Andreu

Andreu died about 20 years ago.

My partner and I had escaped a cold London February for a week in Sitges, a small town on the Mediterranean coast. It was Mardi Gras, and we’d been told that the Sitges Carnival was more fun than anything outside Rio de Janeiro. It was.

We checked into our hotel the evening before Carnival really started. Exploring, we found Quetzal, a tiny gay bar in a cobbled back street. Soon we were chatting to Andreu. He owned it, staffed it, served the drinks, flirted with the customers, cleared the tables.

How to describe Andreu? Handsome, mid-20s, blond, elegant, amusing, sharp-tongued, supercilious, judgmental, generous. Unpredictable. Sometimes annoying. Always good company.

Fiercely proud of newly-democratic Spain, then barely a decade out of the grim Franco dictatorship. And equally proud of Catalonia, and of his mother-tongue Catalan, a language which was banned in public for 40 years after Franco defeated the Republican government in the vicious 1936-39 Civil War.

Over the next few days we became close friends. We hung out with Andreu in Quetzal, and we stayed briefly at his small apartment in Gerona, a beautiful and historic city in the Pyrenean foothills. We came back for Carnival the following year, and spent ten days with him. Andreu insisted on showing us everything – the pagan roots of the Sitges Carnival, the town's Art Deco buildings, Barcelona nightlife, Gerona’s mediaeval city walls.

We went for a trip to Andorra, a minuscule independent country deep in the Pyrenees. With a stereo blaring out the sexually-ambiguous songs of the Spanish group Mecano, Andreu harepinned his car round the mountain roads. Every time we admired something, he would respond smugly: “Of course. It’s Spain, darling.” When the road looped briefly into France, this would change to a patronising “Yes, but it’s only France”.

We stayed in touch, but couldn’t make it to Carnival the third year. And then we heard from his boyfriend that Andreu was dead. There were no anti-viral drugs then, and Spanish hospitals knew little of AIDS except fear and prejudice. Andreu died in a bare isolation room, the scared and hostile nurses even refusing to change his soiled bedsheets. He lasted only a few weeks from hospitalisation to death.

Andreu’s story wasn’t unusal, during what many European and North American gays remember as the “plague years” of the late 80s and early 90s. So many of our friends died from AIDS that we sometimes felt vaguely guilty for having survived.
Only gradually did we understand just what AIDS was, that it was caused by HIV, and how we could protect ourselves by safer sex. But few of us then got tested. Unlike today, when medication can keep HIV under control indefinitely, there was no cure and little treatment. Testing positive was an death sentence, even if the onset of AIDS might not come for years. Why learn if you were positive? Nothing could be done, and it would only make you miserable.

In Britain, where I then lived, most mortgages required life insurance. And the insurance companies always asked if you had ever been tested for HIV. Not whether you were positive: just had you ever been tested. If you answered yes, you got no life insurance, because you were clearly a bad risk. If you didn’t admit you’d been tested, they could revoke the insurance, and few of us were convinced the process was truly confidential.

Women, children and people infected by blood transfusions were called the “innocent victims” of AIDS. Gays, by implication, were only getting what they deserved.

During those awful years, there were so many Andreus. (This still applies today, in many countries in Africa and elsewhere.) Those who died were friends, lovers, co-workers, acquaintances. People we knew, people we didn’t know. They were us.

Overwhelmingly, they were young. And that’s how I remember Andreu, who would be nearly 50 now.

An English poet wrote about the devastation of another generation of young men, almost a century ago in the First World War - "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old". 

© Jon Tinker