GARETH THOMAS on learning to live with HIV
FORMER LIONS CAPTAIN GARETH THOMAS ON LIVING WITH THE VIRUS ... AND EDUCATING PEOPLE ABOUT MEDICAL ADVANCES
GARETH THOMAS knows the mistakes folk make about people like him because he made them too. Back when he was a man on the other side of the line. A man who wasn’t HIV positive.
He knows the thoughts plenty still have because he had them himself.
‘I didn’t have a clue about what it actually means,’ he tells
Sportsmail. ‘When I was told, I mean, well, I just burst into tears. Death sentence.’
His mind goes back to a health clinic near Bridgend and an extraordinary finding in a drop of blood. He won’t say when it happened because that might compromise those in his orbit at the time. But having announced nine months ago that he has been living with the virus, one of the greats of Welsh rugby has vivid memories of the day he thought it was all over.
‘I go regularly for testing around sexual health,’ he says. ‘There is a stigma around it which is weird — we all have sex but we feel ashamed walking into a sexual health clinic. I didn’t — I went often.
‘One day I went and I remember it clearly. I felt so well, healthy. They did their tests and there is one where they prick your finger for blood and 20 minutes later you have your result. I’m sat there and they say it was positive, HIV.
‘Jesus, I was in shock. Straight away, I remember through tears asking the doctor how long I have left to live. I’m crying, catching my breath, and the nurse is looking a bit surprised at how distressed I was. I didn’t know then what I know now, which is the problem, and they are talking to me but I don’t know how much I am listening.
‘Anyway, I left the clinic to drive to a hospital in Cardiff. I am in my car and thinking everything I have already put my family through. Me coming out (as gay, in 2009) and them having to go through that process with me. This time I would be leaving my parents to deal with this because soon I would be dead.’
Thomas catches himself in the emotion of the recollection. After a moment he continues: ‘Everyone knows my mum and dad where we are in Bridgend. It’s like, “Vonnie is the mum of the rugby player, Baz is the dad of the rugby player”. I’m in the car and I’m thinking it will no longer be like that. It will be, “Vonnie, the mother of the guy who died of HIV, who died of AIDS”. I was crying, feeling selfish about what I was doing to them, everything.’
Stigma. A little word that covers a multitude of areas. Thomas, like so many, saw the adverts of the Eighties and Nineties. They were a powerful tool of their time — they sounded the alarm to a new and terrible threat that could be passed through unprotected sex and could kill millions. ‘Don’t die of ignorance’, the Government wrote on leaflets delivered to every British home in 1987.
Where it became problematic for Thomas, now 45, is that his understanding, and that of many others, hadn’t kept up with the science of the past 30 years. So when a retired former captain of the British Lions sat weeping in his car, he was unaware of what he was actually facing.
‘People would be surprised to know what it is like living with HIV these days,’ Thomas says. ‘I thought I had a death sentence. But I take one tablet once a day, at 6am. That controls it.
‘A lot of people don’t know that. It is about telling people you won’t get it from touching a door handle or if someone touches you. It won’t be transmitted. It is telling people that it cannot be transmitted by sex if you are well controlled on regular medication.
‘ I saw the adverts everyone else saw and they scared the living s*** out of me. They worked. But there has been a progression in medicine and science that hasn’t been so well told. I was part of a big survey recently — 4,000 people. Two-thirds say if they found out their partner was HIV positive, they would consider ending the relationship. In sport, one in three said they wouldn’t play if they knew one of their opponents was living with HIV.
‘Where it is important is that stigmas are dangerous. They can harm your view of yourself — you can feel ashamed, scared to tell people, which is how I was for a long time — and they can harm how people see you. You can be abused, treated like a danger to others. You’re not. The perception is you will be weak and frail. Well, the day I told people I had this, I completed an ironman event in Tenby. It doesn’t limit me and it doesn’t have to limit others.’ Getting that point across is a major part of the current chapter of Thomas’s remarkable life. It’s what he wants to do, with this interview marking today’s launch of the Tackle HIV campaign through ViiV Healthcare.
In his words, Thomas’s ‘very purpose is using my life to help others’. Spreading awareness is his thing; a beacon of two fires, if you prefer: one for gay men in sport and society, one for those living with HIV.
He is a man who has endured so many internal hurricanes about who he is — ‘ I have contemplated suicide more times than I can bloody count,’ he says — and still he is shining. By the estimation of Prince Harry and most sensible others, he is a national hero.
‘I loved rugby,’ he says, speaking
‘I’ve contemplated killing myself, I’ve been abused, but feeling like I’m helping people gives me a purpose’
as a utility back capped 100 times by Wales in union and four times in league. He scored 212 international points across the two codes, won the Heineken Cup at club level, captained Wales to a Six Nations Grand Slam and once got so animated in a television debate about Welsh player power under his captaincy that he had a stroke.
‘The game defined me and I wanted it to,’ he says. ‘Jesus, I am so proud of what I did in my rugby career. But when I look at my life, what I do now is way more important to me than running around a field. I have been through some terrible moments, contemplated killing myself, been abused, but feeling like I am helping people has given me a purpose.’
Married to Stephen Williams and living in St Brides Major, Thomas today declares himself ‘truly happy — no secrets, no living in fear of what people might find out, I am just myself’. His past difficulties were never worn lightly, not least around the turmoil brought by the concealment of his sexuality and the end of his marriage to his former wife, which pushed him towards suicide. His troubling claim that a news organisation outed his HIV status to his parents, and prompted his announcement in 2019, also left him in a dire state.
‘I thought I was dying anyway and had that brief feeling that it is easier to close your eyes and never open them again,’ he says.
On the whole the reception to what he disclosed has been overwhelmingly kind. ‘There have been some idiots on social media,’ he says. ‘One guy said something at the start of lockdown like, “Oh, the rent boys must be gutted because Gareth won’t be out for sex, that is how he got HIV”. But the vast majority have been great.
‘I did a documentary on it last year and just after it came out I was getting off the Tube in London. This guy was walking towards me and had headphones on and probably didn’t know how loud his voice was. He goes, “I saw your programme about having HIV”. I felt everyone was suddenly looking at me but then he reached out and just shook my hand. Anything like that, it’s just great. It shows the stigma is passing.
‘If I can help, if I can make it easier for others who live with HIV by talking as some former rugby player, that is what I dream of.’
Former rugby player? He’s sold himself short.
Tackle HIV, a new campaign led by Gareth Thomas in partnership with ViiV Healthcare and the Terrence Higgins Trust, aims to tackle stigma and misunderstanding around HIV. For more information visit www.tacklehiv.org and follow @tacklehiv
‘It’s about telling people that you won’t catch HIV from touching a door handle or if someone touches you’