- ARCHIVE: At first, only gays and IV drug users were being killed by AIDS. But now we know, every one of us could be devastated by it. - The HIV/AIDS pandemic of the 20th century was a watershed moment for the Gay community. In Western countries like Aotearoa and the United States, gay men were predominantly affected by the virus. The fight against the virus was closely tied to the fight for homosexual law reform. It was hard to address the spread of the virus when the very act that was spreading it was still illegal. In this episode, we're looking at how this crisis played out in Aotearoa. - REPORTER: It's been called the new Black Plague. It's been labelled God's wrath against homosexuals. - REPORTER: Many New Zealanders may have AIDS and not know it. - REPORTER: Ignorance about the disease is still widespread, but it's still wrongly believed that AIDS can be caught by victims sneezing. - These people who are infected, are good, kind human beings. - It takes quite a bit of guts to get out on the street and hand out condoms to people. - Oh, I've never had one of these before. - The Catholic bishops of New Zealand say it is medically misleading, as well as morally wrong, to suggest the use of condoms is the solution for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. - It doesn't offer a cure to AIDS-related illnesses, but can give sufferers a longer life. - It will extend my life, which I'm just over the moon over. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2025 (GROOVY MUSIC) - The 1970s was an age of sexual freedom and liberation ` and not just for the gays. The straights were getting involved as well. - I just drove up and down Queen Street, looking at all the women going past and everything else. (LAUGHTER) Shut up. - The Gay community were out. They were gregarious. They were loud. They were trying to be heard. - ARCHIVE: It's a world of difference, a world that exists on the fringe of society. We see only what its inhabitants want us to see, the grotesque parody of traditional sexual values. - And sex did feel like it had more of a dangerous cutting edge to it, I guess, because it was illegal. - No one knew during my generation what it was like to be legal. There were no comparisons. - The last several years have seen a remarkable change to the face of the New Zealand Gay community. Gays used to keep to the shadows; they're now moving to centre stage and declaring their homosexuality. - My rebellion was hidden until I finally was liberated, going to Auckland University, and that year was when I first became an open gay activist. - I can remember at university gay liberation, one of the older members, half-seriously, half-joking, going, 'Look, you may as well get out there and have as much sex 'as you want because no one's gonna get pregnant, 'and the worst thing that's gonna happen is you get gonorrhoea, and you take a pill and you're fine.' That was a big part of the background of life, yeah, was going out for sex. - Gay liberation meant people were living their lives confidently with less fear and more fun. But unfortunately, it coincided with the new virus spreading across cities in the US. - REPORTER: Health department officials are expecting an AIDS epidemic in New Zealand. In overseas cities, many homosexuals live in gay ghettos. Here, many gay men remain in marriages while leading homosexual lives. That is likely to lead to many heterosexuals catching AIDS. - While New Zealand had few to no cases, cities with large gay populations around the world were being inundated with patients suffering from the new condition. - What we had been celebrating turned out to be a perfect doorway for this virus to enter our bodies and to mutate and to spread. That also became a discrimination to, you know, the Gay community that, you know, if you love somebody and you have gay sex, that you're gonna die. - I think for the Gay community at that time, it was very much seen as a modern-day plague. - Absolute panic. Absolute fear. 'Yes, this is God's justice against those filthy, filthy sodomites. 'That is why they have this terrible disease and why they're dying of it.' - It's AIDS, the acquired immune deficiency syndrome, and it's here in New Zealand. - REPORTER: The AIDS scare has sent ripples of fear throughout New Zealand. People are worried that they might catch the disease through shaking hands, off toilet seats or by drinking out of dirty glasses. - I can remember going to a community meeting and talking about AIDS, and about half the crowd thought it was something the CIA had invented to kill gay men, and the other half of the crowd thought it was something the KGB had invented. - REPORTER: In this country, male homosexuality is a criminal offence under the Crimes Act. At the same time, AIDS is a notifiable disease ` to admit to AIDS is tantamount to admit to being a criminal. - The sad thing about this was, of course, you couldn't talk about anal sex and condoms in the context of the time because homosexuality was illegal. - REPORTER: More than 20 people a day have been calling the health department's new AIDS counselling service. (PHONE RINGS) - Good afternoon. AIDS Hotline. Can I help you? - Bruce Burnett, a member of the Gay community, is running the hotline and support network. He believes it's education rather than legislation which will help contain AIDS in this country. Have you got any idea of how many AIDS cases we can expect in New Zealand this year? - You know, a lot of people have been saying, 'Stop talking about epidemics. It's not that serious. 