HIV

I'VE SNAPPED MY BANJO STRING, LET'S JUST TALK // Scott Agnew

Before he gets going, Scott Agnew checks that everyone in the room knows what he really means when he talks about snapping a banjo string. Because anyone who thinks they're in for an hour of innocuous anecdotes from a homespun folk player might be in for a shock. The incident during which – to use the medical term – the frenulum beneath the foreskin of his penis tore and “showered the walls with blood” is one of the more viscous but by no means most explicit of stories in this brief survey of the activities that might have led to him contracting HIV. Cantering from sauna to nightclub to drug-fuelled house parties, he admits that sometimes he wasn't in total control of his actions.

Long before his HIV diagnosis, Agnew needed another for his mental health, but the GP he saw wrote him off successively as an alcoholic, a food addict, a gambler, a sex addict and more, without recognising the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Agnew now manages both conditions, but there's an equivocal tone in his text that suggests he's still overwhelmed by this. For instance, he makes a specific point of saying that not understanding his mental health doesn't absolve his responsibility for his virus, as though HIV is a shameful thing. The words that repeat as a refrain in his show are: “It's not ideal – a downbeat phrase in search of a bright side.

Yet he does recognise positive aspects to his HIV diagnosis: for instance, he jokes, his medication has raised his life expectancy above the average for Glasgow, his home. And with the virus now undetectable in his blood count, he's a safer date than most – although, he points out lugubriously, “that's a hard sell on the dancefloor”. His politicking is bolder when directed outside himself: why is it, he asks, that gays on the telly have to be sexually neutered to be acceptable for a mainstream audience? Camp is fine, he argues, but there needs to be a wider spectrum of queer personality in public life. Elsewhere he gets exercised by the widespread use of date-rape drugs among gay men, who have been “hiding for so long” that they have no way of expressing their emotions. Undoubtedly the two are connected.

For all the comedic banter, it's a poignant show, one that raises a number of questions about Agnew's relationship with his diagnoses and with his Catholic family. Within those questions is a sharp impression of of how far the LGBT+ community still needs to travel towards visibility and feeling accepted within society at large. (MC)

Scott Agnew: I've Snapped My Banjo String, Let's Just Talk is at 22.00 at Gilded Balloon at the Counting House until 29 August. See venue for accessibility information - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/scott-agnew-i-ve-snapped-my-banjo-string-let-s-just-talk

On living with frenulum breve: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2002/feb/28/healthandwellbeing.health2

On HIV stigma and homophobia: http://www.thebody.com/content/art54913.html

A look at the language of HIV stigma: http://www.thebody.com/content/75496/when-words-work-against-us-the-language-of-hiv-sti.html

Information on bipolar disorder: http://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/bipolar-disorder/

 

THE TALK // Mish Grigor

It's a basic fact of parenting that children grow up to do things you might personally find regrettable: contract sexual diseases, for instance, or make theatre, or worse, make theatre about contracting sexual diseases. Mish Grigor's parents have approved a version of her text for The Talk but not, she twinkles, this one. And whether or not that or anything else she says in the show is true is irrelevant; she transcends old-fashioned morals and conventional proprieties the moment she describes the size of her father's cock in a reported conversation with her mother, and just keeps travelling from there.

At the heart of The Talk is a frustration: that every one of us is alive because two people had sex, and yet culturally we're terrible at talking about it. Grigor plunges her family into discomfort when she starts interrogating them about how they fuck: no one can understand why she's doing it, but that incomprehension is part of the point. The prim silence we observe around sex allows all manner of inequalities to persist: not least, the one demonstrated within Grigor's own family, whereby her father is cheerfully being sucked off by a third wife, while her mother is single, wary of online dating, and contemplating a future in which perhaps she never has sex again.

Lack of communication also breeds misinformation and fear: the fear that Grigor confesses feeling not only for but of her brother, now living with HIV. It's left to him to explain, patiently, that modern medication makes the virus undetectable in his blood stream. No one knows what effect it will have on the body long-term, he adds, but even if it kills me, at least it will stop me killing anyone else.

In this, and throughout the show, the words of Grigor's family are spoken by members of the audience: she takes our presence in the room as consent, and in doing so glances at another critical problem caused by lack of decent conversation about sex. The show relies on general embarrassment for its humour: if everyone in the room were comfortable rather than coy in talking about their bodies and its pleasures, The Talk would lose much of its piquancy. But society as a whole might gain, Grigor argues: especially the people within it who aren't heterosexual cis-men. (MC)

The Talk is on at 16.00 at Forest Fringe (Out of the Blue Drill Hall) unitl August 20th. See venue for accessibility information - http://forestfringe.co.uk/edinburgh2016/artist/mish-grigor/

Another argument for more and better talking about sex, in the Wardrobe Ensemble show 1972: The Future of Sex: http://www.thewardrobeensemble.com/#!1972-the-future-of-sex/c13ut

On Paul Goodman, whose 1960 book Growing Up Absurd argued that the fettering of adolescent sexuality was crucial to subduing the human spirit within a capitalist system: http://www.paulgoodmanfilm.com/old/the_relevance.html

Writing on consent from the Edinburgh fringe: https://katewyver.wordpress.com/2016/08/08/zero-something-important/

On the 3D model of a clitoris, to be used in French sex education: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/aug/15/french-schools-3d-model-clitoris-sex-education

On HIV treatment: http://www.tht.org.uk/myhiv/HIV-and-you/Your-treatment/HIV-treatment