Norman Fowler: Gay Icon?

'There are heroes in politics whose virtue goes almost unremarked. In the Lords this week Norman Fowler (as Baron Fowler of Sutton Coldfield) has been quietly pushing through a measure to allow migrants to Britain, including those not lawfully here, to be treated for HIV/Aids.
'It was he who, as Health Secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s Government in 1986, took this country down the track of an energetic, expensive, positive, honest, generous response to the Aids crisis, launching a massive advertising campaign and helping us to lead Europe in grappling openly with the threat. And he’s still here, still “boring”, still the last man on Earth to want to be a gay icon, or any kind of icon, still patiently engaging with the machinery of public administration, still showing how government can matter and how politics can be worthwhile.'

Matthew Parris pays tribute to his former parliamentary colleague, Norman Fowler, in The Times.
Parris neglects to mention that Fowler's Aids awareness campaigns in the 80s were done despite the indifference of Margaret Thatcher to the Aids crisis, and the hostility of several cabinet members.* 
It's worth noting how there was no tabloid hysteria over the new measure, despite its conflation of three red buttons; "migrants", the NHS and HIV.

* See The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of Aids - Simon Garfield, page 107.

Aids: 30 Years On

A fascinating - and chilling - documentary on BBC Radio 4, Aids - A Mystery In The Village, written and presented by Simon Garfield.
Garfield - author of The End Of Innocence - Britain In The Time Of Aids - looks at the response of the media, poiticians, and the gay community in the UK and US in the early years of the Aids epidemic.
The irony is that one thing Garfield looks at is how the media were painfully slow in acknowledging there was a problem.
Many pretended nothing was happening, then switched to homophobic scaremongering.
This year is the 30th anniversary of Aids - or rather its appearance in peoples' conscience, so why have there been so few articles and programmes marking this?
In January The Mirror used the anniversary to interview Lord Chris Smith.
The Guardian to run an interview with Jonathan Grishaw - one of the first people in Britain to be diagnosed with HIV and a co-founder of Body Positive - and Rupert Whitaker, a co-founder of Terrence Higgins Trust.
The Jonathan Grimshaw interview was written by Simon Garfield, incidentally.
These are the only three features that Fagburn has seen in the British press marking Aids thirtieth anniversary.
I wonder if this figure will increase during 2011?
Admittedly, for almost all papers, looking back at how they covered HIV/Aids in the 80s would be highly embarrassing.