Category Archives: Article

A 40 Year Journey Into (And Out Of) Fear Part 2

Article, Autobiography, Gay Interest, History, HIV/AIDS, , , , ,

New words were added to our vocabulary, a series of acronyms that would imprint themselves forever into our memories…PCP (Pneumocystis pneumonia); KS (Kaposi sarcoma); CMV (Cytomegalovirus…one I’m intimately familiar with))… MAC (Mycobacterium avium complex); candidiasis (Thrush), toxoplasmosis, to name a few. When we asked how people were, we were really asking what did they have…and what was the prognosis! Meanwhile, the Australian nightmare was well and truly hitting home.

In 1986, my first close friend, Andrew Todd, died. At that time there was no dedicated AIDS ward, and Andrew was shifted between wards as beds were needed for other cases. On Christmas Day, we visited him in what was called St Christopher’s ward (due to patients travelling into and out of it), in Sydney’s St Vincent’s emergency department. He was very thin, and frail, but we had brought gifts for him, including sheet sets, and books. We were going to a friends place in Glebe for Christmas lunch. When the time came to leave, Andrew said to us, something that was quite upsetting for us, I have to say, that he ‘wouldn’t die that day, and ruin everyone’s Christmas lunch’. It unintentionally did, as we waited all day on edge, for a phone call. True to his word, he didn’t pass away on Christmas Day. He died on Boxing Day. It was my unpleasant duty to ring everyone at a party, and inform them. Party pooper status acknowledged!

His funeral at Eastern Suburbs Crematorium, a place we were to visit on far too many occasions, was several days later. His father had travelled from South Australia to oversee it. Myself and Sandro, both close friends of Andrew’s, ended up being the middle men between those of us who wanted a funeral that was honest and respectful, and the leather community who wanted what we considered an over-the-top leather funeral. We won that one.

Towards the end of the crematorium service, as the curtains were closing over the coffin, every door in the chapel suddenly, and very loudly, slammed close. The silence after was eerie. We could say it was just the wind, but one was left wondering. Andrew got the last laugh anyway. I had lent him many novels during his hospital stays, and in his will he bequeathed them all back to me.

Sex became a conundrum. As soon as it was found that HIV was sexually transmitted, the dynamics of sex changed, at least temporarily. Some guys went celibate. Others cut out anal sex altogether. Others went to odd extremes, like standing well apart and just mutually masturbating. For a culture that was heavily geared towards sex, it was a real blow. The dynamics of “picking up” changed significantly. Condoms became the new order of the day, and condom and lube “safe sex” packs were everywhere, from sex venues to pubs and nightclubs.

ACON created the Safe Sex Sluts, who at least put a bit of fun into what was now a serious subject. This, over time, created some reverse, and some dark situations. On the dark side, terms like “bug chasing” came into being. This phrase described those who deliberately sought out HIV+ guys and indulged in unsafe sex on the purely weird chance that they would get infected. “Breed me” could often be seen on sex sites, placed there by guys who wanted to become infected. It was strange times.

Then there were guys like me who just hated sex with condoms. They ruined spontaneity, and were just passion killers. Naturally, this meant we were seeking out guys to have unsafe sex. To this end, I restricted my sex life to sex with HIV+ guys only. It was politely referred to as “negotiated unsafe sex”. I could never have lived with myself if I knowingly passed on HIV to another guy, but the thinking was that it was impossible to infect a guy already infected. Talk of the risk of creating a HIV mutated “super bug” came to nothing.

Of course, this meant constantly outing yourself as HIV+, but that has never greatly concerned me, and by this time I was working on the scene so it wasn’t a risky thing to do. For the record, I had a very fulfilling sex life. There was no shortage of HIV+ guys hunting for skin-on-skin sex. Another term spawned by the era of safe sex was “barebacking”…known as normal sex (or condom-less sex) in earlier times. Yet despite all the restrictions, self imposed or otherwise, the sex-on-premises places such as Numbers Bookstore which I managed in Darlinghurst, the Toolshed, the Hellfire Club (later to become the Den Club), Club 80 (initially thought to be Ground Zero for the Sydney epidemic) and various others, and the saunas such as 253, the Roman Baths, KKK and the Steamworks, and other notorious sites such as the beat in the Green Park toilet block, and The Wall on Darlinghurst Road, thrived.

In 1984, Ward 17 South was established at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney which became the dedicated AIDS ward. For the next 10 years it was never empty. Palliative care was through the Sacred Heart Hospice. With the support services in place, pubs and nightclubs started running events to raise money. I think if there was ever a time where I was proud to be a member of the Sydney gay community, it was seeing the huge amounts of money raised at auctions, raffles, and events. Tens of thousands of dollars were raised from the pockets of the grassroots community, and was either spread around the various support groups, or was used to buy things like televisions for Ward 17.

In 1987, Colin Crewes, seeing the need for basic lifestyle support, such as meals, a place to meet and interact with others in the same situation, massages, hair cuts, access to magazines and newspapers, counselling services etc started the “Maitraya Day Centre” in Surry Hills (it later morphed into the “Positive Living Centre”). It had a constant stream of guys socialising there. At Milton’s Point, NorthAIDS (Myrtle Place Centre) offered the same services to those living on Sydney’s northside.

Hospitals such as Westmead, hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons; full contamination clothing for those working with HIV patients, rooms not being cleaned, meals left outside doors. According to the rumourmongers, you get HIV from using plate/cups/cutlery/glasses/toothbrushes/towels/bed linen that any infected person had used. It was anathema despite it being washed, despite all information stating that you could not contract HIV through this means. Even the poor old mosquito copped a hiding as a means of contamination. An advertising campaign in 1987 featuring the Grim Reaper bowling down people indiscriminately, created an apocalyptic vision of HIV that scared the life out of everyone. It was quickly withdrawn three weeks into its six week run.

By this stage, my two years prognosis had become four years…became six…became eight. That was great for me, but not for so many others. The obituary columns in the gay rags went from scattered memoriums to pages as the death toll mounted. My life became a haze of alcohol and cigarettes, not shared alone. Our coping mechanisms were being stretched to their limit. Funerals were a daily occurrence, as were wakes. I attended as many as I could, but I just got to a stage where I was burnt out by the continuing relentless onslaught, and stopped going.

