Lisa Power on harmful conspiracy theories and stigma of AIDS epidemic – PinkNews

Lisa Power in the three-part documentary series Positive. (Sky) In the early 1980s, queer men started to die in alarming numbers. A mystery virus was doing the rounds, and nobody knew how it was spread or what its impact would be. It was a frightening time for the queer people working at what was then called Gay Switchboard – a small, grassroots organisation that offered advice and information to queer people over the phone. Today, that charity is simply called Switchboard, and it offers support to the UK’s LGBT+ community. Lisa Power was one of the only lesbians working for Switchboard when the mysterious virus that would later be identified as HIV emerged – and she remembers the fear, the confusion, and the feeling of helplessness that prevailed. “You have to remember that at the start, we had no clue,” she tells PinkNews. “Gay men were starting to die – not huge numbers at the start, and nobody was sure why – and of course, I’m sure a number of people died who weren’t diagnosed in those early days. We were all just trying to get a grip on it, and for Switchboard, that meant a lot of information was coming…
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