An Interview with It’s a Sin’s Nathaniel Hall

By Juliette Moisan & Alex Charilaou 7 October 2021

Image courtesy of Nathaniel J. Hall/Andrew.

InQuire sits down with It’s a Sin star Nathaniel Hall about dealing with social stigma, HIV activism and his upcoming tour – First Time – which is coming to Canterbury this weekend.

Alex: If we start with First Time, what was your process around creating that?

Nathaniel: First Time is an autobiographical solo show, it's all about my life story. I was diagnosed with HIV when I was 16 after my first time, that's why it's the title.

If we go back to 2017, which is just under 15 years after I was diagnosed, I had a mental breakdown essentially. I caught myself in the mirror, still awake two days after a house party, and I had this real kind of look of horror at my own life. This wasn't where I wanted to see my life going at all. I was in a very toxic relationship; I certainly wasn't dependent on drugs and alcohol, but I was leaning on those a lot to cope and get through the week.

I realised it was this thing, this trauma, this sadness that was kind of around the diagnosis because I had not told my family, I had not told the people closest to me. I realised that something needed to change and now a couple years later, I tell the stories of mostly other people and I work with other people to help them tell their stories and I'm always telling them to be brave and bold, and, you know, be authentic.

Sometimes it's like, come on Nathaniel, you're going to need to take a bit of your own medicine here. So, I said to my friend and colleague, Chris Hoyle, who I now run Dibby Theatre with, I want to tell this story and, he was like, I want to help you do it.

In a way, making this show forced my hand. And that's in the show itself, the kind of the theatrics of it – the spotlight – forcing me to say it out loud, to actually go public, forced me to tell my family and come out. Coming out publicly in 2018 was a very surreal moment, and it pushed me to places I didn't expect.

Alex: Was there backlash when you came out?

Nathaniel: Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is one of the things that I always talk to people about, the power and the stigma around HIV. My family was very supportive. I've got a very loving family, you know, I came out at 16 as gay and they've always been part of my life, my partner's life, those sorts of things.

But I would say that there is shame around it, so much shame, for me particularly, around internalised homophobia, around coming out at that time and then being with this thing that, you know, people used to be like "Oh, that's what gays get, that's what you kind of deserve" or whatever.

So yeah, I think it's really that stigma that stopped me, and that's not uncommon, most people I know with HIV go quite a while before they tell anyone about it and some people don't tell anyone at all. So, it was really important for me to show people, with the show, that you can come out, that when you say it out loud, it’s not as scary as you think.

Alex: The perception in recent years has shifted around HIV. How does it feel to be an active participant in shifting people's perceptions?

Nathaniel: I think it’s a very exciting time as somebody who's been living with HIV for 18 years. I stand at the end of a long line of amazing activists and people who've laid the groundwork for this, and people have been talking about this for a long time, but I don't think the mainstream has really listened.

Often, with fights for equality and acceptance, it's the marginalised who are doing it. Particularly in the UK, it's been the gay community, the drug-using community, the people on the fringes basically who have pushed for acceptance and for change. If you read the history of HIV, it's amazing activist groups like Act Up in America who work with drugs companies and who forced drug companies and the government to work faster to find medication.

I think that what's happening, particularly in the last year, is that HIV has been brought into the national conversation and that has taught a whole new generation of people, younger than me, who weren't there when it happened. You know, I lived through it, I was right here when it happened. I've spoken with people in their late teens or early twenties who were like 'Oh my god, this happened, we treated people this way in living memory', you know, with disdain when they were dying or when they were sick.

I think, for an older generation, it reminded them that they were silent when they shouldn't have been and should have been speaking up.

Generally, though, there is a fantastic wave of acceptance on a whole range of things, particularly for LGBTQ people. We know there's still a way to go but the world is so different from when I was in school. I left school in 2003, and Section 28, the legislation that stopped school from talking about homosexuality, was still in place.

There was this culture of silence, of shame, of not being able being to talk about homosexuality or even just sexuality in school. The world is a very different place now, which is very exciting, but there's still loads to be done.

For example, my producer just sent me an article, I was reading it before I came on, an article from KentOnline that says, 'Man with HIV bit girl on Canterbury High Street' and it describes this man as a thug with HIV who sank his teeth in the girl's cheek and drew blood in a nightmarish attack on Canterbury High Street. HIV can't be transmitted from saliva so there's literally no risks.

In the last year, HIV has been brought into the national conversation and has taught a whole new generation of people, younger than me, who weren't there when it happened.

Alex: To give you an idea about how bad the culture is in Kent, Section 28 was only repealed in this county when I was in school, in 2010 - we're so far behind.