In the 80’s, I held a lot of parties with anywhere from 40-60 friends attending. By 1996, if I had tried to hold a party I would have been lucky to have dug up 10 friends to attend. In the blink of an eye, my social circle was effectively wiped off the face of the earth. In 1997, having finally recovered from AIDS, and thinking it was time to reconnect to the community, I went out one Saturday night to The Beauchamp. For the first time in my life on the gay scene, in a crowded pub, I stood in a bar and could see NOBODY I knew. It was an incredibly lonely sensation.

Tim Alderman 2024

Above photo…Peter McCarthy, Peter Gilmore (Deceased), Bevan (Deceased),,Steve Thompson and myself at an AIDS Quilt unfolding (we were unfolders) at the RHI Pavilion (Sydney Showgrounds ) around 1992. The tee-shirts bear the Quilts Insignia, and “Remember Their Names”

A 40 Year Journey Into (And Out Of) Fear Part 1

Article, Autobiography, Gay Interest, General Interest, Health Information, HIV/AIDS, , , ,

I love history. Always have, and excelled at it at school. Not just local and world history in general, but individuals personal history as well. Though often distorted, edited to fit the times, world history is fixed. There is only one truth to it, no matter what narrators may say. Personal histories are quite a different thing. A hundred people will produce a hundred histories, each distinctly individual, never duplicated by anyone else. I have written much about my experiences with HIV over the last 25 years, most of it via “Talkabout”. Though personal, and often intimate, none have really gotten into the nitty-gritty of my personal, lived experience. This reflective piece is to rectify those omissions, giving both a factual and lived insight into a period in gay history that should never be forgotten. The recent Covid experience really drove home to me how HIV, its past, and still present history, was no longer of any consequence. Covid was being spoken about as though it is the only pandemic of recent time. It would be interesting to see where Covid sits in 40 years time. So this is my history with HIV/AIDS. It is more detailed, and more anecdotal than my previous writings…which also means it’s much longer. It is, with no strutting involved, a story of survival, but if survival is the gauge of one’s strength and tenacity, then I have come out at the end of it with flying colours, the glass half full, so to speak.

Over 40 years has passed since I sero-converted to HIV. I remember it well…I was managing a retail store in Sydney and was due to go on leave in August 1983. My last day before going off on my break was hellish. Temperature, diarhhea, extreme lethargy, disorientation…I couldn’t wait for the day to end. As it turned out…for the fortnight it went on for to end. I had only been out for 3 years…a late closet jumper…and I have to admit to being very trashy, making up for lost time as it was. I have wondered over the years, as have many, just who it was that infected me…and where! Was it that hot American boy who was staying in The Connaught in Darlinghurst, who picked me up one night just after my return from Melbourne (very likely!) or was it a Melbourne or Sydney local who had returned from a holiday in the USA, or, like me, gotten off with American boys (the flagour of the month) here. Of course, I’ll never know, but the speculation remains anyway!

Since that time, both as a writer, and as a 12-year public speaker with the Positive Speakers Bureau, I have told of my journey with HIV/AIDS. But the story has always had constraints…either in word length with articles, or time restrictions in talks. There is a lot more to the story than I tell in these…often done by rote…sessions.

I have just finished reading Cheryl Wares “HIV Survivors In Sydney – Memories Of The Epidemic”, an oral history project that I was part of, contributing a 21/2 hour interview with Cheryl when I lived in Gaythorne, Queensland in 2014. I was disappointed in the book, for as much as Cheryl wanted it to be a story of ordinary gay men surviving HIV/AIDS, and how it affected their lives both then, and now, it really came across as a voice for…and was hijacked by… HIV activists, rather than just us bar crawling gays-on-the-Golden-Milers. I was left feeling that both my contribution, and the contribution of others like me who weren’t part of the activist community was largely overlooked…again. I know it sounds like sour grapes, and mine is only one of a thousand survivor stories, but like many others I want there to be some sort of public record of many aspects of the HIV/AIDS survival story that doesn’t make it into many articles, or talks. The one thing Cheryl’s book did do was to invoke memories of so many personal experiences…and feelings…that made my personal HIV journey…MY journey.

This is not the first time I’ve contributed to interviews and photo sessions on HIV/AIDS survival, and either been left out in the cold, or had my story overshadowed by activists…or academics. But more on that as we go along. Because this is a personal transcript, I am not putting a word limit on it, so it’s going to be long. I want all this unknown or forgotten information to be in one article. It’s not a soul-cleansing, so don’t get me wrong. I see it more as an addendum to HIV history. I want it in writing before I either forget it, or confuse it in the fog of ageing. Luckily, I am a bit of a hoarder, so have copies of a lot of the things I will be referencing as the story unfolds. To make sense of it, I guess I need to go back to the beginning.

I have written a lot on my family, the dysfunctionality of my growing up, in my blog (http://timalderman.com), so I am not going to rehash already told stories here. In a nutshell, I was born in St. George Hospital, in Kogarah (NSW) on the 18th January 1954. I had one younger brother, Kevin, who was born in 1959. My childhood was pretty uneventful until I was 11, where with my mother deserting the family home, when my brother and I were at school. My father was a difficult man, trapped in a past that had long gone! Yet, he managed to find the housekeeper from hell…to this day I have no idea where he found her, though her move from the bed in the sunroom of our Sylvania home to the bed in the master bedroom occurred within a week, so I am left to wonder… entering our lives. Her persecution of my ADHD brother was relentless, and led to the death of him, at my father’s hands, in the waters below the cliff top known as The Gap. This blew my innocence all to the shit. My knowledge of “being different” at age 9, and my eventual coming out after my father’s suicide are also on my blog, so let’s move it all along.

1980 finds me in Melbourne, where I had just come out as a 26 year-old. A HIV story begins. Little did I know that both my life as a gay man, and my life as a HIV+ man were to walk the same road.

