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Meet Britain’s First HIV-Positive Parliamentary Candidate
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Candidate
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| Contributor | IndyGeorgia |
| Last Edited | IndyGeorgia Apr 29, 2015 10:04pm |
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| Category | Profile |
| Author | Patrick Strudwick |
| News Date | Tuesday, March 31, 2015 04:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | A 14-year-old boy – skinny, cropped hair, in a crumpled school uniform – sits on a window ledge. He looks down at the pavement far below, calculating. He decides that this would be enough – high enough to make everything stop.
It is 1993, in a village called Cringleford, on the outskirts of Norwich. The boy’s name is Adrian. Every day they call him a poof, but he cannot tell anyone. His legs feel their way over the sill.
“I was lonely, I was ashamed,” says Adrian Hyyrylainen-Trett, now 36. The words jar with the composed man gazing out the windows of BuzzFeed’s London office, assured and eloquent. He sits completely still, dressed in a loose grey suit, his new uniform suggesting the position he hopes to hold after the election: MP for Vauxhall.
Weeks earlier, I received a message in my Facebook account: “Would it be possible to have a very private conversation…” We met in a quiet coffee shop. “I want to reveal that I’m HIV positive,” Adrian said, with jittery determination, explaining that he had thought about it for a long time.
It would make him the first parliamentary candidate to disclose this publicly. Only one MP – Labour’s Chris Smith – has announced his HIV-positive status, and that was in 2005, when he was already leaving the Commons for the Lords. In the following decade, the stigma surrounding the condition persisted as transmission rates spiked and newspapers heralded cures that never come.
I thought I knew what Adrian’s story would entail. But it is only as he begins to describe the harrowing events that led up to his diagnosis that the reality emerges: Coming out about being HIV positive – an act of extraordinary courage – is only half the story. |
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