What do you think?
Rate this book
The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS
Published to coincide with World AIDS Day, this book looks at a decade of AIDS in Britain. As well as the 8000 who have died, some 20,000 are infected with HIV, and many more carry the virus unknowingly. With no cure or even a vaccine in sight, and growing evidence of complacency, AIDS is still one of the greatest post-war challenges the UK faces. This book covers every significant development of the disease, from the early ignorance and panic to the emergence of AIDS as a good cause taken up by Sir Ian McKellen, George Michael and the Princess of Wales. The author uses information supplied by doctors, scientists, government ministers and civil servants, as well as interviews with leading entertainment figures such as Stephen Fry, Elton John and the late Derek Jarman.
ebook
First published November 21, 1994
31 people are currently reading
513 people want to read
About the author
Simon Garfield
36 books332 followersSimon Garfield is a British journalist and non-fiction author. He was educated at the independent University College School in Hampstead, London, and the London School of Economics, where he was the Executive Editor of The Beaver. He also regularly writes for The Observer newspaper.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
April 21, 2024
Comprehensive, magisterial, and critical in tracing the social and medical history of AIDS in Britain from the early 80s to the mid 90s. Garfield deftly interweaves perspectives from numerous fronts of the epidemic, from the gay community that bore the brunt of both the disease and social and media prejudice, to the scientists and clinicians working urgently to battle HIV/AIDS against a complacent MRC and a negligent Ms. Thatcher, to haemophiliacs infected through Factor VIII. While doing this, Garfield keeps the text engaging and keeps touch with the emotional, personal dimensions of the epidemic. Highly recommended.
December 31, 2019
Wonderfully written and sensitive account of the AIDS crisis in Britain - I wasn't planning to read the whole thing, but even the bits not relevant to my research were interesting and presented well!
February 13, 2022
This review first appeared on my blog - https://nsfordwriter.com - on 11th February 2022.
A very important, powerful and detailed account of the early years of the AIDS epidemic, with a focus on how the British authorities dealt with it (or didn’t, as the case may be). First published in 1994 and re-issued in the wake of the TV series It’s A Sin – which was created by Russell T Davies, who re-read it before writing the show and who contributes the foreword here – this is quite a different kind of book to Garfield’s later work, such as Mauve, In Miniature and Timekeepers.
The main part of the book is a generally chronological narrative from the first warnings of a mysterious illness which was said to only affect gay men and which no one knew anything about, right up to the latest medical research and social attitudes in 1994. In some respects it’s out of date and you wouldn’t read it for current information. As a political history and as a resource for what things were like back then, it’s extremely impressive. Although there are some personal stories which are very moving, the focus is on the wider picture. Politicians, scientists, high-profile media personalities, religious leaders, advertising executives and heads of charities are interviewed. No subject is left uncovered where HIV and AIDS in Britain is concerned. The contaminated blood scandal, the concept of needle exchanges, the problem in prisons, the difficulty of communicating the message of safer sex to various groups, the attitude of the church, the media’s role in promoting homophobia, Princess Diana’s passion for meeting and helping people with AIDS, the use and misuse of the red ribbon symbol… there is a huge amount packed into this book.
The second part of the book is the ‘journal of a plague year’, in which the author records the events relating to HIV and AIDS which he attends from 1993-4. This includes meeting (and then attending the funeral of) Derek Jarman, talking to Tom Hanks (who had recently starred in Philadelphia), attending a conference on condom standards and following the trial of a man who knowingly infected women with HIV. There is an extensive afterword to the book from 2021, in which Simon Garfield gives some background to the book’s existence and tells us about the advancements in both medical treatment and social policy which mean that in Britain at least, people who are HIV positive can expect to have long lives which are free from discrimination. Inevitably some mention of the Covid pandemic had to be made and I have to admit that I found some disturbing parallels between the two, which are beyond the scope of a book review. There are copious notes for every chapter, an index and a small number of images.
The only aspect of the book which made it less accessible for me were the statistics-heavy sections and many tables, which would be useful for researchers but don’t contribute to a readable narrative.
In summary, this is one of the most impressive non-fiction books I’ve read. It’s not easy going or packed full of personal stories but I’d recommend it if you want detailed information on the background to It’s A Sin.
A very important, powerful and detailed account of the early years of the AIDS epidemic, with a focus on how the British authorities dealt with it (or didn’t, as the case may be). First published in 1994 and re-issued in the wake of the TV series It’s A Sin – which was created by Russell T Davies, who re-read it before writing the show and who contributes the foreword here – this is quite a different kind of book to Garfield’s later work, such as Mauve, In Miniature and Timekeepers.
