I came into HIV activism the way a lot of queer kids came into everything in the 90s: by looking around my college and thinking, “Is this it?” It was 1994 or ’95 in Galway‑Mayo Institute of Technology – still just “the tech,” not the university – and there was almost no visible conversation about HIV, no red ribbons, no flyers, no nothing. The only LGBT student society was over in the university across the river, which said a lot about whose lives were seen as worthy of organising around. My friend Bren and I were fed up with the silence, so we did the only thing that made sense: we rang AIDS Help West, explained that we were two mouthy queer students in a “lowly” tech, and asked for whatever they could give us. They sent condoms, leaflets, posters, advice – everything we needed to set up the first World AIDS Day stand in GMIT. We weren’t a formal group, we had no budget, but on 1 December we had a table, materials, and a visible, unapologetic presence.
Once I’d done it once, I couldn’t stop. Every 1 December became a kind of personal deadline: what are we doing this year? From that first folding table I went on to programme concerts, cabarets and fundraisers, growing slowly in ambition and scale. We put on small gigs and then big, messy, glorious shows with international names. One year we recorded a single with Mary Coughlan called “Red Apple” to raise money for AIDS West. It did not trouble the charts and it didn’t raise life‑changing funds, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that a crew of queers and allies in Galway were using music and performance to say: we are here, we care, and we refuse the shame that still clung to HIV and AIDS like a second skin.
In 2006 I organised a Jeff Buckley tribute night in the Róisín Dubh, pulling together local bands who all had their own reasons for saying yes. We packed the place, sang our lungs out, and at the end of the night we realised we had raised enough money to fund the publication of a memoir by an Irish mammy living with HIV ‘“Still Standing” by Liz Martin – the first of its kind. It was her story, not mine, but putting that book into the world felt like one of the most important things I’d helped to do. In a culture that insisted HIV belonged to some distant, urban “other”, here was a woman saying: this is my life, this is my family, this is Ireland too. The fundraising gig was loud and sweaty and joyful, but what stayed with me was the quiet fact of that book existing, making it just a little bit harder to pretend certain lives don’t happen here.
Looking back, I can see that these World AIDS Day projects were my early apprenticeship in what I now call cultural activism. At the time I thought I was just putting on shows and making a fuss, but I was actually learning to use art as infrastructure: programming, fundraising, partnership‑building, holding volunteers, navigating stigma, and using creativity to move money and attention towards people who were being disappeared by silence. AIDS West (now Sexual Health West) gave us trust and practical support; the bands and artists donated their time; the audiences brought their grief and curiosity and solidarity. My job was to stitch those elements together into something that, for a night or a week, made a different kind of sense.
Those years taught me that visibility is not an abstract slogan. Visibility is the stand in the college canteen, the condom in someone’s pocket who never thought they’d take one, the cabaret in a church hall, the single that doesn’t sell but still tells a different story, the book on a shelf in Galway written by a straight Irish mam with HIV. They also taught me that you don’t have to be an “official” activist to change the weather in a room; you can be a student with a borrowed table and a phone number for a small HIV organisation that believes in you. When I talk now about cultural activism, about using art and story and atmosphere to shift what feels possible, this is the lineage I’m claiming: a World AIDS Day stand in GMIT, a string of December 1st gigs, and a stubborn refusal to let anyone live or die in silence.
