After watching Aids drama It’s A Sin, the designer Philip Normal sat down to create a charity T-shirt with the word ‘La’, an in-joke from the show.
“I thought I’d sell five and raise £100 for the Terrence Higgins Trust,” says the Labour councillor, who was Britain’s first openly HIV-positive mayor.
“By the next day I’d raised £10,000.”
As we near the end of Pride Month sales of the T-shirt are nearing 30,000, with close to half a million pounds raised for the THT.
They’ve been worn by stars from Keeley Hawes, Sir Ian McKellen and Barry Keoghan to Dermot O’Leary, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and Russell T Davies who wrote the series.
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“It isn’t down to the T-shirts, it’s down to Russell T Davies’ beautiful writing and the amazing cast and crew,” Philip says, surrounded by fabric in his South London design studio. “And what it has all achieved is to get people talking about living with HIV when that wasn’t even a conversation.
“We need it to be a conversation because we need people to stop catching HIV.”
Philip, 39, designed the T-shirt after watching episode three. “I felt so emotional, not just because I live with HIV but because of all the people who have been lost or who have lost someone, and all the people still living with it,” he says.
In episode three, viewers see the death of Colin, a gay, Welsh tailor played by Callum Scott Howells, who moves into the “Pink Palace” flat-share after befriending Olly Alexander’s character Ritchie.
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After being diagnosed with AIDS, Colin is locked away in hospital as a “public menace”. Russell T Davies has said that Colin’s character is based on a real person locked away in Manchester in 1985, when Ken Clarke, then Conservative Minister of Health, enacted powers to keep AIDS patients in hospital against their will.
“After episode three I was a complete mess,” Philip says. “The death of Colin was so beautifully written.
“It’s hard to watch, but it mirrors a lot of people’s experiences.”
Those experiences include the sense of a “found family” amongst people whose sexual orientation wasn’t accepted by their families.
“When I arrived in London at 18 to study fashion, I was kind of lost, and then I got a job at Retro Bar,” says Philip, a small-town boy who grew up living in Bedford and Cambridgeshire.
“They gave me a job and gave me a family. I was surrounded by so much energy and so much love. It was a safe environment when I didn’t really know who I was.
“The whole ‘La’ thing really reminded me of becoming part of a big LGBT family. It said so much, in so few characters.
“That’s why I kept the design of the T-shirt really simple.”
Born Philip Burr, he changed his name by deed poll after giving the name ‘Philip Normal’ to I-D magazine as a fashion student. The designer tested positive for HIV in 2005, aged 26.
“If it had happened now, I would have been put straight onto treatment,” he says. “Back then, I was just told I was positive and to ‘wait until you get sick’. It was frightening. You were just waiting. And then I did become quite ill.”
By 2010 he had opened his first shop in Camden, North London. “At that time my health really did deteriorate. It happened slowly. I just got more and more tired until one day I couldn’t get up in the morning.”
Philip’s eyes fill briefly with tears. “It was like coming out twice,” he says, eventually. “Shame, guilt, rejection. It shouldn’t be like that. We need to end that stigma for the next generation. When I was at school, Section 28 meant teachers couldn’t even discuss LGBT education from a health point of view. That contributed to how many people died.”
Now, 16 years later, the treatment has changed, yet the stigma hasn’t. The money raised from the T-shirts will go towards a campaign challenging prejudice around HIV/AIDS.
As Philip explains, “If you are on medication, you can’t pass HIV on, and the only side effect is good health.” He drains a double espresso. “I was the first openly HIV-positive mayor in the country – which I don’t wear as a badge of honour because it highlights the stigma surrounding HIV,” he says.
“It has been really heartbreaking many times. Just brutal. I would be honest on dates, and someone would say ‘I can’t see you’.
“I was wearing a red ribbon and walked into the barbers, and they said, ‘we can’t give you a haircut’. I wouldn’t want anyone else ever to have to feel like that.”
Philip became a campaigner on HIV/AIDS, but still only a handful of people knew about his diagnosis.
“I gave someone an award in 2017 for their work on HIV,” he says. “I hadn’t at that time in my public life ever said out loud that I was HIV positive. So, I said it. Then in 2020 I became the first openly HIV-positive mayor.”
He is part of a national campaign to get new HIV diagnoses down to zero by 2030. “It’s scientifically possible,” he says. “We need opt-out HIV testing instead of opt-in. And we need to make ‘PrEP’ available.”
PrEP is a drug taken by HIV-negative people that cuts the risk of getting HIV. “It needs to be in every pharmacy across the country the way Viagra is.”
Philip’s term as Lambeth’s mayor ended in April, but he remains a Labour councillor as well as running the Philip Normal shop in Brixton Village. His partner Matthew Doyle has just been appointed Keir Starmer ’s interim director of communications.
“I also became the first mayor sworn in online because of Covid,” Philip laughs. “I was a mayor of firsts.”
The chains he made himself for the ceremony out of recycled T-shirts are now hanging in the Covid exhibition at the Museum of London. They bear the motto ‘Spectemur Agendo’ – “Let us be judged by our acts”.
- Go to philipnormal.shop to buy a La! T-shirt. £17 of the price goes to THT.