The main part of the book is a generally chronological narrative from the first warnings of a mysterious illness which was said to only affect gay men and which no one knew anything about, right up to the latest medical research and social attitudes in 1994. In some respects it’s out of date and you wouldn’t read it for current information. As a political history and as a resource for what things were like back then, it’s extremely impressive. Although there are some personal stories which are very moving, the focus is on the wider picture. Politicians, scientists, high-profile media personalities, religious leaders, advertising executives and heads of charities are interviewed. No subject is left uncovered where HIV and AIDS in Britain is concerned. The contaminated blood scandal, the concept of needle exchanges, the problem in prisons, the difficulty of communicating the message of safer sex to various groups, the attitude of the church, the media’s role in promoting homophobia, Princess Diana’s passion for meeting and helping people with AIDS, the use and misuse of the red ribbon symbol… there is a huge amount packed into this book.
The second part of the book is the ‘journal of a plague year’, in which the author records the events relating to HIV and AIDS which he attends from 1993-4. This includes meeting (and then attending the funeral of) Derek Jarman, talking to Tom Hanks (who had recently starred in Philadelphia), attending a conference on condom standards and following the trial of a man who knowingly infected women with HIV. There is an extensive afterword to the book from 2021, in which Simon Garfield gives some background to the book’s existence and tells us about the advancements in both medical treatment and social policy which mean that in Britain at least, people who are HIV positive can expect to have long lives which are free from discrimination. Inevitably some mention of the Covid pandemic had to be made and I have to admit that I found some disturbing parallels between the two, which are beyond the scope of a book review. There are copious notes for every chapter, an index and a small number of images.
The only aspect of the book which made it less accessible for me were the statistics-heavy sections and many tables, which would be useful for researchers but don’t contribute to a readable narrative.
In summary, this is one of the most impressive non-fiction books I’ve read. It’s not easy going or packed full of personal stories but I’d recommend it if you want detailed information on the background to It’s A Sin.
January 31, 2025
I suppose I must have grown up in the shadow of the AIDS crisis, but it didn't feel like that at the time: in small-town midlands England, a combination of Section 28 and inward-looking parochialism ("it couldn't happen here," to quote the Pet Shop Boys) meant that by the time I was aware of HIV, entering my teens at the very end of the 20th Century, it was simply another part of our embarrassed and hastily-delivered sex education, which I mostly remember as a couple of handouts on birth control and STDs. (I was never shown a condom and certainly nobody rolled one over a banana.) The homophobia had been sucked out of it, I think; in fact, the homophobia I experienced as a not-out-but-obviously-gay teenager was more cultural and gendered, about how gay men were all pansies and fairies. AIDS seemed to have disappeared from the insult list.
Simon Garfield's book, therefore, was an interesting education for me, in learning what was actually happening through the 80s and into the mid-90s, when I was a child; from the first cases, the moral panic, the way the fight for funding and education worked with or against a government's priorities (Section 28, Thatcher's "no such thing as society" and Major's "back to basics" agendas), the silence of the church (including HIV+ clergy members), the confusion between government ministers and experts, the high-profile deaths, and how all these strands influenced or affected the other. (For example, Freddie Mercury's death, and the sales of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' going to AIDS charities in its wake, being the motivation for Virginia Bottomley to pull the plug on the Ministry of Health's AIDS funding, because they were getting their money elsewhere now - and she was perhaps simply sick of being in a no-win situation where money was tight and people were cross with it being spent on "undesirables".)
Garfield covers the crisis at a journalist's remove, with the polemic and rhetoric allowed to come through in his cataloguing of the debates and campaigns, rather than as the driving focus of the narrative. This is particular clear in how he deals with the "de-gaying and re-gaying" of the AIDS crisis: 'The End of Innocence' charts all the ways in which AIDS was seen first as a "gay disease" and eventually as a virus transmitted through blood and/or semen that had overwhelmingly and originally affected the gay community; and the cultural homophobia this ignited - the moral condemnation early on, which allowed people to dismiss it or see it as just punishment for being the wrong kinds of British citizens, who have the wrong kind of sex or take the wrong kinds of drugs; how the lack of knowledge allowed people to make crass judgements, including Princess Anne who, at a public engagement, separated out "innocent AIDS victims" from those who brought it on themselves; and Martin Amis, reviewing one of the early TV documentaries on it, saying it looked like the body simply shuts down after too much sex. Even in the mid-90s, there's a long section about Andrew Neil's tenure at the Sunday Times, when he seemed still desirous of pushing the narrative that AIDS was something good heterosexuals needn't worry about.