500 people in Sydney is an epidemic. Perhaps we can contain and prevent anything from that extent in New Zealand. - Bruce Burnett witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco. When he returned to Aotearoa, where we were largely ignorant of this condition, paranoia began to spread. - You didn't have social media that was giving you all of the information worldwide. This was by word of mouth. (PHONE RINGS) - There was one call from the first guy coming back from Sydney to Wellington with AIDS, and that was at a time of huge, um... hysteria about AIDS. We were terrified, quite rightly actually. - When the news interviewed Denny Marks, who had become the first person in New Zealand to die of AIDS, they used a pseudonym to protect his identity, a decision that seemed necessary at the time. - REPORTER: New Zealand's first AIDS victim was sent home from Australia earlier this year. Henry ` not his real name ` a male homosexual, contracted the disease while on holiday in San Francisco. It was diagnosed in Sydney, and he was sent home to New Plymouth to die. - Western medicine could do nothing. Nurses and doctors were seeing hundreds of young men come through who were just getting sick with weird diseases in front of them and dying, and it just didn't seem that there was anything that anyone could do. - Do you have any hopes that they may find a cure? - Oh, you've always got hope. God, yes. I mean, if you give up hope, you might as well go out, cut your throat. It's as simple as that. (MAN CHEWING) Okay. What should I write? How are we going to sell it? The car or boyfriend? What about tidy but slow? Yeah, you should definitely mention it's not very quick. We're selling the car. It's got a little exhaust. (LAUGHS) - Oh. - Wait. Are we talking about this car? Oh, God. (DOOR CLOSED) I think it should say. (THUNDERSTORM & RAIN PATTERS) VOICEOVER: When you list your car in AutoTrader. You could also win your own billboard (QUIRKY PIANO MUSIC) - A group of eight Queer individuals established a flat known as Marae in the Sky. The flat quickly gained a reputation as an informal community hub for those in need, particularly those dealing with HIV. - We were a diverse group of Pacific Islanders, Maori, European. And what's significant here is that it coincided with the wave of people who were dying from AIDS. The driver behind Marae in the Sky was my cousin, Witoria. The idea was to be able to create an environment, a whanau environment, that was supportive... because it hit the Auckland Gay community like, you know` It was just a wake-up call like no other. - While cases remained relatively low in New Zealand in 1984, they were surging in the United States. It was during this time that Michael travelled there to begin his OE. - I had only been in San Francisco for a few days, and one guy told me about all the friends of his who had got sick and died. He talked about a friend of his who realised how sick he was and dressed himself up in its full leather gear and went out and hanged himself in one of the local parks. I do remember US standing in the kitchen and him saying to me, 'This is really serious.' He said, 'I haven't had sex with anyone for two years because I'm terrified.' - Are you accusing the government of being gutless on this issue? - Yes. In fact, I think Geoffrey Palmer has become New Zealand's Ronald Reagan, who refused to talk about AIDS until 30,000 people had died. - What about the suggestion of distributing condoms to help stop the spread of AIDS if, in the opinion of a doctor, that's a good idea? - I don't think that that's acceptable. It's not our policy at the moment to do that. And no one in Australia does it, and no one is planning to do it. - The New Zealand government was slow to promote preventative measures like condom use to contain the crisis. Meanwhile, Michael was working as an English teacher in Istanbul, where the crisis was not prominent in public discourse. - It was isolated, so I had no real knowledge of what was going on in the Western world around HIV and AIDS, apart from the occasional letters that came through from friends. That was really what made me decide to get tested. I flew up to London, and I went to an NHS clinic, and the doctor listened to my story and she said, 'Oh, you should assume that you do have it and you've probably got about two years to live.' And this was in 1988 when I was 27. And it did turn out to be positive, and I was