So what was it really like in 1982 to be reading snippets in our local gay press about this mysterious illness (KS, or Kaposi Sarcoma), rearing its ugly head in the gay ghetto’s of America, that seemed to be targeting gay men who frequented the saunas, and quickly killed them? Well, cynicism and disbelief to start with, and the surety that within a short period of time they would find an antibiotic to clear up yet another STD. However, the snippets were to become columns, the columns pages as the mysterious and deadly virus…originally labelled as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (Gay plague/Gay syndrome) in 1981, it was followed by HTLV-3 in 1083…human T-lymphotrophic virus type 3…leapt from the shores of America and found its way into the gay scene here. The panic and fear began!

Our response was mixed. The first case of AIDS was reported in Sydney in October 1982 by Dr Ronald Penny. In July 1983, the first recorded Australian death from AIDS-related causes occurred in Melbourne.. The most notable death in these early days was Bobby Goldsmith (1984).We had our usual ratbags who yelled and screamed about “God’s vengeance on the evil, sick and perverted gay lifestyle”…obviously a different God to the compassionate, all-forgiving one that Christians liked to rant about…the most vocal and notable being the Rev Fred Nile MLC and his Festival of Light, and Call To Australia affiliations, the advocates of hate and intolerance who demanded quarantine for all infected persons, and those of the citizenry who either quietly or vocally wished that we would all die or just go away. Mind you, we did have our fun with them. I vividly recall one early Mardi Gras…back then, joining the parade was a very informal process…where the Festival of Light were protesting at the parades starting point. Myself and some friends, dressed in leather chaps with our bare backsides hanging out of them, deliberately stood in front of them, shaking our booty, much to their horror and disgust.

There is no watering it down…discrimination and stigmatisation was rife. It was frightening!

Thankfully, common sense eventually prevailed and both the government and the grassroots gay community combined to put both AIDS Councils and NGO programs in place. Our quick response was instrumental in Australia always being at the forefront of HIV/AIDS care. Within 2 years every state had an AIDS Council under the national umbrella of NAPWA (National Association of People with AIDS), and the formation of support organisations such as The Bobby Goldsmith Foundation (BGF), Community Support Network (CSN) PLWA (which was to become PLWHA), ActUp, and Ankali. Without these organisations life would have been grim for those infected. They provided financial, emotional and spiritual support for those who, quite suddenl found them selves with a death sentence hanging over their heads, along with the fear of unemployment and homelessness in the midst of the hysteria going on.

I digress! In 1985 testing was introduced. It was a bit of a strange affair in the early days. Due to the hysteria, discrimination, and fear of being dragged off to quarantine…a genuine fear… no one wanted their personal details on a database, so at clinics like the Albion St Centre you chose a fictitious name, and the clinic then issued you with a number that then became your ID. Mine was Peter 3080. When things cooled down, the fictitious name was dropped, and replaced with your real name. You had a blood test, and waited for two to six weeks – talk about high anxiety – to get your result. At the time of my HIV test, I already suspected that I had sero-converted and was going to come up HIV+. I was right. Counseling? Oh yeah, we had a lot of that back then. “You’ve got about 2 years to live”. Shrug shoulders “Okay”. And off we went knowing the inevitable was rapidly approaching! The initial window periods were reasonably long, but got much shorter as time progressed, and the virus mutated. That I did not get seriously ill with AIDS until 1996…though their were other factors in play…I always put down to getting infected early in the history of the virus, thus getting a much weaker mutant of the virus than what was to come. I was in a relationship at that time, and my partner came up HIV-…already the juxtaposition between positives and negatives had begun. The strange thing was that I felt no need to hide my status. I turned up at the Oxford Hotel and said to friends…oh well, I’m positive. Of course, I was far from being the only one.

Then the horror stories started! The disgusting treatment of young Eve Van Grafhorst is something for all Australians to be ashamed of. Born in 1982, she was infected with HIV via a blood transfusion. When she attempted to enrol in her Kincumber pre-school in 1985, parents threatened to withdraw their children due to the (supposed) risk of infection. The family was literally hunted out of town, and forced to leave the country and go to NZ. I will never forget the sight of this poor, frail girl on her way to the airport. I, like many others, was horrified that this could happen in Australia. Thankfully, her NZ experience was quite the opposite, and she lived a relatively normal life until her death in 1993 at 11 years of age. Her parents received a letter from Lady Di praising her courage

To be continued

Tim Alderman ©️ 2024

HIV Long Term Survivors Awareness Day Reflection

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, HIV/AIDS, , ,

In early 1994, I had a huge 40th birthday party at the Stronghold Bar, in the basement of the Clock Hotel in Surry Hills. At the same time, I dumped the beautiful man who had been my boyfriend.

With declining health, I thought it would be my last big birthday party.. I hoped I might get another year…maybe 2. I did not want my boyfriend to be lumbered with the care of a dying man. There were others better equipped to do that. At that stage, I had no inkling that my guess would almost come to fruition, and that within those two years, HAART (Combination Therapy) would appear. It whisked me…literally…from the arms of death. Battered and bruised from my encounter with AIDS, I was thrown unceremoniously back into society.

Even at that stage I was already, along with others who walked similar though divergent paths, a long term survivor. According to the statistics, I should have departed this life around 1987. Four years would have been considered a good run, let alone thirteen! That I had survived that long…longer than most of my social circle…filled me with a strange mix of guilt, thanks, and hope. Having been given a second chance, nothing was going to be the same again! And it wasn’t!

Now at 70…way past the self-imposed 40 deadline…and as a 41-year long term survivor, the trepidation of those earlier days is way back in the dark past. Though I still get a jolt when I fully realise the implication of those two figures…70…41! It seems surreal. I did grab the opportunity, and reinvented myself…a university degree in writing, and two TAFE degrees in both cooking (chef), and fitness have positively changed my life direction.

As a long term survivor…and I wear the badge with modest pride, having beaten the odds…the other significant aspect of having been where I have, is the knowing that I have lived…and continue to…through the entirety of a pandemic. What irks me is that, as a valuable historical resource, my knowledge is overlooked, pushed into the background of history. Covid was nasty…and still is…but was treated as though it was the worst thing to happen to mankind. Yet only 40 years earlier, one of the worst pandemics of modern times had started to run its course, and over 40 million people have died as a result of it.

