Dancing in Heaven

This is the title story from the collection Dancing in Heaven, published by Reconnecting Rainbows on 1 December 2025.

It was 1984 and I was 18 years old. My A-levels and a pre-nursing course done, I got my first job at Guy’s Hospital. And so. There I was. The beginning of my new life as a nurse in a busy London hospital. I was so excited.
 
The placement in the infectious diseases ward brought me back down to earth with a bump.
 
Until then, I’d never even met anyone gay – well, not that I’d known, anyway. All I knew about that muttered word ‘homosexuality’ was what I saw on television or heard on the radio. Mr Humphries in Are you Being Served, Julian and Sandy in Round the Horne. Liberace. Danny La Rue. And the words whispered at my all-girls school. Shirt lifters. Benders. Poofters. All said in a way that made being gay seem like the worst thing possible. But I didn’t see anything to hate.
 
The world was waking up to a new disease that was hitting gay men. The tabloids were shouting it, and I saw some truly awful headlines. The worst – the one that still sticks with me – was 'I'd shoot my son if he had AIDS, says vicar' in The Sun. I hated that paper long before Hillsborough.
 
The infectious diseases ward was full of men wasting away. We were given no warning, and the first time I stepped through the door, I had to clench everything not to react. Boys my age, barely out of school. Young men like my big brother. Older men who could have been my father.
 
At the time, all we knew was from the BBC documentary The Killer in the Village, and that wasn’t much. Eventually they called it AIDS, but some of the nurses still called it GRID[1] or ACIDS[2]. Or 4H disease, because it affected homosexuals, Haitians, heroin users and haemophiliacs. I couldn’t understand why it affected those disparate groups, or what they might all have in common. I heard the older nurses whispering in corners, wondering which of the Hs the patients were. Judging them. Splitting them between the innocent victims and the guilty ones.
 
We had to do full barrier nursing – we were gloved and gowned and masked. The older nurses were the most afraid. So, us student nurses were sent in. Fed the patients. Washed them, talked to them. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. Afraid I might catch it. We didn’t know anything about it – the virus hadn't got it's proper name by then and it wasn’t clear how it was passed on. But I got on with it. Got to know them as real people. And their friends. Their friends were amazing! Flamboyant. So colourful in a time and place that felt like nothing but grey. They were like no-one I had ever met before. They opened my eyes to a whole new world, especially when they took me and the other young nurses to the gay club Heaven in Charing Cross. As well as the music and the noise and the dancing, it was the first club I'd been to where I didn't have to queue for the ladies.
 
We treated our patients as well as we could. But there was no cure for the virus, and it tore their immune systems and their bodies apart. Cancers. Infections. Wasting. Skin breaking down despite all our precautions. Memory loss and dementia. Tremors. I wrote letters for some of them when their shakes got too bad to be able to hold a pen.
 
We took it in turns sitting with distressed and dying patients, giving each other a break when we could. It was so hard to watch young men die – I remember hearing one of the more experienced nurses saying it was so much harder for them because their hearts were young and strong while their bodies were weak.
 
John. John, I remember so well. As the AIDS patients were in single rooms and he had few visitors, he had no one to talk to. And so, we made John laugh. The cleaner and I danced around his bed with string mop wigs on our heads and brooms as our partners. The junior doctors called in and told really bad jokes.
 
Our uniform was lilac and white pinstripe with a lilac collar. It was a colour that had never suited me, but I did like the short navy cape with a red lining that we wore in the hospital, and the long cloak and bonnet that kept me warm on the bleak winter walks back to the nurses’ home. The bonnets made us look like we were in the Salvation Army, and an old man gave one of my friends half a crown for the Sally Anns one night. Goodness only knows how long he'd had that in his pocket.
 
We used to wear the short capes reversed at Christmas when we sang carols on the wards. I have to admit I got a fit of giggles when we were asked to sing Away in the Manger in the maternity ward. The bit I really hated was the hats that needed a handful – no, an armful – of white hairgrips to keep them on. We had to make them up from a semicircle of starched white linen, which was stitched across the bottom with a drawstring thread to pull it into shape. The semi-circle had to be folded in these neat little pleats – either eight for the eight Beatitudes, or twelve for the twelve disciples – I can’t quite remember which! We would get told off if the pleats weren’t perfectly equal, and I was all fingers and thumbs. On nights when he couldn’t sleep, John and I would fold a stack of them together. He showed me how to use a thin sheet of card inside to make the front stand up and keep everything tidy. He also taught me how to darn the heels of my horrible grey uniform stockings without leaving lumps that would cause blisters, and how to use soap to stop a run in my precious nylons.
 
I'd come from a girls' school to a hospital ward. I'd never seen a naked man before. And now I was seeing them pretty much every day. They had tattoos and piercings in places that I had no idea you could even have pierced. We had full and frank conversations, John and me. He was so open and generous with me – a silly little girl who knew nothing.
 
I'd also never seen a dead person before.
 
I laid John out, and it was – surprising to me – a beautiful experience. Quiet and serene. It was just me and him, and it was the last gift I had to give him. I kept my cool for the rest of the day, but inside I was broken. I sobbed myself to sleep that night, and when I walked in the next day and saw his empty bed, it was all I could do not to cry. But the bed was soon filled again.
 
Too soon.
 
We had mums visiting but almost no dads. Mums who were broken. Mums who were stoic. Mums who were furious at their dying sons.
 
Telling John's mother that he had died was the hardest thing I had ever done. She didn't even know that he was in hospital. Like so many people at the time, he kept his sexuality and his illness a secret. So not only was I telling her that her beloved boy was gone, but I was also telling her that he was gay. I held her hand and we wept together.
 
We were surrounded by hate. I had people wait for me as I left hospital, asking how I could work with sinners. That God hated me for doing what I did. That AIDS cured poofs. That it was nature and the wrath of God getting rid of the aberrations. The only one that made me laugh out loud was 'God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve'.
 
But we were also wrapped around with care. Not all parents rejected their sons. Some of them healed divisions and said goodbye with love. Some stayed on after losing their sons to befriend the boys who had lost their families. Some became activists. Some were there for us nurses, too. They brought us flasks of tea and soup and hot chocolate, and little wrapped packages of home-made biscuits and cakes. And best of all, they gave us hugs and held our hands at the end of the heart-breaking shifts.
 
You know what I remember most, though. Dancing in Heaven, sweat running down our faces, surrounded by beautiful boys in leather and lace and feathers, singing along to Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat at the tops of our voices.


[1] Gay-related immune disease

[2] Acquired community immunodeficiency syndrome