It was 1984, two years after the first case was diagnosed in Australia and, for six months, he'd been pushing for an AIDS test. His Randwick GP, also a gay man, thought he was better off not knowing. "If you've got it, you're going to die," he said.

Edward had grown up in a regional area, at odds with his strict military dad at home and the target of merciless bullying at school. At 15, he left it all behind to find a new life in the city. Young, attractive and free, he hit the clubs and slept around. Nine years later and by then living in Wollongong, he knew there was a strong chance he'd been exposed to the HIV virus.

Read more: A lesson in humanity - remembering the Illawarra's response to the AIDS crisis

Yet the news, delivered by his doctor over the phone, sent a surge of fear through his body. Positive. A hopeful word in any other context, a death sentence in this one.

"Immediately I thought 'right, I'm going to be dead soon'," Edward said.

"We talked for a minute and I asked if I could make an appointment to see him the next day, and he said 'Why would you want to do that? There's nothing to talk about. You'll be dead in two years." He was only 23.

Edward went to work, stunned but going through the motions, all the while imagining how these everyday interactions with fellow workers and customers would change if they knew his secret. He told no-one for the next five years. When he did finally divulge the news to his parents in 1989, they were devastated - but more upset he had been living with it for so long without their support.

"I just didn't want anyone to know," Edward said. "In those early days, the discrimination, the fear, was hugely palpable everywhere, everyone was running scared.

"If you were in any restaurant and using the cutlery, crockery, glasses, and they found out, all the stuff you had been using would be put into the bin, that was the fear. If I cut myself, if I started to bleed, I felt like I had to lock myself away. It changed me in so many ways, it ruined my life."

Within 12 months of his diagnosis, Edward's friends in Sydney had started dying and he was preparing for his own demise. "All of a sudden it wasn't just me, it was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of us in Sydney," he said.

He was one of about 4500 Australians, mostly gay men living in Sydney and Melbourne, who tested positive for the virus between 1983 and 1985.

Grant Barnes - one of the few openly gay men in the then notoriously homophobic town of Wollongong - was performing as a drag queen at various venues in the Illawarra when AIDS became a threat.

"There were so many things happening in Wollongong at the time other than the virus," he said. "There were the gay bashings, the hate murders, the paedophilia, it was a tough time to go through. And then the stigma of being a gay man - 'Oh, you've got HIV' - was a standard sort of thing."

Mr Barnes did not contract the virus - he has no idea why he was spared - but it claimed the lives of 10 of his closest friends, despite his best efforts to stop the spread.

"Through our nightclubs and the drag performances, we would try to educate people about what was going on," he said.

"We were doing it over the microphone after the shows at Kennedy's at the top of Piccadilly - 'Please go and get tested. It is serious what's happening in the community'.

"A group of us went to see a doctor at Thirroul that we knew was gay and had our testing done there. It was all very hush-hush, if we had it we didn't want anyone to know.

"I was living with one of my friends and the doctor rang and I answered the phone and he said 'can I talk to such and such'. And I just knew straight away exactly what it was about, and my friend passed away about six or seven years after."

In 1986, a new Port Kembla sexual health clinic, with Dr Ross Price as its inaugural director, was established to help deal with the escalating crisis. Vivienne Cunningham Smith was employed as a counsellor, but was also tasked with community education and prevention. She had her work cut out for her. Homophobia, the linking of HIV exclusively to gay men and sensationalist headlines that reinforced fear and discrimination and caused paranoia were rife.

A local chapter of the Community Support Network (CSN), a volunteer organisation that provided home care for people with AIDS and their families, also sprang up. Trish Regal was a founding member of the Illawarra group, made up of all straight women.

"I remember watching a news report about people basically being thrown out on the street to die and everybody refusing to have anything to do with them ... the absolute venom that went towards them, you know, like they deserved it because of their lifestyle," Ms Regal said.