We have short memories!

Tim Alderman 2024.

That Crazy Weird Old HIV Guy

Article, General Interest, Health Information, HIV/AIDS, Opinion Piece, , ,

Let’s get one thing straight…I’m NOT a conspiracy theorist! I would like to think I weigh things up before coming to a conclusion. I’ve seen…and heard… a lot over the last 41 years of my life with both HIV, and AIDS! Some good, some not so good. Many will not agree with me on some, or all of these points, and that’s fine! But there are also a lot who will! There will never be a Royal Commission, not even a dissection of how HIV was handled “back in the day”. There was a thinking that drastic times called for drastic actions, and thus everything was acceptable, despite any damage it caused. I’m one of those who begs to differ, even if it makes me out to be a crackpot! Oh…and another point I need to make…yes, I AM suspicious of Big Pharma! Both their intentions, and practises!

So…why am I defending myself? Well…I have some “outside-the-square” theories/thinking on how the HIV community has been used by the drug companies over the decades. Of course, they are BIG, so have a lot of clout, and nobody ever seems to question their intentions.

I have always considered it a bit odd that there have been investigations into how Covid was handled, federally and on a state level, but nothing into the handling of the HIV pandemic. As stated already, it is almost like there was an “anything goes” attitude towards issues regarding HIV. As long as an action could be justified, it was okay!

In 2018, I had a chapter dedicated to me in the “HIV Book Project” publication of the same name. Over the decades, I have had many interviews by media, including Good Weekend, and a segment on the television series Healthy, Wealthy & Wise. Apart from a very cringy article in The Bulletin in 1987, back when we knew fuck all about HIV treatment, and survival rates, my story, as interesting as it is, as told in interviews and photographic sessions, had never been published in the mainstream media. This has always appeared to be the domain of activists, HIV “hierarchy”, and academics. So much for the voice of the HIV guy on the street!

My interview and photography session for the HIV Book Project took place in Sydney Park, with an ex, and my dog, Benji tagging along. When they decided to include me in the book, I was, to a point, surprised! My opinions were controversial, and my actions to handle my HIV drug treatments my own way must have raised many an eyebrow. After all, compliance had been rammed down our throats for over 20 years, and that someone like me dared to defy the norm was, to say the least, foolhardy! To my way of thinking, our doctors didn’t decide our medication dosing…the drug companies did!

After being on one regime or another…extending back to the days of mono therapy…for over 25 years I was greatly concerned about how these drugs must have been knocking my body around. At that time, I was on a regime of three drugs twice a day. Over a 7 year period, I had made the very personal decision to halve my regime to once a day. This effectively cut out side effects I was experiencing at that time. It also gave my body some respite from the continued battering of long-term drug dosing. To make things worse…I was also taking a drug holiday every weekend. So these views and actions were published in the book. I had never admitted to anyone that I had taken this action. Not even my doctor!

After publication, I read the other stories in the book. Comparing my story to theirs, I actually felt as though I had come across as a bit of a weirdo! Perhaps to my own detriment, what I hadn’t explained was that when I started this action, my intention had been that if by halving my dosing my viral load climbed, or my CD4 count dropped, I would resume the prescribed dosing. Yet after 7 odd years of doing this, my viral load was still undetectable, and my CD4 count continued to climb! So much for the need for compliance! I’m not advocating that everyone on HIV drug regimes should do this…but it is food for thought!

And it doesn’t stop there! I openly defied those who love to claim that AZT was beneficial, and kept the wolf from the door! This was an incredibly toxic drug! Having failed as a cancer drug due to its toxicity, it was suddenly hailed as a breakthrough drug in the treatment of HIV, despite trials such as the Concorde trial (Britain/Ireland/France) labelling it as “human rat sac”. Anyone who saw “Dallas Buyers Club” would be familiar with the disdain in which the drug was held. Its side effects…and we were dosed massively with it…were horrendous, including liver and kidney damage, peripheral neuropathy, knocked the immune system around (immune suppression), and anaemia. On a HIV forum many years ago, I posted that I personally held AZT responsible for the sudden decline in my CD4 count, and the immune suppression that brought about my run in with AIDS. I thought I would cop a slamming for expressing such an opinion, only to find in the comments that many agreed with me! Like me, many regretted taking it!

I also question…please note that word…the ethics behind the pricing of HIV drugs! At one time, the actual retail price of the drug…usually in the many hundreds of dollars…was printed on the pharmacy label. Anyone on three or four drugs would never have been able to afford to buy them every month, especially anyone on a pension. One has to wonder that, without the PBS, would the drug companies have just allowed us to die…or would we also have had to run buyers clubs!

Which brings me to resistance testing…another drug company instigated test, and one I have always been…vocally…doubtful about. Excuse my cynicism, but if a drug company is developing and pushing a particular test, there has to be something in it for them!Has anyone noticed…and I’m sure you must have…that pretty well everyone who had a drug resistance test was taken off the older drugs (despite them still working) and placed on the newer drug regimes! Logic decrees that, considering the costs of research and development, Big Pharma would prefer us all to be on the newer drugs, considering that they would have the highest financial outlay! I reckon we were really duped on this one, especially considering that currently those who are experiencing weight gain…another point worth raising…from the newer drug regimes are requesting a return to the older drugs…which at some stage they would have been told they are resistant too. Interesting, that!

So call me a weirdo, or a ratbag! To be honest, I really don’t care! For no reason has the term HIV Industry been coined! Someone is making money from it, and undoubtedly keeping the shareholders happy…and it’s not US! I would rather be called a whacko…at the least, after 41 years being HIV+…that I’ve experienced enough, indeed seen enough, to know that if you are not one of the sheep who just goes along with the flow, if you are someone who thinks for themselves with a moderate dose of cynacism, you are always going to be attacked and slammed.

I have broad shoulders. I can handle a bit of criticism.

Tim Alderman ©️ 2024

Be A Local Disability Advocate.

