'I was burying friends at 23': The real lives that inspired It's a Sin
As a young adult, Paul Burston was burying one friend after another practically each week. When he wasn’t, he was busy making preparations for his own death - which he felt was imminent.
Born in York and raised in South Wales, Paul had moved to London in 1984 at the age of 18 to study at St Mary’s College. He was able to begin embracing his sexuality with his friends and explore more of the queer night scene for a short period of time before the rumours started to circulate about the new ‘gay plague’ spreading across the world.
By the end of that year, there had been 108 AIDS cases and 46 deaths in the UK alone. Panic grew, with scandalous headlines in tabloid newspapers at the time, like ‘I’d shoot my son if he has AIDS’.
Join our WhatsApp Top Stories and Breaking News group by clicking this link
By 1988, there had been around 1,000 confirmed cases in the UK. The hysteria was growing and Paul was at the centre, watching attitudes shift towards him, his friends and the wider LGBTQ+ community.
“It was such a horrible time,” Paul, now 57, tells the M.E.N. “It was like living through a war in which everyone around you wasn’t aware there was a war going on.
“Your connection with the wider world was really troubled. Often you’d open the newspaper and there were articles rejoicing about the fact that people were dying. As late as the early 90s, Derek Jarman, who was a very dear friend of mine, was photographed during an ACT UP protest kissing someone and one newspaper captioned that as the ‘kiss of death’.”
Yet, at the same time, Paul says he was living ‘in such denial’ about the situation. “On the one hand, I was very aware of AIDS as a life-threatening illness but, at the same time, there was still a part of me that