Nathaniel: Oh yeah absolutely, I don't use that as a benchmark of people's attitude but lots of people will use that, that misinformation around HIV, the idea that people are dangerous. What that man did was awful, but HIV is not relevant to the story.

There's been no known transmission of HIV through saliva or through those kinds of incidents, so that's one of the reasons why it's so important. It's really important for us as well, it'd be easy for an LGBTQ company to just take the show to big cities, stick to where there's an LGBTQ population, where they tend to live and work, but actually it’s really important to take it as far and wide as possible and remind people.

And the show itself, you know, it educates but it is a show, it is a piece of entertainment, it’s a really funny, touching, moving piece, that pulls out all the stops. And many people come out like, 'Oh I didn't realise I would be so entertained by it'. People think, 'Oh HIV, this is going to be heavy', but it's not all the way through.

Juliette: How did living in secrecy about HIV for 15 years impact your life and the view you had of the disease?

Nathaniel: The show really is about shame: you could take the HIV out of it and it would still reflect how we all carry shame in our lives in different ways. I hadn't realised that until 2017 when I went onto this journey to make the show and realised I needed to put myself through quite a lot of therapy as well.

Shame had seeped into other parts of my life and was impacting my life, so I was allowing that shame to impact my self-worth. When you have low self-esteem, you allow people to treat you in ways you probably shouldn't, which I was doing.

You also treat people badly as well because you're projecting how you feel about yourself onto the people around you. So, I really fell into a pattern of behaviours that were self-destructive.

Looking back and analysing, I'm like, 'Actually yeah, I can understand now' and look with compassion. I talk a lot about HIV being stigmatised and the shame around because, you know, there is. The advance in HIV medication is amazing and it has very few side effects but it's the shame and the impact of that psychologically, and that is what the show really delves into, the mental health impact of HIV.

Alex: I was going to ask more now about the artistic side of First Time, how is it laid out? How does it reflect your experience?

Nathaniel: Oh, it's a real rollercoaster. Basically, you meet me in 2017, and as people are coming in, I'm not ready, I've got white powder on my face, I've not been to bed, and I'm telling that they can't come in. It's kind of funny but it's also tinged with a hint of sadness because you can see that I'm really not in a good place, or in a good place to be able to deliver a show.

And then, it's the spotlight that forces me to make a start, and we go back in time, and we tell all the story from when I was 16. That first part of the show is all about first love, finding yourself, finding your sexuality. It's full of noise, bangers, very theatrical, there are confetti cannons, quizzes, audience interaction, and then towards the end we see more of the psychological impact, how it has affected my life…

Alex: Self-indulgently, I wanted to ask how it was working with LGBTQ icons like Russell T. Davies?

Nathaniel: Honestly, I knew Russell was writing something about HIV quite a while ago, back when I was writing my show in 2017, and I said to my agent, 'Oh we need him to come see my show'.

But he couldn't, so a friend of his came to see my show on the opening night and told him that he should come and see my show. So, he came to see it and I sent him a message on Instagram, which was so unprofessional, but I just told him like, 'Hi, I've just done this thing about HIV, do you want to meet up?'

And he said yes, much to my surprise! And I sat in this coffee shop in Manchester, talking to one of my absolute icons, and he was very gracious and gave me a lot of his time, he wanted to hear about my story. He was writing the story of Colin Morris-Jones, who gets it from his first time, which I didn't know at the time. He's an incredible, generous, lovely man and he's been incredibly supportive.

It was my first TV gig, and it was as well for a lot of the other cast members. He was so supportive, popping in on set, sending text messages, kind of offering advice… It's been amazing actually, really wonderful.

Juliette: You've been very vocal with your activism; how does it play a part in your life?

Nathaniel: I think I'm part of a long line of people who've been shouting this from the rooftops for a very long time, amazing charities like the Terrence Higgins Trust and the George House Trust and there's load of other amazing activists, saying this stuff.

I think I've been very fortunate to come at a turning point which I think that it comes from the change in the science, U equals U, undetectable equals un-transmittable, and also people on effective medication like myself can't pass the virus on, so we can have unprotected sex with my partner and be confident that it works. That's only been around for the last few years, a lot of people don't know about that, but I think it’s important given the HIV-positive community the confidence to be like, 'We know we're not a danger'.

We knew we never were, because most of the transmissions come from people who don't know about HIV, that's when HIV is mostly transmitted, not from people like me who know because we're obviously taking precautions to protect partners.