Article, Autobiography, General Interest, HIV/AIDS, , ,

I’m a 41 year long term survivor of HIV/AIDS. I’m severely vision-impaired from CMV, and mobility challenged from one of the early drugs designed to prolong our lives.

I used to see HIV disability as a singular issue, but ageing…I’m now 70…has turned that thinking around. No matter if you are disabled as a result of birth, accidents, stupidity, or illness such as HIV, all disabled people share one thing in common. We’re disabled! And quite often, this world is designed manufactured and built by people who aren’t. To make things worse, many think they know what disabled people need…without consulting with us!

I live in a Central Coast village. Footpaths here are a luxury. Residents usually walk on the roads, as having a sand base, the grass verges are a minefield. I’m lucky in that we have several new paths, though to use them when walking into the village adds several minutes to the journey. I also have to cross 3 busy roads. There is a pedestrian refuge on one, and a crossing on another, but the busiest middle one has no safe crossing. You not only need to watch traffic from four directions, but you have to step onto the road to see around parked vehicles. I’ve had several close calls crossing this road, and I dread crossing it!

In consultation with my local member…also disabled and in a wheelchair…we have put in a submission to council to have some sort of crossing put in there, not just for disabled people, but also to guard the safety of school kids, and the elderly using that path. Considering council is supposedly disabled-aware,they are certainly procrastinating. Safety aware indeed! Not!

Likewise the car park and entry access area of our local RSL were badly edge marked, and with a dangerous ramp to the clubs entry area. In bright sunlight, you could not see the pale yellow fluro markings at all! Coming out of the club into sunlight, I could not see the access ramp at all, and relied on friends or kindly members to get me safely to the ramp. Submissions from me and several other vision impaired people saw the whole car park remarked, and the club entryway reconfigured.

It is very empowering when you are listened to, and suggestions are acted on.,

I used to be frightened to speak up about these things, but if nothing is said, nothing changes. As disabled people, we have a right to be able to move safely around our local areas. Whether able-bodied or disabled, if you know of dangers in your local area, be an advocate and speak up. Small changes can save a life.

Tim Alderman 2024 ©️

Please Stay On The Line – Your Call Is Important To Us

Article

It’s rigged, you know! The whole system is designed to drive us Tribal Elders to the brink of insanity! And it’s working! Mention a government service to me, and I start whimpering…tears are close to flowing…followed by a string of expletives. To say I have developed a phobia about government services is an understatement. I would rather have my nails pulled out…less pain would be involved!

It’s not as if this is a recent frustration…it’s been planned by the government to work us over through the decades, knowing that the whimpering messes we become by out three score and ten years will have us like putty in their hands, ready to give in to whatever delusion they have created for us. Who remembers the old Centrelink of the 80s and 90s, tied into the CES (Commonwealth Employment Service – before they decided it was better to have private enterprise ripping them off and doing nothing) with their job boards! Every week (or fortnight…I can’t remember) we had to trot into a Centrelink office to hand in our forms to say we’d been searching for work. Of course, we had lied on them, and crossed our fingers that they wouldn’t choose our form to check up on. The thing I was thankful for was that I had a mate who worked in our local office. Yes, he did oil the wheels.

When I finally had to leave the workforce in 1993, ACON had an advocate …Fred Oberg…who did all the dirty work for us, both getting onto the disability pension, and applying for the housing subsidy for those of us in private rental. All the same, we still had to have occasional interactions with both those departments, and for some unknown reason it was inevitable that SOMETHING wouldn’t have been done by the book, and your single visit turned into three, with you trailing sheafs of paperwork that must have kept somebody in the job. Then there was the Dental Hospital…when they finally realised we were all losing our teeth thanks to candida. The receptionists have to be the crankiest people I have ever encountered! Once you got in…no easy feat…they yanked all your teeth out. Then they made you dentures. My first set…I’d love to know what photo they used …had teeth so big I looked like Bugs Bunny. I thanked them profusely…and used a BGF subsidy to get a set from a private dental clinic.

But I’ve survived AIDS…and thought naïvely that my battles were over! Then I encountered the new, cleverly disguised, Housing. Having tried ringing Centrelink, Housing, and My Aged Care,to be told “Your call is important to us. Your place in line is…257…please don’t hang up. We are experiencing a higher than usual number of calls…a consultant will be with you shortly Here is some music while you wait”, I decided to apply online. Wrong choice! Not only is it extremely time-consuming, and frustrating including time outs…it enjoys…I’m pretty sure of that terminology…taking you in circles. You’ve gone to the trouble to have a medical assessment form filled out by your GP. You upload all the documentation they request. You submit it! Within minutes, you get an email saying they need more documents for, say, your medical evidence. You think…I’ve already submitted this…so you resubmit the documents you have already submitted. Then another email saying they require more documents that you have submitted . I got so frustrated by this stage that I contacted the then Housing Officer at PL, and begged for help before I had a total meltdown. They got me through the process.

Now…My Aged Care! The web site finally tipped me over the edge. There are page after page of information…each page with a dozen links…you click on a link and instead of just being given the information you need you get…another dozen links…which leads to…yet another dozen links. The lists of providers for those lucky enough to get the highly prized client number, is staggering, and you are left on your own to sort the good from the bad, knowing that…at the end of the day…they are all really after the government subsidy cash. How much subsidy you get depends on which of four categories you end up in when assessed. It seems that no single provider will deliver all the services you need, so you could end up having two or three providers to have all your requirements covered. I just went through and picked four who didn’t appear to be attached to a religious body. When my sanity finally returns, I’ll check them out more thoroughly.

It’s time the government learnt that at seventy…I’m old!…I’m cranky!…I’m impatient!…and I just want information in a form I can digest easily…and don’t keep me waiting on phones!

Tim Alderman

Wrong Turns…The Person HIV Created

Article, Autobiography, Gay Interest, HIV/AIDS, , , ,

Wrong Turns

How often have you asked yourself “what the hell am I doing with my life?”. How often have you sat at work and wondered,”’why am I doing this?”. I’ve found that as I get older, it’s a question that rears its ugly head more often. You ponder the missed opportunities, the wasted time in jobs you hated; you envy those who are happily going about their chosen careers, fulfilling ambitions, doing what they enjoy.

