HAMBURG (dpa) – “AIDS – The Final Sermon: Pastor Goes to the Countryside to Die” – that was headline in the local paper in 1995 when Peter Weigle had to leave his parsonage near Frankfurt.
He kept the article and can even manage a smile when telling visitors how good he feels these days. Peter Weigle is 40 years old, homosexual and has been HIV-positive since the beginning of the 1980s.“Wow, so you’re still around then,” somebody called over to him at a party recently. It may have been a throwaway remark but to Weigle it’s a matter or life and death. He contracted the virus that can lead to full-blown AIDS at a time when little was known about the illness – except that getting it amounted to a death sentence.These days the dreaded diagnosis of HIV-positive does not automatically mean death. Thanks to improved therapies the immune deficiency illness is still not curable but in Western countries at least it is gradually becoming a chronic rather than a fatal illness.As a result, the public debate about AIDS has fallen eerily silent and help centres, such as the one in the German northern port metropolis of Hamburg, are threatened with financial cutbacks.There are no statistics on how many people in Germany have lived for ten years or more with AIDS but what is certain is that medical science has enabled the around 38,000 HIV-positive citizens to lead a better life.The times when gay men in particular were losing dozens of friends claimed by the illness seem to be over and in many AIDS centres the hospice beds are empty.“I thought I had two years. That was in 1991,” reads an ad used by pharma concern GlaxoSmithKline in 2002. And American columnist Hugh Elliott wrote: “After my doctor told me that AIDS was going to put an end to my life, I stopped planning. That was 20 years ago.”Many AIDS sufferers believed they had only a few weeks or months to survive but instead of experiencing the “twilight” of their lives, these people are having to cope with being seriously ill for years on end, explained psychologist Karl Lemmen.These are being thrown “back to the future” said Lemmen. They have not regained their health and have to cope with severe financial problems. The future remains uncertain.One example is Klaus, a gay man who abandoned his unloved university studies after being diagnosed with HIV and decided to spend a few happy years globetrotting through South America.“Twelve years later he is almost shocked by the fact that he is still in relatively good health,” said Lemmen.Peter Weigle behaved differently. The diagnosis did not make him want to be a dropout but rather gave new structure to his existence. “I’m not going to stop living before I’ve even started,” he said over a cup of coffee at an advice centre in Hamburg.Weigle contracted the virus during his studies in North America at the beginning of the 1980s. He was admitted to hospital in 1984 after his lymph nodes became swollen, a painful ordeal.In the end the diagnosis was given to him down the telephone. “I was thunderstruck,” said Weigle, puffing on a cigarette. A New Age- inspired lady doctor even let slip a sentence that Weigle says he will never forget.“Perhaps you don’t really want to live Peter,” she told him. Weigle still frowns when he thinks back at the “damn cheek” of it.Weigle went his own way. One of the first steps was to gain his driver’s licence. It seemed banal but was important to him. He completed his theology studies in Berlin and worked for several years as a pastor near Frankfurt. The whole time he made no secret of his gender preferences or his illness.Weigle does not want his life to be dominated by illness even though he has already undergone four cancer operations. He does not have a lot of time for self-help groups either and prefers to do voluntary work instead. At the moment he only has to take six tablets a day, which he describes as being like a “holiday” compared to all the therapy and medication he has been through.Weigle doesn’t look like a sick man and he probably has the sophisticated medicine to thank for that. A milestone was a 1996 medical congress in Vancouver, Canada.It was the first time that the highly effective active anti- retroviral therapy HAART was announced, a procedure which has become virtually standard treatment since then. It involves the combination of three different substances which cannot heal AIDS but can ensure the virus does not spread throughout the body.AIDS-typical illnesses such as certain forms of pneumonia or toxoplasmosis, an infectious illness caused by a microscopic parasite, have become rare as HIV-specialist Dr. Stefan Fenske observes at his clinic in Hamburg.“The key component is that people adhere to their medication plan,” he stressed. The actual outbreak of AIDS causes sufferers fewer problems than the danger of resistance and side-effects such an enhanced likelihood of suffering a heart attack, digestion problems and loss of body fats.Around 600 people a year die of AIDS in Germany each year, whereby the illusion shared by many that the illness is curable may have led to carelessness. The Robert Koch Institute detects an increase in the number of syphilis cases, an indication that some HIV-positive sufferers are still having sex without a condom.Each year 2,000 new cases of HIV-infection are registered in Germany and in the gay circles of big cities sessions for what the participants call “bare-backing” – sex without a condom – have been a regular fixture for some years.One, a man named “Peter”, was asked by the editor of the gay magazine Hinnerk, Joerg Rowohlt, whether he was afraid of catching AIDS. “Of course I’m worried sometimes but I love bare-backing, the thrill of it,” Peter admitted. “Naturally I want to stay negative. AIDS is a terrible thing but with these new medicines you can cope with it. It won’t kill me.”It’s unlikely that Peter would have had the courage to tell that to Eva M. The biochemist, who was infected by her bisexual husband in 1983, knows about the side-effects of AIDS medication. She showed no symptoms for years until the bouts of pneumonia came. After nearly two decades of carrying the virus she swallows five sets of tablets a day, 30 pills in all.No one at Eva’s workplace knows why she is officially classified as disabled or why she visits the doctor so often. “So far no one has asked me about it,” said the biologist. “I’ve been waiting for someone to say something.”Eva’s fate shows that in the heterosexual world AIDS is far from being seen as a normal illness about which people can talk freely. When Eva was young, at a time when politicians openly advocated the isolation of AIDS sufferers, doctors advised her to keep quiet about her illness.She is now in a self-help group and has found a supportive new partner but says that over the years the virus has robbed her of the chance to “tell the truth” about herself.
