now retrieved and scanned all my journalism from those years. I think this material is of sufficient historical interest, and some of it still of sufficient contemporary relevance, to merit republication.

In compiling this collection, I have been aware of my biases, and readers should be aware of them, too. I am an affluent, educated, white gay man, who does not have HIV infection – although I didn’t know this until I got tested at the end of 1988. Until 2020 I lived all my life in Melbourne, a city whose experience of HIV/AIDS has been very different from that of (say) New York, or Lagos, or Manila, or even Sydney. I have had a fortunate life, and, relative to the experiences of many, a fortunate HIV/AIDS epidemic, although it didn’t always feel that way at the time. Everything I wrote reflected who and what I was, and it could not have been otherwise. So you will not find much here about the experiences of women, heterosexuals, IV drug users, sex workers or people in developing countries. Most importantly, my writing does not reflect the experiences of people living with HIV infection and/or AIDS.

Nor will you find much about the politics of HIV/AIDS in places in Australia other than Melbourne. For much of the time during which I was writing about AIDS, I was also active in the Victorian AIDS Council, including a year as President and three years as Vice-President. I was aware of the need to be diplomatic when commenting on events in other cities. In any case, in the pre-Twitter world, my sources of information about what was happening in Sydney and Brisbane were not as good as my sources in Melbourne. I have tried not to include too many articles which dealt with local Melbourne issues, but this remains emphatically a Melbourne-centred collection.

I am aware also that this collection gives the impression that both I and the gay press spent the 20 years after 1983 entirely preoccupied with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This is untrue. I wrote a great deal about many other subjects during these years, and the gay press in fact made strenuous efforts not to allow the AIDS epidemic to take over its pages entirely. However, in order not to make what is already a very long book even longer, I have reluctantly confined myself to articles related to HIV/AIDS.

Finally, I am also aware that this collection contains a fair amount of repetition. I have for example written at least four accounts of the foundation and early years of the Victorian AIDS Council. I have included them all here. I’ve done this firstly because I want this to be a complete collection of my writings of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and secondly because these accounts are not in fact exactly the same, and this serves as a warning to future historians of these events – it illustrates the fallibility of human memory as a source for the writing of history.

Adam Carr

Jomtien, Thailand

September 2021

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to Dr Graham Willett, Nick Henderson and the Australian Queer Archives for facilitating my access to their collections, where the print versions of all my published works, as well as many records from VAC’s early days, now reside.

I must thank a succession of publishers and editors – Bill Calder, Chris Carter, Steven Carter, Chris Dobney, Jamie Gardiner, Kelly Gardiner, Chris Gill, Martyn Goddard, Peter Hains, Sherelle Moody, Marcus O’Donnell, Warren Talbot, Danny Vadasz and Zoe Velonis – for publishing all this stuff, despite its inordinate length, despite its often depressing nature, and despite the fact that they frequently disagreed with its content.

Cover photo by Ponch Hawkes, 1988.

From left: Adam Carr, Danny Vasdasz, David Menadue, working on an early edition of Gay Community News, 1979.

Journalism

1982–2003

Will we all die of gay cancer

(Gay Community News, February 1982)

Major journals throughout the West have begun reporting what could become known as gay diseases. According to The Times health supplement (London), two diseases in particular are involved: Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), a skin cancer very rare outside equatorial Africa, and the most unusual pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a particularly virulent lung infection.

Time magazine (US) recently reported the increased incidence of Kaposi’s sarcoma in young gay men. It is usually described as an old man’s complaint. The two quite separate diseases have been reported in 180 people in 12 US states since first spotted in July 1980. 75 of the victims have died; 92% of the victims are reported to be homosexual men. Three studies in the New England Journal of Medicine (US) show that the victims’ immune systems have been dangerously weakened, leaving them vulnerable to germs that most people shrug off. This is known as defective immunity.

Doctors are speculating that the culprit behind the body-weakening is repeated infections with a virus that is common among homosexuals. A possible suspect is cytomegalovirus (CMV), a rather common virus that may produce no symptoms but can cause fever, swollen glands and weight loss and damage the immune system. According to a report in Newsweek CMV has been reported in Africans in whose countries KS is endemic and most of the gay patients with PCP and the cancer also harboured it. The virus can be carried in semen as well as urine.

The epidemic is being studied by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, US, the specialist unit which discovered the causes of toxic shock. A member of the CDC task force, Dr Harold Jaffe, did not rule out the use of street drugs such as amyl nitrite, as a key causative factor. CDC is now conducting animal tests to determine whether nitrites may supress the immune system. The CDC says that the other main possibility is a new and previously unrecognised strain or an infectious agent, possibly comparable with Legionnaire’s Disease.

The report in Newsweek said there was no really effective treatment for KS or PCP. It said the best way to prevent the outbreak is prevention. Physicians and gay activists are encouraging homosexuals to practice better hygiene, reduce their sexual contacts and get the names of those they do have sex with.

AIDS in Australia

(OutRage, June 1983)

Suddenly AIDS — Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome — is big news in Australia, more than three years after its appearance among gay men in America, and after more than 600 deaths from the syndrome around the world. The cause of the sudden attention has been the first confirmed case of AIDS in Australia, involving an American gay man living in Sydney. At the time of writing, there were reports of perhaps three other cases in Australia, though confusion as to exactly what constitutes AIDS makes it difficult to know how many there are. There is reason to doubt some of these reports.

There is even some doubt about the Sydney case that has been apparently confirmed. Dr Ronald Penny, an immunologist at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, who discovered the case, told The Bulletin that it met all the criteria set by the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta for AIDS, and has been accepted by it However, he also told The Bulletin that the disease in the American has been brought under control, and has been reported elsewhere as saying that the case is not serious.

The Australian media’s treatment of AIDS’s arrival here has been predictable. Most of the press have been free with discredited phrases like the gay plague, and The Bulletin excelled itself with a homophobic coverage and an offensively irrelevant choice of photograph. Other papers like The Age have given a reasonably balanced coverage. The very worst coverage so far has been on Channel 9’s Sixty Minutes, which weighed in with an unbelievably stupid and shallow segment, featuring a mock-concerned Jana Wendt asking AIDS patients idiotic questions and a lot of very misleading sensationalist rhetoric about weird plagues and cities gripped with fear. Both The Bulletin and Sixty Minutes chose to feature as their gay spokesman Sydney businessman Paul Dexter, who makes good copy because he believes that AIDS is worse than World War Two and will wipe us all out. This underlines the need for the gay community to choose properly representative spokes-people to deal with the media on this issue.

While both the health authorities and the gay community are right to be concerned about AIDS, it is important not to be unduly panicked. AIDS is not an explosively infectious disease. It took two years for there to be 50 cases in the US, and there will not be a sudden flood of cases here. The article that begins on the next page attempts to set out what is currently known about AIDS; what it looks like, what it does, how it might be spread, who might be at greatest