I sometimes feel I’ve lived a life of quiet desperation. Most of my work life has been for nothing. I’ve nearly always been unhappy in my job choices…despite being very good at it…and developed the I’m-just-doing-it-for-the-pay-packet mentality. Sure, my latter years have been a lot more fulfilling, but the operative word is ‘latter’.

I wasn’t offered a lot of opportunities to select a fulfilling career. I left school at 15, in 1969, with the School Certificate under my belt and no idea what I wanted to do. According to my father and his family, I needed to get myself a “career”. By ‘career’, they meant becoming a plumber, electrician, carpenter or any of the associated trades. Considering the current sexy status attributed to tradies, I’m wondering if it may not have been a bad choice. I loved working with food and even when I was at school used to create my own recipes. However, it was the wrong time to be a foodie. My father suggested becoming a hospital cook (and tried to get me into that area), but the prospect of being stuck in a hospital kitchen for years was daunting. Let’s face it, hospitals are not prestige culinary establishments, especially in the ’70s. I begged out of it, though despite the severe lack of a restaurant culture at that time, the TAFE course may have been of benefit – at least I would have got a grounding in the basics. I had an uncle who was a pastry cook and he helped get me work experience at a bakery (Isoms) in Campsie. Now, if I hadn’t been 16 years old, if I hadn’t had to get up at five every morning and if I hadn’t had washing up and measuring ingredients as the full account of my day, maybe I would have stuck with it. Four months and I was out.

I spent the next 12 months (A) as a presser at a dry cleaning outlet and (B) doing repetitive work at a battery factory, where at the age of 16 I was getting adult wages due to the high turnover of workers, and the mind-numbing repetitiveness of the work. Not very inspiring and certainly not life choices. While in the dry cleaning job, I saw an ad in the window of a menswear store for a junior shop assistant in a high end menswear store . I got the job and…

…pretty well set my career path for the next 28 years. A quick timeline from there would read clothing, records, religious and church paraphernalia, monastery, back to religious paraphernalia, bar useful, sex shop, liquor, community work, cash office manager, data entry/doctor surgery receptionist, office work (at ASHM – the Australian Society for HIV Medicine). At least a variety. Could I really say I loved any of this? Well, it was a job.

The option of continuing education, through TAFE or university, was never presented to me early in my life. Doing anything creative was frowned upon and indeed one would have had one’s ‘inclinations’ (read sexuality) put in jeopardy by even suggesting that you might want to write, be a window dresser, hairdresser, clothes designer, interior decorator, artist or anything else creative. I was told in no uncertain terms that this was unacceptable.

This isn’t to say I didn’t do a few things that fulfilled my creative streak. I did some window dressing as part of general retail; I did quite a bit of writing, though none of it published at that time; I did some costume-making (as well as making my own drag outfits); some catering from home for a delicatessen; made my own jams and preserves (winning quite a few prizes in the process); and I was a DJ in two Darlinghurst gay pubs and bars for five years – the only job I’ve ever truly loved. Who knows, I could still become the oldest Trance DJ in Australia given the opportunity.

What other options would I have chosen for my life? In retrospect, I would love to have been an investigative journalist, in print or television. I enjoy research, and love history, and personally think I would have made a decent career out of it. I love gardening and would have made a successful landscaper or horticulturist. I love athletics and was a good high jumper, relay and short distance runner in my day. With the right encouragement before I started smoking, I would have loved that; or working on the stage; or a singing career (again we come back to smoking!) I have an intense interest in history, both local and global, which could have led in many directions. All these not to be.

What do I do now? I write! I love writing. It’s the flow of ideas; having that fledgling phrase circling in your head that just has to be put somewhere; the one word that can become an article; anger that can be released; opinions that can be controversial; comments that create debate; taking the collective consciousness of many and making it your own; pent-up frustrations released; intelligent argument put forward; comedy to induce a smile; information to be exchanged. Writing is wonderful.

Why suddenly 15 years ago did I head in this direction? And more importantly, where can it lead at this late stage? Well, HIV brought about this huge shift in my life.

As part of my self-organised repatriation after getting out of Prince Henry Hospital and surviving AIDS, I decided to take on some volunteer work to get out of the house and away from Days of Our Lives and the panic attacks I’d started having as a result of my swift and unexpected return to life. A life of clinics, counsellors and support groups was great for filling in time, but I also needed to do something that wasn’t medical. I’d started to see one of Sydney’s more eccentric doctors at that stage and felt a need to write about my experiences with her. This opened the floodgates, which haven’t closed since. I started writing about my experiences with HIV, the processes I was going through, the strategies I was using to cope, the sheer bloodiness of being HIV+ and having had AIDS, the questioning one went through and the realisation that one had to get on with it.

I think therefore I write.

I have always, even as a young kid, loved books. My compositions at school were always a bit over-the-top, much to the amusement of my teachers, and my parents were always being told I had a very fertile mind. Shame they never took this seriously.

On leaving St Gregory’s in 1969, Brother Geoffrey, who taught English, took me aside and told me I should take up a career in writing. Stupid me just let that comment drop.

In the 1980s I was a member of Acceptance Melbourne l and had quite an intense affair with the editor of their newsletter, and contributed regularly to it. I was a prolific letter writer. I edited the newsletter for the Dolphin Motor Club and was responsible for them starting a media sub-committee. I did several courses through community colleges on fiction and life writing and had two poems published overseas.

In 2001 I was accepted into the Humanities Faculty at UTS to do a degree in writing. But the first year of an undergrad degree is full of everything except writing. UTS uses authors to run tutorials, which might sound great in theory, but is just a means for them to push their own writing agendas and methodologies. As a mature-aged student, I clashed! I also didn’t feel comfortable with the often snobbish, elitist attitudes to reading and writing. The tutorial class was horrified that my favourite authors are Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Dan Brown, Michael Crichton, and Edward Rutherfurd. Well…fuck them!

