‘Isn’t it interesting,’ he added pleasantly, ‘that before the AIDS crisis, the number one cause of death for gay people was straight people?’

I stared at him. ‘Is that true?’

‘Sure!’ he said. ‘Maybe.’

‘Straight people,’ I said. The cause of death was straight people: it felt so skulduggerous to suggest this, tasty and glorious and just possibly true.

‘They sound terrible,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But have you met the gay ones?’

And this was how I learned about the problem with gay men who wanted to lift the blood-donation ban but didn’t understand that this would throw poz guys under the bus; the problem with the terms of the campaign for same-sex marriage, how it had reinforced the primacy of the couple as the homonormative ideal to which all queers should aspire. The problem with guys in Prahran who caked themselves with bronzer, the problem with guys in Preston who did the same thing as a joke. So here they were, the moral wilds. They were thick and wild.

In the sixth hour of my knowing him, he told me of his status. Apparently what I said was ‘Whoa.’ And I will always be grateful that he also dispensed info he was absolutely not obliged to dispense, choosing to see my questions as high and silly, and to consider this a sweet position rather than a thoughtless one.

Back in my idyllic wild-less seaside community I’d barely gone as far as what you might call hooking up. But I’d still managed to be one of those disagreeable people who get on apps and ask complete strangers if they are clean and safe, as if HIV-positive guys were unsafe or dirty. I didn’t have the courage to take my clothes off with a person, but I still had enough courage to stigmatise people like Dan, of whom I had previously had an almost mystic understanding: I thought of a converting agent moving through the world, turning good bodies to bad bodies, then to AIDS, then to death, and then into glowing forefathers – and these were always men – who blipped into existence whenever was convenient, to remind us of the history we’d defeated and then chucked.

I knew I had to give up something valuable and personal of my own, or I’d wake up in the morning and find Dan had disappeared, the whole night nothing but a figment.

‘I don’t really like touching people’s bodies,’ I offered.

Although I did whatever guys wanted to – for instance, I’d made out with him – I had a problem with mouths and had wondered if, as a child, I’d had a formative relationship with a meaningful adult who had filed teeth, bad lipstick or a mixed approach to flossing. I had looked up lots of things about this problem on the internet and mostly found classifications that did not feel right; I knew that I was basically a sexual being; I kept coming across boys I almost, almost wanted. I just knew people were gross and preferred them to keep their distance, leaving space between us, preferably also walls.