Interview with Ingo Michels
1. How would you introduce yourself?
My way into the AIDS services is a bit unusual. I didn’t come to this part of life via the gay community, but from my work with drug users, which I got to know as part of my additional training in psychiatry in 1985. I was actually a sociologist and did my doctorate on a literary topic, but then did additional trainings to become a consultant for addiction help. Drug addicts were forced to stay in a psychiatric ward because it was believed that they could receive better therapeutic care there than in prison. I met people there who were sentenced to prison just because of their addiction to heroin, which is not the case for an alcoholic dependent person. At that time (1985) HIV tests at the psychiatric clinic revealed that around 1/3 of the patients were HIV positive, which meant at the time that they had a maximum survival time of six months. There was great fear and exclusion and stigmatization among the population in the city where the psychiatric clinic was located. Only later did it become clear that they had been infected by sharing injection equipment, which was still banned, as was methadone dispensing. It was claimed that one addiction replaces another, even though the risk of infection is drastically reduced by opioid substitution treatment! I then got involved with AIDS Help [Aidshilfe] in the town where I lived – a very Catholic town – where a lot of gay men got involved in AIDS services and that brought me closer to the gay community. I started working in Berlin in 1987 for the German AIDS Help (DAH), the umbrella organization for AIDS help in Germany. The DAH received a lot of money from the state to organize and network prevention in the gay community and among drug users and to offer trainings. I was in charge of Drugs and Prison projects. And I enjoyed working with my gay and lesbian colleagues as “the gayest heterosexual”…it was a great atmosphere in which sexuality and drug use could be discussed without taboos. We were responsible for the “dirty children” and we were proud of that! I then motivated ex-convicts and drug users to work in the German AIDS Help because they had the competence of those directly affected. That wasn’t always easy, because these two communities had hardly met each other before, tended to distance themselves from each other and only “found together” with the H virus.
2. What would you describe as landmarks in your engagement with AIDS activism, please?
From 1987 to 1994 I worked for the German AIDS Help in the drug and prison sector. During this time there were many highlights in the activities, such as the creation of four job positions for people directly affected by drugs and HIV and for a former prisoner who campaigned for people with HIV/AIDS in prison. The founding of the self-organization of drug consumers JES (Junkies, Exusers, Substitutes) in 1989 was a highlight, as was the inclusion of more than 30 such JES groups in the German AIDS Help. We campaigned for the provision of sterile injecting equipment to drug users, which only became legal in 1992. The levy on prisons has still not been passed, despite many years of lobbying. We fought for the allocation of methadone and later buprenorphine to heroin addicts, banned in Germany until 1987, initially with strict conditions (several unsuccessful abstinence therapy attempts, HIV or hepatitis infection with symptoms, pregnancy, etc.). It was only after years of political work that access was gained with an established opioid addiction as the only prerequisite. There are now over 80,000 opioid users (about 40-60% of the estimated total) in treatment. The AIDS services have also acquired skills in the prevention and treatment of hepatitis C among drug users. The AIDS Help was also able to support networks and self-help groups of sex workers and stand up for their rights. We have managed to promote close cooperation between the gay and lesbian community and drug users, even if “cultural disagreements” occur here from time to time, but politically the AIDS crisis also significantly promoted the recognition of gay lifestyles and identities in Germany , e.g. through the “outing” of former Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit (“I’m gay and that’s a good thing!”). The rights of people with a sexual identity that differs from that of mainstream society are now firmly anchored in Germany.
3. Did any transnational networks in which you were involved in the 1970s and early to mid-1980s affect your AIDS activism subsequently? E.g. networks of the gay liberation movement? Informal meetings in destinations, such as Mykonos, Amsterdam?
The self-organization of drug users has not only been anchored in Germany through the AIDS work, but throughout Europe and also globally with the establishment of networks such as the INPUD (International Network of people who use drugs) inpud.net or European Network of people who use drugs EuroNPUD. The networks of the gay communities provided support here. The German AIDS Help was able to use the state funds to set up and continuously promote such network meetings on a national and international level. The European Union could also be persuaded to support such networks and this was successful as well at international meetings of drug politicians at the UN and WHO level in Vienna and Geneva.
I was able to play a part in that and I’m proud of that!
4. Did you personally have contacts with AIDS activists elsewhere in Europe, North America and the rest of the world in the 1980s and 1990s? How important was for you the activity of AIDS activists in countries other than (West) Germany?