By the second year, and finding yet another author being given their own tutorial, I looked to changing the degree to a Masters. At least by doing this I was just writing. The writing courses did give me the opportunity to publicly write about my drag persona Cleo and in a short story course to talk about my murdered brother, which had never been discussed with anyone. This making public some previously private parts of my life (other than HIV) was very liberating. I had at this stage done enough subjects to get my Graduate Certificate in Writing, so I took that and fled.

My university experience is not something I wish to repeat. The one thing I did learn is that it is extremely difficult to make a living out of writing in Australia. In the meantime I continued writing for Talkabout and the more I wrote, the more I wanted to write. I began to realise that all these articles had become a timeline of my journey with HIV, from the days of illness to the healing process to the return-to-work issues, from treatment issues to regaining my health, redirecting myself and finally my movement away from a life centred around HIV, and a spiritual reawakening through Buddhism. In a way, writing freed me. I took advantage of the beginnings of the Internet to do HIV site reviews and eventually my cooking column. Before leaving Talkabout after 15 years of writing articles and columns, I did a series of articles on Getting On With It, about reshaping life, ageing, and how to cope with its inherent problems.

I would love to widen the scope of my writing. For many years people have been telling me to write about my family and upbringing which was a complex, sometimes sad, sometimes happy experience. Perhaps a bit late in my life – or not – I’m thinking of getting into freelance journalism. Everything HIV that has happened to me over the last 30 years has led to this. It has presented me with new opportunities and opened doors that had previously been closed to me. I am contemplating a course for 2024 – not a cheap thing to do, so I have to consider carefully. In the meantime I will continue to write. Am I self-opinionated? I hope so. Am I controversial? I hope so. Can I see both sides of an argument? I hope so! But most importantly, do I love writing? You bet!

Tim Alderman 2023

A Long Term Survivor Diatribe

Article, HIV/AIDS, , , ,

The long-term survival journey is one where it is easy to get lost along the way. Low motivation, low self esteem, social isolation, lethargy, and a victim mentality can lead to feelings of worthlessness, seeing no value in your own existence, and survivor guilt…all my friends have died so why am I still here! It can be overwhelming.

We have already spent 30+ years of our lives popping life saving pills, thousands of pills…and still with no end in sight. Pretty well every organ in our bodies has been subjected to incredible stress. Our minds have been tested beyond belief. We have been so low that we thought there was no coming back. Lipodystrophy and lipoatrophy have ravaged and aged us early, made us unrecognisable, made us feel ashamed of our own bodies, reticent to strip in front of strangers, in front of even lovers. We have lived without immune systems, a state of inherent danger, not knowing what was going to attack you next, a world where even a cold or the flu could be deadly. We have been eroded by strange diseases, live right now with their devastating consequences. And now we live in a world where younger generations don’t understand us, don’t understand why we carry rage, why we roll our eyes at recent seroconversions, who carry on as though death was lurking around the corner. We have met death, witnessed its cruelty. You have nothing to fear!

Yet…we are here! Present! Sentient! We carry a world of knowledge that no one seems to want to know about.

So what do we do, wandering in this alien landscape? Do we bend, fold and cower…or do we BLOOM! This world is trying to put us down, humble us when we have already been humbled. But there is one thing this world doesn’t know…we are, and always have been, fighters. We make a fist and punch the shit out of it! Then we stand back and roar at it “You are not going to win!”. Our world is not what it was! Having already been deconstructed, the only choice left is…reconstruction. So we stop! Re-evaluate! Pry around our fragile edges, gouge out the positives! Rip our lives to pieces, then sew it back together again into a fabric of renewal. We re-educate, for our past is not our present! We reconnect, seek out those from our past who valued us for who we are…and take steps to make new acquaintances, find those who bring joy, laughter and value into our lives. We feed our bodies, this indestructible machine, with goodness, purity, health. We strip ourselves naked, stand proudly in the light, and rebuild our broken frames. We glare at those who put us down, and yell “FUCK YOU…if you want to learn, come to me…otherwise, bring others down with your ignorance!”. We reconnect with life! Everything is right there in front of us…you just need the hunger to grab it by the balls, and say “make me whole again!”. Don’t give it choices! Never accept no as the answer! Take it…mould it…your new, renewed life waits! Don’t waste the opportunity! Long term survivor is not three dirty words! It is empowerment! Having survived, you rise up…proud…arrogant…and step confidently into the new.

Mantra

I am here! I’m not going away!

Tim Alderman 2023

Buddhism 101: Buddhist Monks and Shaved Heads

Article, General Interest, Religion/Lifestyle, ,

And Why Is the Buddha Depicted With Curls?

Two nuns of a Tibetan Buddhist order, photographed in Dharamsala, India. Matthew Wakem / Getty Images

Here’s a question that comes up from time to time — why do Buddhist nuns and monks shave their heads? We can speculate that perhaps shaving the head reduces vanity and is a test of a monastic’s commitment. It’s also practical, especially in hot weather.

Historical Background: Hair and the Spiritual Quest 

Historians tell us that wandering mendicants seeking enlightenment were a common sight in first millennium BCE India. The historical record also tells us that these mendicants had issues with hair.

For example, some of these spiritual seekers deliberately left their hair and beards unkempt and unwashed, having taken vows to avoid proper grooming until they had realized enlightenment. There also are accounts of mendicants pulling out their hair by the roots.

The rules made by the Buddha for his ordained followers are recorded in a text called the Vinaya-pitaka. In the Pali Vinaya-pitaka, in a section called the Khandhaka, the rules say that hair should be shaved at least every two months, or when the hair has grown to the length of two finger-widths. It may be that the Buddha just wanted to discourage the weird hair practices of the time.

The Khandhaka also provided that monastics must use a razor to remove hair and not cut hair with scissors unless he or she has a sore on her head. A monastic may not pluck out or dye gray hair. Hair may not be brushed or combed — a good reason to keep it short — or managed with any kind of oil. If somehow some hair is sticking out oddly, it is all right to smooth it with one’s hand, however. These rules mostly seem to discourage vanity.

