He believes it was in Germany that he was infected with HIV.īy the summer of 1981, however, he was back in London, where he met Higgins in the West End nightclub Bang. It was here that he embarked on his first relationship, after being seduced by a boss twice his age. Instead of going to Cambridge, Whitaker went to Germany for a year and worked as a clerk at a publishing house. “I was too afraid to sit them, so I turned it down.” Why? “I didn’t think I was bright enough.” But his low self-esteem meant he couldn’t go through with it. He was all set for a singing scholarship at Cambridge University, so long as he passed the entrance exam. The young Whitaker was both bolshie and a bag of nerves. But, at the age of 15, he became the first boy to come out at school – and he paid a price. He was a bright boy and a talented musician. Whitaker’s father sent him from London to a remote boarding school that offered help for children from broken families. When he was 13, his mother fell asleep while smoking in bed, was severely burned and died from complications. “I asked my mum how Māoris killed themselves,” he says – and followed that by trying to kill himself. “I was clinically depressed when I was six,” he says. His parents divorced when he was seven he says he wished they would have done so much earlier. Broken by abuse, she became an alcoholic, addicted to prescription drugs. But his father was violent, putting her in hospital a number of times. His mother, a dirt-poor, part-Māori girl from New Zealand, was a dancer and a beauty. He came from a deeply dysfunctional upper-middle-class family (his paternal great-great-grandfather founded J Whitaker and Sons, the publisher of Whitaker’s Almanac). W hitaker has formidable whiskers, speaks with a stentorian self-assurance and cuts an imposing figure. “We struggled to get it incorporated as a charity in the first place because the attitude was: ‘You’re not us, so why should we allow you to do this?” Who were ‘us’? “Straight, white, upper-middle-class males.” Terry was thought to be too ‘street’,” Whitaker says. What kind of man was called Terry? “We changed to the more formal Terrence Higgins. It was initially called the Terry Higgins Trust – because none of his friends had known him as Terrence – and the establishment was even snobbish about the name. Politicians, the NHS and newspapers were initially suspicious of THT, because of their lack of expertise in health, fundraising or science. When Whitaker joined forces with Higgins’ great friend Martyn Butler to support people, it was a condition that had no name.ĭespite this, the organisation met with considerable hostility in its early days there was rampant homophobia in Britain, fuelled by a tabloid press that revelled in headlines about a “gay plague”. But stigma was not the only reason it didn’t have Aids or HIV in its title the terms hadn’t been invented at the time Higgins died. By naming it after a person, the founders of THT hoped to humanise the deadly epidemic. Higgins was the first named person in the UK to die of an Aids-related illness, on 4 July 1982. That was how Whitaker wanted it at the time, he says, but he has agreed to talk openly about him today. The name Terrence Higgins is recognised throughout the UK today, but little is known about the man.