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"My HIV status demonized parts of me that didn't need to be."

Oliver Sim of the band The xx revealed his HIV-positive status at Cannes Film Festival. He told Brut why he felt ready to finally open up about it … #Cannes2022
Transcript
00:00When I was 17, the only person I knew who had HIV was Freddie Mercury, and he's dead.
00:05Now, with people like Jonathan Finesse, Billy Porter, being so open and visible,
00:16things have definitely shifted.
00:19I've only in the past couple of years, and through the music and through making this
00:31film, been able to start talking about it.
00:42I found out about my status when I was 17, and it was at an age where I was just starting
00:51to be open about my sexuality.
00:53It was a really formative time, and it married itself to who I was as a person, and demonised
01:07parts of me that didn't need to be.
01:10For a long time, it's been something that has been a piece of information that I've
01:16held very tightly, and I've assumed that I can win someone over, and I can form a relationship
01:26with somebody, but then there has been a feeling of, well, you don't know about this, which
01:35it's just been, it's undercut quite a lot of stuff in my life.
01:51HIV has very little effect on my body, thanks to my medication, but the stigma around it,
02:00the stigma that I felt, has been a very big part of my life.
02:19I feel like we made this film for childhood selves, and I'm not the finished product at
02:26all.
02:27When I was a gay boy, I very much lived in fantasy in my head, thinking about what life
02:31was going to be like.
02:32I was definitely a femme kid.
02:34That's something I loved about myself.
02:36It felt like my superpower.
02:37Me looking for queer moments as a kid was that I really had to dig.
02:41There weren't that many, and I would, when it came to horror, I would identify with heroes,
02:49I'd identify with the monsters who were chased out of town and were kind of villainized for
02:57what was making them powerful.
03:09I hope he would be proud.
03:11I think he would be.
03:13There was a kiss in the film.
03:15Because that kiss would have meant so much to me as a young kid watching.
03:21That's the kind of thing that would feed my imagination and would give me a lot.
03:28So I hope he would enjoy it.