There's a lot to unpick here: principally how a country likes to separate its people into correct, neutral citizens and "others" - people who don't "deserve" AIDS, people who shouldn't be worried as long as they're behaving correctly, people we don't mind seeing die because they're letting the side down (druggies and queers). Then there are the people who accept gay men as long as they don't have to think about the sex we have. In a sexless role (and this continued long into the 2000s, with Will & Grace) we're acceptable. But remind people of what we do? No thanks. Which is a double-whammy because people don't want to have their homophobia revealed to themselves; it makes them feel foolish, guilty, deluded. Which only means they hate us more for exposing it.
Garfield doesn't always write this chronologically, and he does at times leap backwards and forwards depending on the particular passage of the crisis that he's following: are we in a medical debate, is it about education and prevention, is this about government funding, or activism? As such we seem to shuttle back and forth a lot between 1987 and 1991, and I wasn't always sure what was happening when. (This is particularly difficult in the section when he discusses the issues around Benetton, who capitalised on the crisis by running a series of adverts that *sort of* doubled as AIDS awareness campaign, but mostly just exploited it to sell jumpers.) There's also a small discrepancy where Garfield touches on the UK wing of ACTUP briefly, says that they'd "burnt themselves out" by late 1990, but in 1993 mentions them in passing as ongoing.
But this is, I think, a minor quibble. Garfield is lucid and informative, and despite being 500 pages long the book never feels baggy. The second half, a year-long diary of mid-1993 to mid-1994 (and the period, presumably, when Garfield was writing the book) contains personal scenes with Derek Jarman, among others, and a long, difficult section on Neville Hodgkinson, the scientific journalist whose believed he had strong evidence that HIV didn't cause AIDS. There's a lot to chew on in this book, and as well as being a record of the time, in places it stands as a fitting monument to the dead.
Simon Garfield's book, therefore, was an interesting education for me, in learning what was actually happening through the 80s and into the mid-90s, when I was a child; from the first cases, the moral panic, the way the fight for funding and education worked with or against a government's priorities (Section 28, Thatcher's "no such thing as society" and Major's "back to basics" agendas), the silence of the church (including HIV+ clergy members), the confusion between government ministers and experts, the high-profile deaths, and how all these strands influenced or affected the other. (For example, Freddie Mercury's death, and the sales of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' going to AIDS charities in its wake, being the motivation for Virginia Bottomley to pull the plug on the Ministry of Health's AIDS funding, because they were getting their money elsewhere now - and she was perhaps simply sick of being in a no-win situation where money was tight and people were cross with it being spent on "undesirables".)
Garfield covers the crisis at a journalist's remove, with the polemic and rhetoric allowed to come through in his cataloguing of the debates and campaigns, rather than as the driving focus of the narrative. This is particular clear in how he deals with the "de-gaying and re-gaying" of the AIDS crisis: 'The End of Innocence' charts all the ways in which AIDS was seen first as a "gay disease" and eventually as a virus transmitted through blood and/or semen that had overwhelmingly and originally affected the gay community; and the cultural homophobia this ignited - the moral condemnation early on, which allowed people to dismiss it or see it as just punishment for being the wrong kinds of British citizens, who have the wrong kind of sex or take the wrong kinds of drugs; how the lack of knowledge allowed people to make crass judgements, including Princess Anne who, at a public engagement, separated out "innocent AIDS victims" from those who brought it on themselves; and Martin Amis, reviewing one of the early TV documentaries on it, saying it looked like the body simply shuts down after too much sex. Even in the mid-90s, there's a long section about Andrew Neil's tenure at the Sunday Times, when he seemed still desirous of pushing the narrative that AIDS was something good heterosexuals needn't worry about.
There's a lot to unpick here: principally how a country likes to separate its people into correct, neutral citizens and "others" - people who don't "deserve" AIDS, people who shouldn't be worried as long as they're behaving correctly, people we don't mind seeing die because they're letting the side down (druggies and queers). Then there are the people who accept gay men as long as they don't have to think about the sex we have. In a sexless role (and this continued long into the 2000s, with Will & Grace) we're acceptable. But remind people of what we do? No thanks. Which is a double-whammy because people don't want to have their homophobia revealed to themselves; it makes them feel foolish, guilty, deluded. Which only means they hate us more for exposing it.
Garfield doesn't always write this chronologically, and he does at times leap backwards and forwards depending on the particular passage of the crisis that he's following: are we in a medical debate, is it about education and prevention, is this about government funding, or activism? As such we seem to shuttle back and forth a lot between 1987 and 1991, and I wasn't always sure what was happening when. (This is particularly difficult in the section when he discusses the issues around Benetton, who capitalised on the crisis by running a series of adverts that *sort of* doubled as AIDS awareness campaign, but mostly just exploited it to sell jumpers.) There's also a small discrepancy where Garfield touches on the UK wing of ACTUP briefly, says that they'd "burnt themselves out" by late 1990, but in 1993 mentions them in passing as ongoing.