devastated. I thought, you know, my life's over. I'm just going to get sick and die. - REPORTER: Over the next five years, 500 cases of full-blown AIDS are going to develop in New Zealand. The health department knows of that many infections. It's hoping all the advertising alerting people to AIDS and preventative practices will stop it from developing further into a possible 20,000 cases within 10 years. - I came back here and I didn't know what I was going to do with my life because I didn't really think I had any life ahead of me. And, uh, within a couple of months, it turned out I had tuberculosis, and I was immediately whacked into full barrier nursing. So I was put into an airtight room. People could only come in in masks, full PPE. And I thought, 'This is what the rest of my life's going to be like now.' - We were constantly up in Ward 13 at Auckland Hospital with our flatmates all the time. It was part of our lives. And they'd be out, and they'd be wheeling out with their drip on their arm and coming back down to the flat and partying up a storm at the table, you know, and it was just life. It was a way of dealing with a journey that we knew would end in death. - I bounced around a bit between Ward 9C ` the AIDS ward ` and Herne Bay House, which was a respite centre/hospice and that was a wonderful, wonderful place. But a lot of people died in there. A few people killed themselves in there because they could see no hope, no way forward. - How do you feel about that possibility that you could die? - I've... learned to accept it. I mean, this is one of those things. I mean, it's a` it's been a new experience. (LAUGHS) I haven't done that before. - I got so sick that my body weight went down to about 50 KG's. Um, I got so sick I couldn't walk. And just being so angry, so depressed and so angry with everything and everyone around me. And the head nurse, um, of the hospice actually took me aside and said, 'You know, this is really hard for me to say, 'but unless you can stop being such a shit, we might have to ask you to leave.' And that's where I thought, 'OK, I need to change my attitude,' and I thought, 'I want to die well. I don't want to die bitter, angry, horrible. 'I want to die calm and peaceful and loving.' - Henry died in New Plymouth during the middle of this year. He was New Zealand's first AIDS victim, but he's not likely to be the last. - Bruce Burnett, the man who was instrumental in founding what would later become the New Zealand AIDS Foundation, died of an AIDS-related illness at 30 years old. Throughout the 1980s, deaths from AIDS-related conditions became an everyday occurrence for gay Kiwis. - A Tongan situation we had in Auckland that where it was very kept quiet because of confidentiality, and it was a sister looking for the son, and she finally found him, but it was too late. He died. And her comment was, you know, for a Tongan to die alone, that's like an animal. - It was just another day of somebody was saying, 'Did you hear so-and-so's passed? Did you hear so-and-so's passed?' It was just like people were just dropping. - And so getting ready to die became the main project in my life. And I have to say, it is still to this day, the most important project I've ever done, is how do I prepare myself for my own death? How do I have a good death? (SOMBRE MUSIC) - By 1990, twice as many Americans had died of AIDS-related causes as had died in the Vietnam War. (SOMBRE MUSIC CONTINUES) (INDISTINCT CHATTER) - 1996 I was when I was first involved with the New Zealand Aids Foundation. Gay brothers in our Maori and Pacific communities were passing very suddenly. And what came to fruition were a series of posters, in particular the blue poster in the ocean, which I'm standing in with a bunch of Pacific brothers. It was a great way to promote messaging around safe sex and HIV/AIDS, but also equally to have people from our community be the faces to that message. Um, and, you know, I'm so grateful, because our Pacific community ultimately over the years have still had some of the lowest, uh, new infection rates across the board, but that doesn't mean that the marketing stops, right? - REPORTER: ZMFM's morning crew, armed with pamphlets on safe sex and free condoms, took to the streets. - I think it's a wonderful idea. It'll save a lot of people's lives. - But it's a shame they can't get into those schoolkids, eh? You know, that's a bit of worry. Cos I reckon that's where it starts ` school kids start mucking around. - Clearly, parents would be astonished to find that their children are being told to put condoms on and lick them off` or honey off the end of the condoms and things like that. - Christian groups hit back at some of the preventative measures being suggested by health organisations. Despite this, glimmers of hope started to appear in the 1990s with breakthroughs and medical advancements. - The drugs that were available were not very effective, as you could see through the way I was getting so sick. And as well as