The 2007 Master and Creator Prize - STEPHEN FRY

In autumn 2007, the BBC broadcast the documentary series HIV and Me. While making the series, actor Stephen Fry met with numerous people who have HIV, their partners, and those who provide them with care and assistance. Placing himself in various different situations during his journey through the world of HIV and AIDS, Fry always maintains a disarming openness. Never does he become judgemental or moralistic. What we notice instead is his solicitousness. And his curiosity. And his surprise—sometimes even to the point of being shocked. But he never fails to pose the right questions, with the right tone.

His patient, inquisitive personality does honour to the name of the series. Indeed, the basis of HIV and Me is the relationship that Stephen Fry (who is himself HIV negative) has with the HIV-positive people around him—a relationship chockfull of engagement, compassion and respect. And that is rare these days! In the hands of the media, HIV is seen as little more than a source of sensation. The resulting news coverage of HIV is not only often superficial or even deceitful, but also go beyond what is humane: it leads to polarisation and stigma.

Another advantage of Fry’s curious, inquisitive and unprejudiced attitude is that people actually dare to talk to him. And he also shares that often emotional and courageous openness himself. All that talking sheds light on many, very many things. In that sense you could even see the series as a cultural-anthropological study on HIV. It not only concerns the virus itself but also especially the havoc that it wreaks in people, amongst people.

We have never seen things recorded like this before: In the abandoned Middlesex Hospital, Fry tells of the early 1980s, when fate struck mercilessly for the first time, primarily amongst homosexuals; the countless bed lamps still attached to the wall in the otherwise empty hospital ward seem to represent those who died back then. Fry’s voice echoes in the vacant space, a faucet drips; it is a monumental memorial to all the lovers, the sons, the brothers, the friends and relatives who slid further towards a death we knew nothing about...

In a home movie we see a young child picking berries with her playmates; when her hand gets caught on a thorn, she warns them that she needs a plaster: she is HIV positive and could possibly infect others. It is a sad image of innocence lost young, a child who will never be allowed to play the game of ‘blood siblings’...

A fifty-something woman startles a group of secondary school students when she reveals that she—‘that granny sitting next to you on the train’—is HIV positive; her son tells of the time when someone spray-painted the word ‘AIDS’ across the side of their house in giant letters written hastily, cowardly...

Young HIV-positive mothers in Africa make memory albums for their children, whom they probably won’t get to see grow up simply because they don’t have access to HIV medicines... An angelic young man, whose emaciated body recalls images of the AIDS patients from the ’80s, will not live to see Christmas in a couple of months, despite all the medicine he takes. Resigned, he stares at the approaching end of his life...

A completely bloated man courageously swallows handfuls of pills, five times a day – all of which are thoroughly experimental, as nearly all HIV drugs are. The big question is: how long will his liver hold out…? A man who got the virus through a blood transfusion sees his continued existence redeemed through the children he begets: thanks to medical science, which can wash the virus from his sperm, his children were born HIV negative...

Doctors and scientists despair at the sudden, sharp rise in new HIV infections amongst young people: the current availability of effective HIV medicines and the dearth of fear-inspiring AIDS-related deaths are thought to have led to a trivialisation of the dangerous virus...

Some government officials deny the very existence of AIDS. There are those who say you can cure HIV with beetroot, which would obviously have consequences for healthcare if put into practice. The United States preaches the conservative duo of abstinence and fidelity as a means of turning the tide in the countries in crisis; these turn out to be extremely naive weapons in the fight against AIDS, which means that condoms have only become less available in the end. Humanitarian aide, misused to promote a particular worldview, ends up only making matters so much worse...

A woman moved with her son to England and discovered there, when she became ill, that she was HIV positive. Since she is probably not eligible for a residence permit, she must return to Uganda. It is entirely unsure if she will be able to find the right medicines there; who knows she might well die of AIDS. That depressing prospect led her to decide to give her son up for adoption: Uganda already has enough AIDS orphans...

On and on the list goes: blood-curdling, heart-wrenching, sickening stories. All those make it particularly hard to take when people shake an accusing finger at those who carry the virus themselves. What could that possible solve? Every person featured in HIV and Me is afraid but puts on a brave face nonetheless and courageously gets on with life. Everyone pours out his heart and speaks of her pain, but without complaining. Everyone is disappointed but hopes for more understanding from the world around them. Everyone is worried about himself but especially about others who might still become infected.

And you begin to wonder whether that will ever change: whether those prejudiced individuals who are frightened at their own anxiety and who therefore feel the need to humiliate the ill, will ever come to see that. And you hope that countries and states will start adhering more strictly to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (from 1948!) by abolishing the entry restrictions for those with HIV and/or actively granting residence permits and the right to medical care to those who are ill. And you can see it with your own eyes how armies and a staggering amount of material is mobilised in no time for the war in Iraq while each day some 8,500 people with HIV die of AIDS because there are not enough pills, because something goes awry in their distribution, because a government is corrupt.

And you take care to vote strategically in the hope that the immeasurable fatigue that many people with HIV experience—and that often completely paralyses their lives—will once again be recognised as a criterion for disability benefits, even if only partial. And you hope that everyone who has run some kind of a risk will get tested, in order at least to prevent things from getting any worse. And you hope that everyone—the youth, but also older people who are once again sexually active thanks to the pills for erectile dysfunction—will do it safely, because being HIV positive is more than just taking a pill once a day.

For HIV—the unbounded virus that has no preference of its own for any particular rank or class, does not select on the basis of age, does not discriminate and is not sexist, and is carried by many people today who do not even realise that they will be sick tomorrow—causes immensely great damage to society: economic, physical but also psychological. We are not being cynical if we say that with the virus, acquired in an instant, you remain all alone, dead tired, while the rest of the world just goes merrily further, as if nothing had happened to you. Those who are ill simply count for less in a world where being healthy is all-important. And you can count yourself fortunate if you live in the wealthy Western world, where medical care is often within reach...

HIV and Me: what makes Stephen Fry’s performance so laudable is that he shows us that you can relate to things in a personal way. And thus also to HIV and to those who have HIV. Everyone has a personality—whether or not one is a journalist. And no one forces you to assume an impassive aloofness but yourself! In his brilliant exemplary role, one individual has at any rate shown us how it should be. Let us follow him, in the farthest-reaching political decisions, in the smallest gestures of empathy.

Ladies and Gentlemen! The Master and Creator Prize for 2007 goes to: Stephen Fry!

English translation: Thomas S.B. Johnston