Princess Diana, The Mildmay Line and What We Have Forgotten About the AIDS Epidemic
Written By Ben Mcilree
Princess Diana, The Mildmay Line and What We Have Forgotten About the AIDS Epidemic
If you fancy a trundle from Camden Road Station to, say, UCL East, you might find yourself on the Mildmay line. You may then wonder why this Overground line was renamed as such, and why it is so special as to be immortalised on the Tube map (the most esteemed real estate in London). I have since learned that my confusion represents a tragic failure of British society in letting the taboo of the 80s and 90s AIDS epidemic undermine the fight for the dignity of millions of queer individuals which until recently, we thought we were winning.
On April 9th, 1987, Princess Diana made history when she was pictured shaking hands with a patient with AIDS without wearing gloves: ‘You can shake their hands and give them a hug. Heaven knows they need it.’ Two years later she was indeed photographed hugging a patient, yet in those two years three major events took place: Thatcher’s government enforced Section 28 - the legislation against ‘intentionally promoting homosexuality’; the Mildmay Hospital opened – the first in Europe to specialise in HIV/AIDS-related illness; and the UK lost 146 people to AIDS-related illness, the first of the 40 million worldwide casualties that it has claimed today. However indelible the show of affection (Princess Diana would go on to visit the Mildmay Hospice 17 times until her death) at a time of fear and tragedy, much of the British public would unleash an epidemic of homophobia on already-suffering members of our own nation. The stigma took lives, and whilst buried somewhat in the past, the wound it left in the British psyche remains largely untended.
The Mildmay Hospital was founded on the ethos of empathy for the downtrodden – its work in the 80s and 90s to manage HIV/AIDS and its attached stigma remains a testament to this unrelenting principle. Originally the Mildmay Group was a number of volunteer deaconesses treating cholera in London’s slums in the 1860s, which was shut down under the NHS crackdown on ‘cottage hospitals’ in 1982; the institution reopened six years later as the Mildmay Hospital, specialising in HIV/AIDS-related illnesses. The Mildmay Hospital eventually evolved from an AIDS hospice to an internationally-renowned HIV rehabilitation centre. With the introduction of the aptly named ‘highly active antiretroviral therapy’ (HAART) in 1996 at specialised centres, like the Mildmay, from 1995 to 2000 the amount of AIDS-related deaths fell by 80%.
However, in recent years, just as LGBTQ alterity started to become a thing of the past, it has been the sole intent of some in this country to pick at the scab. Members of the LGBTQ community are still accused of being dangerous and infectious; take the House of Commons’ very own Thatcherite, Nigel Farage, and his ‘war on woke’. Reform UK pledging to ‘Ban Transgender Ideology’ in their party manifesto, just across the page from their ‘free speech’ pledge, underscores the same ignorant fearmongering of Thatcher’s Conservatives which plunged generations of gay and bisexual men into preinstalled shame we are still trying to unlearn. Beyond being shamelessly copy-and-paste, the rise of transphobia flies in the face of what Britain supposedly learnt from the AIDS epidemic and enshrined on the tube map. Section 28 was only lifted in 2003, but ignorant regurgitations like the suggested banning of gender education by Reform threaten to set us two steps back.
Whilst patting ourselves on the back for treating AIDS patients in the 80s, the image of the People’s Princess embracing the bludgeoned of society has transformed itself from an image of the future to an image from the past. And on the Mildmay line, threading Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington, Keir Starmer’s Camden, and the Liberal Democrats’ Richmond, the name is a reminder of the United Kingdom that opposed the politics of division with their fundamental empathy.
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