taking the pills, I was taking pills to deal with the side effects of the pills. And the worst it got to, I think I was taking 47 or 48 pills a day. - REPORTER: Meanwhile, a drug called Retrovir has arrived in the country, the only drug in the world which can prolong the life of AIDS sufferers, but it's also extremely expensive, costing about $15,000 to $20,000 to treat a single patient. - We could see that New Zealand seemed to be constantly at least a year, if not two years, behind what was available in Australia. The people who could afford to would go to Australia and get into the Australian medical system and have their prescriptions done down there and come back to New Zealand. - By the mid-90s, medical breakthroughs and preventative measures saw the first downward trend in new cases and deaths. However, for some it was too late. - And when Witoria died, my people hadn't even heard of AIDS. When I said to them Witoria died from AIDS, they were all saying, 'What's that?' You know, they're living down in Kawhia. I didn't expect to be the conduit between my tribal world... as a Maori, and my Gay community, and I didn't ever plan his tangi to be a lectern to... inform my people. And so I broke it down, and I said, 'All of you young people here, you must wear condoms.' And I completely took advantage of breaching protocol because I was given that extraordinary right to get up and speak to my people, to be able to warn them what they may come across if they came into the city. - If I had to put heroes... I would say that it was those young men who died of HIV/AIDS that I looked after. - As a society, we're not good at dealing with death, and we're not good at dealing with sex. And if you put the two of those together, you get this incredibly explosive mixture that people just don't wanna touch. And that's why it was so immensely powerful when Princess Diana walked to their AIDS ward in London and sat on someone's bed and touched them. That was just amazing. - This was the first time anybody of any significance had been seen touching anybody with HIV. - And there was a small, amazing response to that from a smaller section of mainstream society, which was how do we help you? How do we look after you? How do we love you while you go through this terrible, terrible thing that's no fault of your own? - The AIDS Quilt celebrate the lives of people who have died of AIDS-related causes. Families, friends and partners lovingly created each fabric panel, which is as unique as the person that remembers. The concept started in San Francisco and spread to 42 other countries, like Aotearoa. - MAN ON LOUD SPEAKER: John... Keith... Grayham, David. - The Gay community were fighting for their rights medically, and also they were grieving because so many were lost. - ...Russell Robert Purvis Wells, Simon, Roy. Max Navarre. - My mother and I are here marching today for those who died, for those who are still living with the disease. (GENTLE PIANO MUSIC) (MUSIC RESOLVES) (GENTLE PIANO MUSIC RESUMES) - My life now, well, I'm married to a wonderful man. I was in my mid-50s when we met, and I had given up completely on the idea by then of actually having an intimate relationship with somebody that I could build a life with in that way, and it's an absolute blessing and a joy and something I treasure immensely. (GENTLE PIANO MUSIC CONTINUES) - Those of us who are survived today, I think we are better for it. We've been very, very lucky. I was very lucky to have had that experience, um, to have been around people whose lives were on the line. - But there's a whole generation of gay men who have no understanding really, of this, who've grown up after my generation. They haven't lived through what we lived through. They haven't watched their friends die. They haven't watched their lives get upended by a virus passed on through those most intimate and important moments of, you know, sexual joy, and they don't have a clue, really, I think, is my sense, of what it was like for us. And you can't explain things in the same way. You know, somebody who is in the Second World War would have been through an incredibly intense experience. I wouldn't have really understood them trying to explain it to me. So those of us who lived through it can talk about it with each other, but we can't really... pass it down. - The HIV/AIDS crisis was a devastating period of time for the Gay community. While we've been reflecting on the past, it's crucial to recognise that HIV remains a current reality. As a community, we cannot afford to be complacent or underestimate this virus. Keeping the threat low depends on men who have sex with men regularly getting tested and consulting with healthcare professionals about treatment options like PrEP. In the '80s, '90s, and 2000s, people fought tirelessly for access to lifesaving drugs. Let's continue their legacy and strive to eliminate transmission in Aotearoa. Captions by Tom Clarke. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air.