These meetings were important to learn from other countries and activist groups there and to implement their experiences on effective harm reduction measures (safer sex and safer use tools) in Germany, as well as to present our models (e.g. drug consumption rooms) internationally. We first looked at opioid substitution treatment in England, the Netherlands and Switzerland and for measures to prevent hepatitis in Australia.
5. If those contacts were significant, did they influence your perceptions of: (a) safer sex, (b) AIDS treatment, (c) the buddy system, (d) ways of commemorating people who dies of AIDS?
Dealing with dying processes was also a direct part of the experience of AIDS Help. In the first years of my work at the German AIDS Help, 8 of my close colleagues died of AIDS and we then introduced, among other things, so-called “death seminars” in order to better understand and “learn” how to deal with dying and how to deal with it humanely dealing with grief. The establishment of hospices for a dignified death was established in Germany through these experiences. There are now hundreds of such facilities. A whole area has been set up on a Berlin cemetery for people who died of AIDS, many well-known activists, politicians, artists or other celebrities. The AIDS stations in (Berlin) hospitals served as a model for a dignified and positive treatment of sick people and helped to break down rigid hierarchies (first doctors, then nurses, then other staff and finally patients) and to establish friendly treatment in the hospital, beyond of profitability issues. Unfortunately, this impetus was not enough in the long term…
6. How significant were the international AIDS conferences, which took place annually, for you? How close was the collaboration between various AIDS activists during those conferences, such as in helping set the agenda of the relevant international conference in Berlin?
The international AIDS conferences were an important vehicle to promote close cooperation between activists, representatives of science, the medical profession and politics, because at these conferences for the first time representatives of those affected were admitted, albeit initially against resistance. The funds had been made available by UNAIDS to cover the high participation and accommodation fees and travel costs were an important help. The German AIDS Help was also able to contribute to using its own resources sensibly and to supporting the active participation of people with HIV/AIDS. This is still anchored in the AIDS work and it is not just a question of medical expertise alone. The big conference 1993 in Berlin was able to be actively shaped by the German AIDS Help as a co-organizer and firmly anchored these principles (after we had learned about everything from the activists in the USA).
7. How significant was your collaboration with migrant activists dealing with AIDS?
I no longer experienced this problem, that more and more migrants were confronted with HIV/AIDS, when I was working for the German AIDS Help, but later in my activities as a government representative (as drug coordinator for the state of Bremen in northern Germany and as head of the working group for various drug commissioners of the Federal Government in the Ministry of Health) when more and more people from Central Asia came to Germany in the mid-1990s. These “Russian Germans” who lived mainly in Kazakhstan (where they were expelled from other parts of Russia under Stalin) were “brought back” by the Kohl government, although they hardly spoke German and were not integrated into society for a long time. Among them were many young people who had already consumed heroin in Kazakhstan, spoke almost only Russian, were unfamiliar with the German help system and it was difficult to organize help for them. There are now many Russian-speaking social workers who organize help, including for refugees from Afghanistan (with similar problems) and recently from the Ukraine. It is often the AIDS organizations that offer unbureaucratic help.
8. How significant was your collaboration with AIDS activists from the former German Democratic Republic?
Shortly after the “Wende” in Berlin, we came together with the former AIDS Hilfe DDR [German Democratic Republic] and built up the first connections and later also the merger into a unified association. This was initially marked by cultural ruptures, because in the GDR AIDS and drug problems were denied and tabooed for decades and gay life was only accepted in niches. The AIDS support functioned here as a catalyst for a development towards open discourse and towards the development of a common identity. To what extent this was perceived as “imposed” by the local activists certainly requires its own research work. In practice, there were only a few problems, since the AIDS support in the former GDR “adapted” seamlessly or was founded after the end of the GDR anyway.
9. What was the impact of the discovery and circulation in the late 1990s of more effective forms of AIDS treatment on your activism?
I no longer actively experienced this development in the AIDS aid work, but indirectly, because AIDS has lost its “dread”, because the willingness to have safer sex has probably decreased, because one is given medication and can also take care of unsafe sex with a “morning-after pill”…this development is reflected in the current discourse on the “chemsex” scene, where AIDS and drug aid organizations are cooperating again to better deal with this situation and to find answers as to how affected groups can be better reached through prevention and help.