Head Shaving Today 

Most Buddhist nuns and monks today follow the Vinaya rules about hair. 

Practices do vary somewhat from one school to another, but the monastic ordination ceremonies of all schools of Buddhism include head shaving. It’s common for the head to be mostly shaved prior to the ceremony, leaving just a little on top for the ceremony officiant to remove.

The preferred form of shaving is still a razor. Some orders have decided that electric razors are more like scissors than a razor and therefore are forbidden by the Vinaya.

The Buddha’s Hair 

The early scriptures tell us that the Buddha lived in the same way as his disciples. He wore the same robes and begged for food like everyone else. So why isn’t the historical Buddha depicted bald, as a monk? (The fat, bald, happy Buddha is a different Buddha.)

The earliest scriptures don’t tell us specifically how the Buddha wore his hair, although stories of the Buddha’s renunciation tell us he cut his long hair short when he began his quest for enlightenment.

There is, however, one clue that the Buddha didn’t shave his head after his enlightenment. The disciple Upali originally was working as a barber when the Buddha came to him for a haircut.

The first depictions of the Buddha in human form were made by the artists of Gandhara, a Buddhist kingdom that was located in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan, 2000 years or so ago. The artists of Gandhara were influenced by Greek and Roman art as well as Persian and Indian art, and many of the earliest Buddhas, sculpted in the early first millennium CE, was sculpted in an unmistakably Greek/Roman style.

These artists gave the Buddha curly hair clasped in a topknot. Why? Perhaps it was a popular men’s hairstyle at the time.

Over the centuries the curly hair became a stylized pattern that sometimes looks more like a helmet than hair, and the topknot became a bump. But depicting the historical Buddha with a shaved head remains rare.

Reference

  • O’Brien, Barbara. “Buddhist Monks and Shaved Heads.” Learn Religions, Aug. 25, 2020, learnreligions.com/why-buddhist-monks-and-nuns-shave-their-heads-449598.

Buddhism 101: Samskara or Sankhara

Article, General Interest, Religion/Lifestyle, ,

This is a vital component of Buddhist teaching

© Arctic-Images / Getty Images

Samskara (Sanskrit; the Pali is sankhara) is a useful word to explore if you are struggling to make sense of Buddhist doctrines. This word is defined by Buddhists in many ways—volitional formations; mental impressions; conditioned phenomena; dispositions; forces that condition psychic activity; forces that shape moral and spiritual development.

Samskara as the Fourth Skandha 

Samskara also is the fourth of the Five Skandhas and the second link in the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination, so it’s something that figures into many Buddhist teachings. It’s also closely linked to karma.

According to Theravada Buddhist monk and scholar Bhikkhu Bodhi, the word samskara or sankhara has no exact parallel in English. “The word sankhara is derived from the prefix sam, meaning ‘together,’ joined to the noun kara, ‘doing, making.’ Sankharas are thus ‘co-doings,’ things that act in concert with other things, or things that are made by a combination of other things.”

In his book What the Buddha Taught (Grove Press, 1959), Walpola Rahula explained that samskara can refer to “all conditioned, interdependent, relative things and states, both physical and mental.”

Let’s look at specific examples.

Skandhas Are Components That Make an Individual  

Very roughly, the skandhas are components that come together to make an individual—physical form, senses, conceptions, mental formations, awareness. The skandhas are also referred to as the Aggregates or the Five Heaps.

In this system, what we might think of as “mental functions” are sorted into three types. The third skandha, samjna, includes what we think of as intellect. Knowledge is a function of samjna.

The sixth, vijnana, is pure awareness or consciousness.

Samskara, the fourth, is more about our predilections, biases, likes and dislikes, and other attributes that make up our psychological profiles.

The skandhas work together to create our experiences. For example, Let’s say you walk into a room and see an object. Sight is a function of sedana, the second skandha. The object is recognized as an apple — that’s samjna. An opinion arises about the apple—you like apples, or maybe you don’t like apples. That reaction or mental formation is samskara. All of these functions are connected by vijnana, awareness.

Our psychological conditionings, conscious and subconscious, are functions of samskara. If we are afraid of water, or quickly become impatient, or are shy with strangers or love to dance, this is samskara. 

No matter how rational we think we are, most of our willful actions are driven by samskara. And willful actions create karma. The fourth skandha, then, is linked to karma.

In the Mahayana Buddhist philosophy of yogacara, samskaras are impressions that collect in the storehouse consciousness or alaya-vijnana. The seeds (bijas) of karma arise from this.

Samskara and the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination

Dependent Origination is the teaching that all beings and phenomena inter-exist. Put another way, nothing exists completely independently from everything else. The existence of any phenomenon depends on conditions created by other phenomena.

Now, what are the Twelve Links? There are at least a couple of ways to understand them. Most commonly, the Twelve Links are the factors that cause beings to become, live, suffer, die, and become again. The Twelve Links also are sometimes described as the chain of mental activities that lead to suffering.

The first link is avidya or ignorance. This is ignorance of the true nature of reality. Avidya leads to samskara—mental formations— in the form of ideas about reality. We become attached to our ideas and unable to see them as illusions. Again, this is closely linked to karma. The force of mental formations leads to vijnana, awareness. And that takes us to nama-rupa, name, and form, which is the beginning of our self-identity—I am. And on to the other eight links.

Samskara as Conditioned Things 

The word samskara is used in one other context in Buddhism, which is to designate anything that is conditioned or compounded. This means everything that is compounded by other things or affected by other things.

The Buddha’s last words as recorded in the Maha-parinibbana Sutta of the Pali Sutta-pitaka (Digha Nikaya 16) were, “Handa dani bhikkhave amantayami vo: Vayadhamma sankhara appamadena sampadetha.”  A translation: “Monks, this is my last advice to you. All conditioned things in the world will decay. Work hard to gain your own salvation.”

Bhikkhu Bodhi said of samskara, “The word stands squarely at the heart of the Dhamma, and to trace its various strands of meaning is to get a glimpse into the Buddha’s own vision of reality.” Reflecting on this word may help you understand some difficult Buddhist teachings.

Reference