Oliver Sim shared his HIV status at Cannes Film Festival

Brut America

"My HIV status demonized parts of me that didn't need to be."   Oliver Sim of the band The xx revealed his HIV-positive status at Cannes Film Festival. He told Brut why he felt ready to finally open up about it … #Cannes2022

Transcript

00:00When I was 17, the only person I knew who had HIV was Freddie Mercury, and he's dead.

00:05Now, with people like Jonathan Finesse, Billy Porter, being so open and visible,

00:16things have definitely shifted.

00:19I've only in the past couple of years, and through the music and through making this

00:31film, been able to start talking about it.

00:42I found out about my status when I was 17, and it was at an age where I was just starting

00:51to be open about my sexuality.

00:53It was a really formative time, and it married itself to who I was as a person, and demonised

01:07parts of me that didn't need to be.

01:10For a long time, it's been something that has been a piece of information that I've

01:16held very tightly, and I've assumed that I can win someone over, and I can form a relationship

01:26with somebody, but then there has been a feeling of, well, you don't know about this, which

01:35it's just been, it's undercut quite a lot of stuff in my life.

01:51HIV has very little effect on my body, thanks to my medication, but the stigma around it,

02:00the stigma that I felt, has been a very big part of my life.

02:19I feel like we made this film for childhood selves, and I'm not the finished product at

02:26all.

02:27When I was a gay boy, I very much lived in fantasy in my head, thinking about what life

02:31was going to be like.

02:32I was definitely a femme kid.

02:34That's something I loved about myself.

02:36It felt like my superpower.

02:37Me looking for queer moments as a kid was that I really had to dig.

02:41There weren't that many, and I would, when it came to horror, I would identify with heroes,

02:49I'd identify with the monsters who were chased out of town and were kind of villainized for

02:57what was making them powerful.

03:09I hope he would be proud.

03:11I think he would be.

03:13There was a kiss in the film.

03:15Because that kiss would have meant so much to me as a young kid watching.

03:21That's the kind of thing that would feed my imagination and would give me a lot.

03:28So I hope he would enjoy it.

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