empowerment | timalderman

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 ©️

WORLD AIDS DAY

It’s the day after WAD, and as usual, I’m ruminating! For many years now I have been looking at how I now view HIV/AIDS – through the lense of objectivity. Emotion only muddles the issue, and history has a trail of misinformation, mixed objectives, venom and misunderstanding!

Even recently I have encountered those who, for reasons known only to themselves, have never been able to move on! The hate is still alive, the dragons still circling. I could be one of these, who still feel that the experiences of the 80s & 90s are still alive, an uncompromising hard line that leaves me stranded in a time that has passed by. Fuck knows there is a lot in my past that I have never fully moved on from – family business that could, at any time in the past, have left me sitting in a gutter, needle dangling…or in a bar, in an alcoholic stupor – and fuck knows I flew very close to the latter at one stage! More so than many, I have reason enough to be bitter, to be a victim. My experience with AIDS has left me close to blind, and there are many who would agree that that is reason enough. But, as in my latter teens, with full knowledge of my families dysfunctionality, living with a solitary knowledge of my younger brothers horrendous death, of violence and unspoken secrets, of my being gay, I made a quiet vow to myself that I was not going to let it get the better of me, to smother me, to stop me being who I would be! So to with AIDS – my survival alone was an unexpected surprise – and blindness! To buckke under, to attribute blame, to become a victim, to allow it to hold me back, swallow me up, would be saying…I do not have the strength for this, the self-empowerment whereby I would become someone who even I didn’t recognise!

To move on, one has to acknowledge that the past is just that – the past! Yes, what happened was dreadful – the hatred, the discrimination, the accusations, the blame, the misinformation, the segregation, the fear! We need to acknowledge – 40 years along now – that we were all scared shitless. Straight, gay, male, female, religious, non-religious, politicians, doctors, journalists, activists…ad infinitum…were all scared. Perhaps not since the scourges of the Black Death have we encountered something we all knew absolutely nothing about – not even those who, perhaps, should have known! And what does human nature do when it is faced with an unknown that can just kill at will, shows no mercy, is no respecter of life at all – it looks for scapegoats, attributes blame, hands out punishment! It just so happens that the scapegoat was the gay community, and given what was happening at that time, it perhaps should not have been surprising. Minority groups have a long history of misunderstanding, stigma, discrimination, hate and ignominy! I am not defending the direction it took…I’m not going to shoot myself in the foot…but the point is, it was quite a while back now, and as awful and relentless as it was, as a community we not only survived it, but we fought back with the tools to hand – knowledge, facts, patience and dogged determination.

One can’t deny that some of the negatives from that era live on. There is still prejudice, discrimination, stigma and musunderstanding! But it is also true that we don’t have it on our own – just ask any person with Down Syndrome. To hang onto the hate, and all the other negatives from that period in our history is to hold no one back but yourself! You know, we all walked in the footsteps of those that suffered, those that died! But by walking in their footsteps, when their footsteps stopped…ours continued on! To live with the negativity is to deny that a lot of good, positive, beautiful things were still going on. The community still lived, loved, and laughed. We supported each other, we were staunch in the face of adversity, we celebrated the lives of those who died with a gusto that was ever born of love. If ever there was a time I was proud to be a member of the gay community, it was through the 20 years of that horror!

Okay, it damaged me! As a fanatical reader & writer, it chose to attack perhaps the most important assets I had – my eyes! But it also presented me with new opportunities, new roads to venture down, new challenges to tackle. I can’t carty the hate because, despite everything, my life has not stopped, nor my humour, my inquisitiveness, my talents, nor my ability to just get on with it. I no longer go to candlelight vigils, or other AIDS memorials. It is too raw, too emotion charged, to ready to rip open healed wounds. I don’t forget – those who died are too entrenched in my memories for that – but now I choose to remember in more gentle ways. What every single one of my dead friends would have wanted is for me to get on with my life. Once a year their ghosts are going to waft around, to cajole me to tears, to invoke memories of wonderful times that will stay with me forever.

But I’ll wake up tomorrow, and the ghosts will be gone. And just as they wanted, my life goes on. Who am I to argue with them!

Tim Alderman (2016)