Jill Nalder

I watched It's A Sin back in 2021 and didn't even connect the two when I added Jill Nalder's memoirs to my wishlist (according to Russell T Davies, 'One of the lead characters in It’s a Sin was based so much on Jill’s life that I couldn’t even change her name!') Jill was an actress from Wales who moved to London at the height of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, and helped to look after 'her boys' - actor friends including Dursley McLinden - and also volunteered on the AIDS ward at the Westminster Hospital. She became and activist and co-founded the West End fundraising charity Les Mis Cares, later West End Cares.

I love the character of Jill in It's A Sin and reading about the real woman's life is equally entertaining and emotional. I'm just glad that none of Jill's boys had a mother like Keeley Hawes in the series! Right from the start, Jill was worried about the 'gay disease' in America, and warned one of her friends about 'this illness, sort of like flu . . . but ... it can kill you, apparently. Gay men are getting it in America, and they say it’s possibly infectious! No one knows how you get it. I know that sounds weird, but have you heard about it?' In her words, 'men now had to consider the consequences of sex, in the same way that women always had.' Four of Jill's closest friends were PWAs (people with AIDS, not victims). and three of them died before a successful treatment was found in the mid 1990s (also too late for Freddie Mercury, but in time to save his partner Jim Hutton). She recounts the illnesses and deaths of her friends and her memories broke my heart, especially losing Dursley, who fought so hard (I had to Google him, I admit!)

Jill and the 'Pink Palace' boys - even though they only stayed in the garishly decorated flat for a few years - also travelled to America, 'the only first-world nation to ban people from travelling there based on their HIV status', and South Africa. Jill's life as a West End actor in the 1980s sounds like such a one-in-a-lifetime combination of incredible parties and personalities, tinged with personal fear and loss.

Like Ruth Coker Burks' book All The Young Men, Jill's story is as much about the men who fought the disease and lost - and some who were lucky - as her own life. I love that she continues to fight the stigma of HIV forty years on, and still has such fond memories of her boys. The quotes heading each chapter are also fitting and poignant, especially the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. A beautiful companion to It's A Sin.… (mehr)