"...At 1am, after about an hour spent on Google, Tim's story began to make more sense. It became quite clear that for a large section of the urban gay scene, unprotected sex is the norm; that risking HIV is a buzz, a burst of routine impetuosity, like flooring the accelerator in the Jag on the M40 going home.
"Anyway," said Michael, the host of a very nasty site indeed, "Aids is a minor inconvenience these days. It's not the catastrophe it once was."
Then there was a darker side, the romanticising of Aids itself. Google led me underground, to gay clubbers with "HIV neg" tattooed on their biceps as an invitation for others to infect them, to online chats about HIV-spreading sex parties, talk of "conceiving" the virus like a pregnancy and the intense intimacy of infecting a partner.
"It offers a kind of permanent partnership," said a journalist for a gay magazine, "a connection outside time."
( ... )
My priest friend telephoned on Tuesday, after Tim's funeral. The HIV positive boyfriend had a new boyfriend, he said, who had already moved into Tim's old flat, but the service was nonetheless romantic. Mourners told stories about the unique love between Tim and his boyfriend, which the vicar called sacrificial, "Christ-like".
Last rites for the man who chose Aids, Jan 15, 'o6, Telegraph.co.uk