On January 22, 1985, a regional paper in Victoria ran a highly inflammatory headline.
“LOCAL AIDS SUSPECT,” it screamed.
“A young Warrnambool homosexual is the first member of the nursing profession in Australia to be identified as an AIDS suspect,” the story read.
The “suspect” was Barry McCluskey, a 30-year-old student nurse who had just been informed he had contracted HIV.
He had hoped to keep his diagnosis close to his chest, at least until he figured out how to tell his parents.
But there was no hiding in Warrnambool. Word had gotten out.
“[My parents] had the paper delivered every morning and there it was,” recalls Barry’s brother, Anthony McCluskey.
“There were only a couple of [male] nurses at the hospital so it was pretty easy to work out who it was. My father went to Barry at the time and said to him, ‘Is it true, Barry?’
“And Barry said ‘yes’.”
A ‘tremendous smile’
Barry and his three siblings grew up in Warrnambool, about three hours west of Melbourne, in a small Catholic community.
“We had a really loving family and it was a great childhood we had together. Barry was a very generous man … [with a] tremendous smile,” Anthony says.
“The fact he became a nurse, I think, talks to his caring nature and the kind of person that he was.”
Barry’s parents knew about and accepted that their son was gay, but Warrnambool was still a small, conservative place.
Except for a secret spot near the breakwater, where men would meet for sex, there was no queer community to speak of.
Barry spent his 20s in Melbourne, then he returned to his hometown to pursue a career in nursing. But everything changed after a trip he took to the US in 1984.
He spent a few months immersed in the gay culture of San Francisco, making friends and enjoying the 80s party scene.
Yet there was an undercurrent of fear. It had been three years since the first reported cases of HIV in the US and case numbers had already reached 130,000 there.
Public hysteria and homophobia were ramping up, with the illness termed “gay cancer” and the “gay plague”.
Barry returned to Warrnambool, feeling anxious. He was tested, and received a positive result for HIV.
Panic and prejudice
While the AIDS epidemic was reaching a fever pitch overseas in the mid-80s, it moved more slowly in Australia.
Nonetheless, misinformation was rife and even official health information stirred fear and stigmatised.
Cheryl Durston trained with Barry at the Warrnambool Base Hospital, and remembers the panic that spread through the community in 1985.
“We knew nothing about it, and then suddenly this rumour spread around the hospital: ‘Barry’s got HIV’,” she says.
“It was almost like he was the walking dead.
“The treatment that I saw Barry receive was appalling.
“It got to a point where Barry was almost ostracised from the hospital. Certain surgeons demanded, ‘He is not to be in our theatre, we do not want him near any of our patients’. And what they said, they got.”
Barry wasn’t unwell, but he was put on sick leave by the hospital.
It was the same year that three-year-old Eve van Grafhorst, who contracted HIV through contaminated blood transfusions, was hounded out of Australia.
The Warrnambool Standard, the same paper that had incorrectly labelled Barry as having AIDS, reported that city councillor Frank McCarthy called for “all known homosexuals working in hospitals to be transferred to duties not involving patient care”.
The councillor — who would become mayor of Warrnambool — was quoted as saying, “You don’t leave a small child at risk with tiger snakes”.
A week after the article was published, Barry fled to Melbourne. But his parents reported that the prejudice against him continued in his absence.
“[My mum] had lived in Warrnambool all her life … and she talked about people crossing the street when they saw her coming. It was really hurtful,” Anthony says.
Solidarity in the hospital
While in Melbourne, Barry connected with Tom Carter, a nurse who worked as an advocate and carer for those with HIV and AIDS.
The pair met at Club 80, a popular gay bar in Collingwood where Tom ran a clinic for patrons.
“[He] came and saw me [from] midnight until about 3.30 in the morning, and we had a long talk,” Tom recalls.
“He was very brave. But once he realised he was talking to another male nurse who knew how hospitals could be so nasty — and I knew enough to know what happened to him was very unethical — we laughed a lot, we cried a lot.”
After a break in Melbourne, and with the support of the Australian Nursing Federation, Barry returned to work at the same hospital that had ostracised him.
This time though, he had back-up.
Locals had begun to avoid the hospital due to prejudice and hospital management blamed Barry for the down tick.
But Barry’s friends and colleagues pushed back.
“A number of us went and approached the director of nursing at the time,” Barry’s friend from nursing training, Cheryl, says.
“We stood up and said, ‘Hey, look, this is not fair, this is discriminatory … We’re trying to give some confidence and trust to the community. What are you guys doing?'”
The abuse didn’t stop, but neither did Barry’s supporters.
“It got to a point where even when Barry sat down, you had a cleaner come and wipe down the chair after [he] got up. It was so deliberate,” Cheryl says.
“When we saw that happening, we actually took our little wipes and we wiped our chairs too. We raised our finger to say, ‘Hey, look, we did it for you.'”
Other local male nurses let the community believe they were HIV-positive too, in solidarity.
“They were trying to get the heat diverted off Barry,” Cheryl says.
The choice to care
With this support, Barry was able to complete his nursing training. Once again, he moved to Melbourne, where he found work at the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, the centre of hospitalised AIDS care in Victoria.
Grant Hamilton nursed there alongside Barry between 1986 and 1992, through the height of the AIDS epidemic in Australia.
“He was a lovely, lovely man; a very gentle sort of person, very caring,” Grant recalls.
“It must have been pretty challenging for him, having made the choice to work in that environment when he had HIV.”
The vast majority of the patients Grant and Barry cared for were young, gay men dying painfully and well before their time.
In 1986, US authorities reported that the death rate for AIDS patients was over 50 per cent, with most people dying just over a year after diagnosis. The odds were similarly dire in Australia, with anti-retroviral drugs still years away from being effective and available.
Grant says he and Barry cared for their patients holistically and tried to make their last months positive. Grant even arranged for one patient — an icon of the fashion world who was critically ill with AIDS — to attend a high-profile fashion gala, wheelchair in tow.
“There were so many social, emotional [and] political aspects to the whole issue of AIDS and the experience people were going through,” Grant says.
“To truly look after these people well, you had to become involved in all those aspects of their life.”
‘A beautiful death’
In the early 1990s, six years after his HIV diagnosis, Barry’s body began to break down.
“He got sicker and sicker [but] he kept wanting to contribute,” fellow nurse Tom recalls.
“They moved him to a job in the nurses’ library [at Fairfield], which in reality meant he laid in a comfortable beanbag and just drowsed for most of the day.”
During his final months, Barry’s colleagues would drive him to and from work. When he was no longer able to work, they cared for him in his home.
In his last weeks, his mother and brother Anthony were by his side.
“I remember his death very clearly, I really do. It was a beautiful death,” Anthony says.
“He’d been unconscious probably for about 24 hours. It was a Sunday afternoon, about three o’clock, and he sat up in his bed [in] an amazing burst of strength and said, ‘Where’s Mum?’
“I went to get Mum and she came in and sat down with him, and he asked her to give him a cuddle.
“She sat in the bed and he sort of leaned on her chest, and he went like that.”
He was just 36 years old.
Barry is buried in a small cemetery just off the Great Ocean Road, a mid-point between his two homes, Melbourne and Warrnambool.
Cheryl’s enduring memory of her friend is one of bravery.
“It would have been so easy for Barry just to toss it in and go and hide,” she says.
“And he didn’t.”
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