Unknown

‘I’ll live a lot longer than you think.’

This verse memoir speaks in the voice of a man called Jonathan Blake.

Jonathan Blake was diagnosed so early in the UK AIDS epidemic that he was named Patient L1 at London Middlesex Hospital and is immortalised in the film, Pride. Born in 1949, he has lived through the high and lows of queer life for over seven decades. He also shared four of those decades with his life-partner, Nigel Young.

From a nineteen-fifties childhood to activism with Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, via the very darkest days of the epidemic, Maddrell’s sparkling poems tell our ever-shifting queerstory in the most personal of ways. They are luscious, witty and heart-felt.”
Neil Bartlett

Simon Maddrell is the author of six pamphlets including: a finger in derek jarman’s mouth (Polari Press, 2024); Isle of Sin (Polari Press, 2023); and joint-winner of the Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition 2020, Queerfella.

Jonathan Blake was born in Birmingham, England in 1949. Studying drama in Sidcup straight after school, Jonathan has been an actor ever since. Following his HIV diagnosis in 1982, Jonathan retrained as a tailor and worked at English National Opera. Sharing half of his life with Nigel Young, Jonathan lives in Herne Hill, south London. Now 75 years old, he is still an HIV activist.