OK, I admit this song was originally released in 1978 but with the advent of HIV/AIDS it became the rallying cry of the 80’s.

The first person with AIDS that I ever met was Bobbi Campbell (the so-called ‘AIDS Poster Boy’) in San Francisco in 1983. I remember quite distinctly him wearing a button in his lapel declaring ‘I Will Survive’.

As for Gloria Gaynor, she was very much an up-front supporter of the gay community. In 1986, for example, she performed at the ‘No On [Proposition] 64’ campaign’s Victory Party in Los Angeles. (Proposition 64 called for people with HIV/AIDS to be banned from various jobs such as teaching and catering).

This particular clip is taken from the movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.  I’ve included it here because it’s used in the movie to make two important connections.

The first, obviously, is with gay men and HIV/AIDS. But the second – which a lot of people may not have picked up on in the movie – is the message’s relevance to Australian Aboriginal people.

Like so many indigenous populations, they have struggled to survive since the arrival of white people. They were massacred as vermin less than a century ago, then the ‘White Australia Policy’ included a plan to ‘breed out’ Aboriginality and even today the Australian Government is planning legislation to further disempower them.

Aboriginal people are also affected by HIV in disproportionately high numbers.

At some point in the future I’ll be posting some blogs on my experience of working with Aboriginal people with AIDS. In the meantime, as you watch Felicia, Mitzi and Bernadette camping it up in the Outback, spare a thought for the people from that other community that has had to struggle to survive against bigotry and indifference.