But this is, I think, a minor quibble. Garfield is lucid and informative, and despite being 500 pages long the book never feels baggy. The second half, a year-long diary of mid-1993 to mid-1994 (and the period, presumably, when Garfield was writing the book) contains personal scenes with Derek Jarman, among others, and a long, difficult section on Neville Hodgkinson, the scientific journalist whose believed he had strong evidence that HIV didn't cause AIDS. There's a lot to chew on in this book, and as well as being a record of the time, in places it stands as a fitting monument to the dead.
January 21, 2022
Published in 1995 albeit with a 2021 epilogue, this does seem woefully out of date, but nevertheless documents the start and first 10+ years of the UK epidemic. Reading it takes you back to another world, mainly of mass societal homophobia and long forgotten politicians. I'd like to think things have changed for the better. A good companion book to How to survive a Plague.
January 1, 2025
I read this in conjunction with Walking after Midnight: Gay Men's Life Stories, compiled by the Hall Carpenter Archives.
This book is very interesting and informative, but also rather dense, so it was nice to take occasional breaks to read one of the interviews from Walking after Midnight.
Aside from all the stats that Garfield throws around, his book also contains many relatively short bits of interviews that are relevant to the specific facet of the crisis being discussed in that chapter, but Walking after Midnight really takes its time to talk to ordinary people and ask about their entire life experiences. The books complement each other perfectly.
All in all, it was an incredible and instructive experience that I wholeheartedly recommend.
This book is very interesting and informative, but also rather dense, so it was nice to take occasional breaks to read one of the interviews from Walking after Midnight.
Aside from all the stats that Garfield throws around, his book also contains many relatively short bits of interviews that are relevant to the specific facet of the crisis being discussed in that chapter, but Walking after Midnight really takes its time to talk to ordinary people and ask about their entire life experiences. The books complement each other perfectly.
All in all, it was an incredible and instructive experience that I wholeheartedly recommend.
June 11, 2023
This is an incredible book and nobody is safe from me peppering them with AIDs facts after reading it. It led me to a lot of interesting conversations because I was asking people in my life about their memories of the AIDs crisis. It's not an easy read, both because it's sad and densely written, but it's worth it. I was less interested in the diary section but you don't need to read that to appreciate the main portion of the book.
Originally written in the 90s, it's a real time capsule, but it was nice to see a 2021 update too. Especially because the new afterword draws attention to the parallels with COVID-19 which is something that struck me while I was reading.
Originally written in the 90s, it's a real time capsule, but it was nice to see a 2021 update too. Especially because the new afterword draws attention to the parallels with COVID-19 which is something that struck me while I was reading.
March 28, 2024
I loved the personal stories within the book - speaking about money and famous names, facts and statistics, it all gets a little impersonal and you find yourself skimming over the pages. But the book does a good job of breaking this up with personal stories from ordinary people - those who got HIV in the more stereotypical ways and those who got it in the more unconventional way. It drives home just how devastating the disease was, not just to gay communities, but to drug takers, prisons, children, those in need of blood transfusions and more.
December 10, 2023
An incredibly interesting book - an absolute must-read for anyone wanting to learn more about the British AIDS crisis. Whilst sometimes I found the medical jargon to be exhausting and uninteresting, the personal anecdotes were so powerful. As a queer man, there were many times I had to put the book down and just absorb myself in my own thoughts. Garfield's work had helped inspire my own poetry writing too.
February 11, 2022
4.5. This was very good and is an important book. It is riveting and written exceptionally well. The author himself describes this book as a ‘time capsule’ and I might have made some edits, or précised some sections, ie the Sunday Times/Andrew Neil débâcle. But read it!
February 5, 2022
An incredibly powerful and important book that will be read again and again.
March 13, 2022
This is a remarkable book. Mr Garfield manages to combine human-interest accounts with hard data in a way that is neither clinical nor cloying. Highly recommended.
March 22, 2022
limited and homonormative perception of the HIV epidemic, far better books available.
December 7, 2024
Beautiful and heartbreaking and very very important. An incredible piece of work.
October 27, 2025
Comprehensive but still empathetic. A hard, necessary read.
April 4, 2022
A powerful and comprehensive record of AIDS in Britain in the 80s and early 90s. After a thematic overview of the crisis, the book concludes with a diary-style 'Journal of a Plague Year', which really works.
September 23, 2024
More dissertation reading. The importance of this book cannot be overstated - this is one of the best histories of HIV/AIDS in the UK. An engaging and very informative book.
April 16, 2022
A contemporaneous account of the AIDS crisis in Britain, which was relied on for elements of It’s A Sin. It documents the attitudes and approaches to HIV/AIDS in the 80s including the Tories’ prudish failure to actually do something about it, and the shameful attitudes of a lot of healthcare workers to those affected. Brilliantly put together.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews