AIDS lifeline and AIDSline West Midlands
1988
“I’d moved on from the Gay Centre and was involved at that time with AIDSline West Midlands, in 1988”. He did phone work and buddying, and also started to do some education work. He then got involved in organising the group and then became the Chair for three years.
“A gay health worker named Mark Bestel, a Liberal Party member and Shirley Williams’s agent up in Crosby, now dead, came down from Liverpool to be the manager of AIDS lifeline, run by the Health Authority. He stirred things up, he got things done. He was quite Machiavellian and ruthless but he didn’t bullshit. He wasn’t very diplomatic but he had the Liverpool sense of humour”. There was a lot of friction between the two organisations, but in his period as Chair Trevor tried to bring the two organisations closer together and dovetail their two campaigns.
Contributed by: Trevor Sword, 50