"I just remember thinking, 'That's awful, somebody's got to do something about it' and it just came to me 'well who's somebody? That's you.' So I rang the sexual health clinic at Port Kembla the next day and spoke to Vivienne and she said there were people who actually volunteered to work with people with AIDS and she helped us to organise CSN training in the Illawarra."

When Trish became Edward's carer in 1990, he was relatively healthy but severely depressed and living in a Department of Housing property in Gwynneville. She quickly became his confidante - listening to him as he talked about his grief around the loss of his friends, who were dying from both AIDS and suicide.

"In the gay scene we called it self-delivery," Edward said. "We decided to change the name because we wanted to have control of it, and a lot of us were doing it, we were taking our own lives out of sheer desperation."

Trish provided an empathetic, non-judgemental listening ear.

"Not only Edward, but a few others told us that being able to talk about 'self delivery', without judgement or intervention - not being told things like 'don't talk like that' or 'you don't really mean that' or similar - by being listened to, even discussing what/how they planned to do so, meant they didn't," Mrs Regal said.

"Feeling that they at least had control over when or how they would die often gave them a sense of control back and a determination to enjoy their lives as much as was possible at that time. We basically listened to how they felt and explored why."

Ultimately, Edward decided he needed to get away from all the talk of self-delivery if he was to survive. "I had to make a conscious decision to start staying away from it because it was affecting my mental health and I thought if I don't start pulling myself away from it, I'll get so caught up in it I was scared I would do it myself.

"From 1990 until 1995, I was preparing myself to die. I just thought I'll be dead soon. In that first 10 to 15 years, I was told five times 'you've only got two years to live', so that was doing my head in."

But Edward didn't have to die. Around 1995, it occurred to him that the doctors had been wrong before, and he might have a future after all. "I needed to change my whole thinking. I thought, 'If I'm still alive now, I could be alive for however long'."

He lodged an application with the Department of Housing for a transfer up to Sydney and applied to start an accounting course.

When he left Wollongong on Australia Day 1996 aged 34, he had attended 35 funerals. Needing a fresh start, he was offered a new unit in Pyrmont, scored a job for a national firm in Martin Place and eventually applied for a home loan to buy his own place.

His first and only real health scare was in 2002, 19 years after he'd been diagnosed, when a bout of food poisoning triggered a "massive domino effect" that almost killed him. For the next six months he was in and out of St Vincent's Hospital nine times, his tiny frame wasting away to just 49kg. At one point, the HIV specialist came to his bedside and told him they believed he only had 48 hours to live.

"I was very sick and in a great deal of pain," Edward said. "He sat there talking to me for maybe half an hour and I remember when he was walking out of my room, to this day I don't know if I said it out loud or if I just said it in my head, but I just told him to 'get f**ked, I'm not ready to die'.

It was a long hard struggle but he made his way back to good health. "My doctor keeps telling me I come from great breeding stock," Edward said.

"My mum and dad were in their 90s when they passed. And when I moved to Melbourne to find my own life when I was 15, I remember telling friends that I wanted to be around to help my parents when they got old, and that was always in the back of my mind and helped carry me through. Thankfully I was able to.

"There were times when I thought, 'yep, I'm going to be dead soon, I may as well live to the fullest, let it all happen and enjoy the ride. Then there were days when I thought, 'hang on, if I want to stay alive I've really got to fight'.

"One thing about me that I know is that I'm bloody-minded and, you know, I've been fighting all my life. Growing up in the family I was brought up in was difficult, high school was difficult, society was difficult, and then in the '80s it was even worse because I was HIV positive.

"Unfortunately I was never destined to have an easy and happy life. But I really didn't want to go. You know, it was at the back of my head all the time 'I just want to keep living'. And I'm still here today, I just turned 60."

*Not his real name

If you, or someone you know, is thinking about suicide or experiencing a personal crisis or distress, please seek help immediately by calling 000 or one of these services: Lifeline 13 11 14, Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467 or NSW Mental Health Line 1800 011 511.

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