Jill Nalder - It's A Sin Special

I was supposed to be taking a break from Herstory this week because I have 3 important deadlines coming up. I also don’t normally write about living people. BUT I just finished watching (and crying at) It’s A Sin! And was immediately compelled to come on and talk about Jill Halder, the real-life person Jill Baxter is based on (and who plays her mum in the show!). I got this largely from her interview with Cherwell (found here). 

For those who haven’t seen It’s a Sin (rectify it immediately), it focusses on the lives of five friends living in London during the peak of the AIDS crisis. Although obviously the gay men affected are central to the story, Jill is at its very core and her struggles to understand, educate, and support her friends through the worst time of their lives is what helps make the show so heartwarming and heart breaking at the same time.  

The show has become an instant hit, and Channel 4’s most binge-watched ever. It’s the most I’ve ever been educated about the AIDS epidemic and it has even more disturbing similarities to the pandemic we’re facing today. However, I didn’t know that the idea for the show came from the real-life experiences of Jill and her tireless fight against AIDS. The show was born after from a series of intimate discussions with its creator Davies, a long-term friend of Jill. Using her experience of the time, and of course his own, Davies constructed this semi-fictionalised representation of the London queer scene in the 1980s.

In her interview with William Foxton, Jill vividly recalls the time she spent acting and partying with her friends These epic parties took place at the iconic Pink Palace, as portrayed in It’s a Sin, the actual apartment Jill rented with her friends at the time.  She said: “We had such fun there!” but noted that the actual Pink Palace was “way more glamorous” than its televised portrayal, recalling a large mock-Tudor building complete with pink velvet curtains, pink sofas and chandeliers. “It was not very student-y in the conventional sense”.

Parties at the Pink Palace included cabarets where guests would perform their “party piece” for an adoring audience. She said that while the flat was definitely not “sex in every room 24/7” as it is depicted on the show: “Now, when I look back, it seems hedonistic because it’s so care-free. It was a sense of freedom. That great freedom you have when you’re young.”

Over time, the Pink Palace became legendry, taking on a mythic status within the gay community. But, for Jill, it’s the nights she spent with her flatmates that are the most cherished: “You become very close, and then you become lifelong friends. If you’re lucky. I lost a lot of those people…so what would have been lifelong friends was not to be.”

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Jill’s first exoerience with AIDS was the death of a friend from college. “He’d gone home because he was ill…and then suddenly we heard he had died. And nobody knew what had happened to him. He was 26,” All that was left were whispered rumours that it could have been AIDS.

The show portrayed this well, the fear and misinformation that spread in the early days of the illness. Jill explained how there was little information out there at the time, partly because AIDS was a new disease but also because it was predominantly targeting “a stigmatised community.”

As portrayed in the show, the LGBT community itself didn’t pay much attention to the rumours at first.  “Nobody listens, do they?”, Jill says, “I’m a cautious person, I was warning my friends, telling them what I’d heard, trying to make them take it more seriously. Perhaps I was being a bit idealistic. People tried to brush it off. They were in denial. They were scared themselves. But it creeps up on you.”

 

“And then there were those terrible commercials…” she recalls, “with the tombstone smashing…” These adverts were public information commercials issued by the government, warning people not to “die of ignorance.” Voiced by John Hurt, complete with apocalyptic visuals and a science-fiction score, they were chilling clips intended to alert the general public to the dangers of AIDS. Jill appreciates the effort, but sees the flaws in the campaign: “I don’t think it was a particularly good commercial. It stigmatised people.”

The advert itself announced, in an menacing voice, that “so far [the disease has] been confined to small groups, but it’s spreading…”. Jill felt: “It makes those ‘small groups’ totally stigmatised. People were horrible to Chinese people when they first found out about COVID. I think you can imagine what people were like to gay men if they thought they were spreading AIDS.”

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As depicted, Jill was sworn to secrecy by friends who’d received a diagnosis: “They were desperate not to be labelled. They were desperate not to think that they couldn’t have the life they wanted.” They also feared the news might reach their families: “they felt ashamed…they didn’t want to let their families down. There’s a desire to protect your parents because you think they might be stigmatised too. It doesn’t stop with the person; some people would be horrible to the family too if they heard rumours. It becomes a stigma for the entire family” (which is also visible in the show).

Jill describes visiting hospital wards that were “full of young gay men”, all of whom “carried a great shame and sadness.” Some had visitors, like Jill, though many were too ashamed to tell friends and family. Jill took on a maternal role, caring for friends suffering from the disease who felt like they couldn’t tell their family. It was a physically and emotionally demanding task, but she never considered walking away from those in need: “Once you’re involved in somebody’s care, particularly when you know their life is not going to be long, you can’t let them down. You can’t turn your back  on them.”

Jill still remembers how it felt to be told by friends that they had been diagnosed with the illness. “You’re just a listening ear at that point. It’s emotional, but you’ve got to try and not get emotional. You have to be positive about it, though you still feel that sadness and that trauma…they’re telling you something that you know is going to kill them. It’s hard.”

Jill lost four very close friends to AIDS, but refuses to speak about them to protect their families. She did however say that they were ‘incredibly brave human beings’ and that they were all ‘just…fabulous.”

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As more and more friends became ill, Jill became a fierce campaigner. She founded the charity, West End Cares with a group of seven fellow West End performers. The charity is still going, nowadays under the name TheatreMAD Make A Difference. Since it was established, they have raised upwards of £10 million in the fight against AIDS.

As part of her work with West End Cares, Jill funded vital research, gave money to those who were unable to work due to the disease and helped raise awareness and solidarity for sufferers. She was relentless, organising late-night cabarets, competitions, raffles, carol concerts, etc. “We did loads,” she says, “you have no idea.”

Some have questioned, as the GP does on the show, why a straight woman should care so much about a disease that would not affect her. She answers: “That was my world. That was the world I moved in, and they were my friends. And if you love somebody, you want to help.”

In the final episode of the series, Richie reminisces about all the boys who have been lost: They were all great,” he says, “that’s what people will forget. That it was so much fun.” That’s why Jill and Davies wanted to tell this story. When asked if people would forget, Jill said: “I don’t think they will now. I think Russell has made sure of that. People will have to think twice if they thought it was all doom and gloom.’