But now we've got this kind of piece of science, so if people don't know, if there's pushback, it can be like, 'Hm, got the receipt, it's right there', do you know what I mean? And also we've got PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) which, if you're not using condoms or at risk of contracting HIV, you can take pre-emptively. So, we're kind of coming in on all sides in the UK and globally, there are targets for no transmission by 2030.

The UK government has committed to that as well, so we're sort of nine years away to potentially no more new transmission of HIV. So it feels like after 40 years of fighting, since HIV appeared in 1981, we're getting to a point where things are really changing.

Alex: What kind of LGBTQ artists and texts were formative for you?

Nathaniel: Ooh, that's a really good question. In the show itself, Will Young plays quite a large part, and when you see it you'll find out why.

If I think back, one of the things I often talk about is growing up in Stockport and, for me, although it was not far from Manchester which did have a LGBTQ scene at that time, in the 90s, there wasn't anyone, it wasn't a thing, when if I experienced all the gay people it felt like Steven Gately when he passed away and there was all this very nasty homophobia around what happened, and these nasty articles about people. It was the press.

We know that there were pop stars at that time who were gay but were not out, and it was like on the cusp of that change. I think there probably wasn't, and I guess more recently there has been. I'm only now discovering what I probably wanted when I was younger because it wasn't around in the same way.

In terms of theatre, a big play that I absolutely adore is Angels in America by Tony Kushner. It’s about the AIDS epidemic in New York which was really a source of inspiration for me, and was part of the reason I wanted to make the show. I didn't see what I wanted to see, people like me on the stage so I went ahead and made it.

You also had like, Queen, with Freddie who obviously died of AIDS, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. That song, Relax, at a time when, you know, the gay community was being hugely vilified with everything around HIV, and for that song to be so overtly explicit, he says it in the lyrics, like, 'Relax, don't do it, when you want to come', and for the BBC to ban that, feels like the 80s were kind of an edgier time than the 90s, more progressive, especially in terms of music.

Gay people hate themselves, you had pop groups with people who were obviously gay but whose management told them not to be overtly gay. When I think about the art that inspires me, often I go back to the music of the 80s and I prefer listening to it because it feels like it connects more with me.

Alex: So, In Equal Parts is the name of your outreach project, which is kind of ongoing alongside First Time - could you talk us through that?

Nathaniel: So, there was always a large part of outreach and activism alongside the show when we started doing it, which was interrupted by the pandemic.

We thought what could continue the impact of the show, because we had such a great impact in Edinburgh and on tour, we applied for some money and joined partnership with the Georges House Trust, a HIV Charity in Manchester, which means quite a lot to me, to do 'In Equal Parts'.

In Equal Parts has got lots of different strands, but mostly it's about inspiring people, de-stigmatising, educating people around the virus, to tell our own stories.

The main strand is we work with different people to tell our stories on film and my approach as an artist is not to kind of do that for people but to support people to do that themselves, so there are people who are not artists, by their own admission, not writers, not performers and they've created these beautiful films called 'HIV and Me'.

They've created them themselves, wrote the scripts, sat in front of the camera and learnt that skill of performing in front of a camera. Through that, what we're doing is diversifying the stories we hear about HIV. Because my story, a white gay man, I sometimes go like, 'Yawn', we've heard it, everyone knows that story in terms of HIV but in the UK, gay men make up only about 50% of HIV cases and a lot of people don't realise that.

And there is lot of other challenges with the other communities, in the Black British and Black African communities, there's a lot of stigma and shame that needs unpicking, so through HIV and Me we support an amazing Black British woman called Yvonne to tell her story and Paul, a good friend of mine, who's been an HIV activist since 1991, right from the start, in Manchester and was part of the group of people who formed the Georges House Trust and a guy called Mark who's an ex-injecting drug user, who used to be homeless and who's got tattoos all over.

When he talks about HIV people look at him like, 'You don't look like the type of people who we expect to have HIV' so it's kind of confounding these preconceptions that people have about how people with HIV are like.

Alex: What have you got planned for the future?

Nathaniel: We're on tour till the end of February so for the foreseeable future my life is still First Time, and in theatre we've got another show we're making called Hallway of Dreams, which will premiere next summer.

And I am about to embark on a new project called Toxic, looking at the impact of internalised homophobia and toxic masculinity on gay male relationships so that's gonna be a new touring show, not solo this time, and only semi-autobiographical, I think I'm done with complete autobiographical honesty onstage, and yeah, who knows what will happen with First Time really.

The script is published so people can buy it as a text but maybe a book, maybe a film, I don't know – I’m open!

First Time is at the Gulbenkian Arts Centre on Saturday 9 and Sunday 10 October 2021.