Lead Pic: Fighting Spirit of AIDS Victim piece in The Argus, 7 March 1987; photo of The Argus‘ Health Reporter, Phil Mills
In October 1986, 24-year-old Colin Vincent was waiting tables in a Brighton hotel.
“My employers kept dropping subtle hints about my condition and kept pushing me into a corner until I couldn’t stand it anymore. In the end, I got myself the sack by drinking a bottle of stolen champagne.”
Colin’s condition was HIV. The first case of HIV in Brighton was diagnosed 40 years ago, in 1982. In fact, there were ten cases registered at the Claude Nicol GUM Clinic at the Royal Sussex County Hospital over the course of that year.
The first death in the UK was recorded in London in 1981. Doctors initially referred to it as GRID: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, but by August 1982 the Centre for Disease Control in the US had coined the term: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
The first death from AIDS in Brighton was in 1984.
“He was very calm, very determined… very resigned I would say, but I would have put him down as a nice guy anybody could be a friend of.”
The tabloids were their usual sympathetic selves. In December 1985, The Sunday Mirror ran with the headline AIDS Seaside Shocker, and how a Killer Plague Takes Hold of Brighton.
They even named people: “the latest known AIDS victim is hotelier Andrew Blyth. He has sold up and gone to Paris for guinea-pig tests with a new drug HPA23 – the same one used on film star Rock Hudson who died in October.”
Unfortunately, HPA23 was quickly dropped as a treatment after no medical benefits were seen.
With all the fear and stigma associated with the condition, it must have come as a surprise when The Argus newspaper was contacted directly by someone wanting to talk openly about having AIDS.
As the Health Reporter for the Argus in 1987, Phil Mills worked closely with the Claude Nicol Clinic so was more up to date than most people on HIV/AIDS. The request came from Colin Vincent who wanted to tell his story from his bed in the hospital.
Brighton-born Colin had attended Bexhill High School, been an altar boy at All Saints Church, but at age 16 he returned to Yorkshire where he’d spent time in a children’s home. He was living in Leeds when in 1985 he discovered he was infected with HIV.
His stepsister Fran Whiteman remembers him as “a lovely caring person. Unfortunately, people around him didn’t accept him. We lost contact when he went back to Brighton.”
“I’m not afraid of dying because I know I have not lived my life for nothing. I am an example to all others.”
Thankfully Colin found support and assistance from the recently set up Sussex AIDS Helpline.
“I just wanted to hide the fact at first – I just didn’t want to face it. It was only when I came to Brighton that I was able to come to terms with it.”
He had just returned home when The Sun newspaper stirred things up branding Brighton a Town of Terror as ‘virus grips gay hotspot’, with ‘11 dead and 1,000 infected’.
The Argus journalist Phil Mills remembers “He was the first to be interviewed like that, certainly for us. There were comments at the time such as ‘Don’t accept the offer of tea from ‘them’ in case you catch it from the mug’, that sort of thing. There was a great deal of ignorance around.
“We didn’t gown up, we didn’t glove up, we just went straight in, and I sat quite close to him in the chair and had a good long conversation with him.
“I stuck out my hand and we shook. It made us both feel more comfortable.” As it turns out, this was a month before Princess Diana shook the hand of a patient with AIDS at the Middlesex Hospital in London, challenging attitudes as she made headlines around the world.
Phil recalls Colin “was virtually blind due to a disease that most healthy bodies fight off and was being trained to cope with his disability at home. He talked about his sex partners and made the point it didn’t matter how many you had. If we’re talking about AIDS, you can get it from just one.”
Having made his point, Colin said: “I’m not afraid of dying because I know I have not lived my life for nothing. I am an example to all others.”
“Unfortunately, people around him didn’t accept him. We lost contact when he went back to Brighton.”
He then told Phil about losing his hotel job. “He said that because of his deteriorating health and because he was presumably quite openly gay, that they were putting two and two together and saying, ‘Ooh, do we really want him around?’ I bet that wasn’t an unheard-of scenario; I bet there were quite a few that lost their jobs simply because they were gay, not because they had HIV.
“Colin said he hated their ‘sheer ignorance’ about AIDS but was not hurt by them. ‘I just don’t care because I can’t be hurt more than I have been.’”
I asked Phil what he remembered about Colin and the interview.
“He was very calm, very determined… very resigned I would say, but I would have put him down as a nice guy anybody could be a friend of.
“Like a fireman puts his uniform on every day, my uniform was being a reporter, and I had to get the interview. Now I’m seeing him through a human being’s eyes with no uniform, I feel sadder for him today than I did then.”
The article appeared in The Evening Argus on 7 March 1987. Tragically that same issue contained a piece about a 75-year-old man from Chichester who had killed himself because he thought he had AIDS. No trace of the virus was found in his body.
And of course, The Argus letters page a few days later was predictably vile, with Mrs M Dougon of Brighton declaring AIDS to be “self-inflected, due to a complete breakdown in morality”.
Shortly after the interview both Phil and Colin celebrated their birthdays. Phil turned 36 and Colin 25. Colin died a couple of months later.
This year Colin Vincent will be included in the names read out in Brighton at the annual World AIDS Day Memorial.
Thanks to Phil Mills, Amanda Soutter, and Fran Whiteman for their assistance.