Jacob Boehme

In April 1987, the Grim Reaper ad first aired on Australian TV. I was 13 years and four months old and I’d only just experienced my first teenage sexual fumblings with a school friend in the garage out the back of our family home; after school, beside the pool table. I had no idea then what HIV/AIDS would or wouldn’t mean to me. I knew that two years earlier little Eve, one of the first children in Australia to be diagnosed with HIV, had been banned from her pre-school and in that same year, Rock Hudson had died. Three years before that, Australia had recorded its first AIDS-related death. The Grim Reaper ad was designed to shock an entire nation into an education about the rising global health epidemic that had already reached our shores. In the ad, a grim reaper figure in a bowling alley plays a game of bowls, knocking out the lives of men, women and children indiscriminately. Some HIV/AIDS advocates insist that the ad did more to contribute to creating a stigma around the HIV virus and its associations with gay men, the effects of which are still being undone. At the time I wasn’t aware of the politics or the fallout or what symbolism was being read into what. All I knew was that I liked other boys just like Rock Hudson and after watching the ad at the age of 13 years and four months, I had the sinking feeling that I would end up like Rock Hudson too. Photograph: Bryony Jackson In 1996, I began dance studies at NAISDA, Australia’s longest-running and premier dance training