“I went into this melodramatic moment of ‘I’m in these pleasant surroundings, with a lot of people. But I’m dying,'” photographer Sunil Gupta tells me, as he recalls being diagnosed as HIV-positive on July 20, 1995.
He remembers walking outside St Thomas’ Hospital in central London on that sunny day, surrounded by the lunchtime hubbub, and looking over the River Thames.
“It was like I was in my own movie suddenly. That made me weep a bit. And I didn’t know how to being to tell anyone, either,” Gupta adds.
Now 65 years old, Gupta has been living with HIV for more than 20 years.
Sunil Gupta talks to us for World AIDS Day
To mark World AIDS Day on December 1, Gupta is speaking to me about his experience of the HIV/AIDS crisis through the 1980s and 1990s, which devastated the gay community.
It’s estimated that nearly 37 million people are living with HIV globally and more than 35 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses across the world since the outbreak of the pandemic.
Throughout our hour-long conversation in his studio in Camberwell, Gupta talks about how his friends died around him—how he lost so many that funeral rites became a source of “great interest and debate” and, even, black humour. (“I think that’s a very positive gay response to whenever we’ve been in trouble as a group of people,” he notes.)
Born in 1953 in New Delhi and raised in Montreal, Gupta moved to London from New York in late 1977, a few years before the virus hit the UK.
He explains how, at first, in the early 1980s, AIDS seemed liked an “American problem,” adding: “That, somehow, being in the UK, we were safe.”
“The number of deaths started to pile up. The frequency just grew somehow.”
—Sunil Gupta
But, from about 1983 onwards, the virus started to spread quickly among his social circles.
“The number of deaths started to pile up. The frequency just grew somehow,” says Gupta. “It became a kind of new normal.
“It went from this great ignorance to a panic to a kind of stage of acceptance, but with a kind of black humour attached to it.”
Gupta recalls how the virus claimed the lives of his friends, including film director Stuart Marshall, who was widely praised for his work documenting the HIV/AIDS crisis, in 1993.
The post This gay photographer lost countless friends and loved ones to AIDS. He feared he would be next appeared first on PinkNews - Gay news, reviews and comment from the world's most read lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans news service.