Holding Our History, Our Values and Our Future Together

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On December 1, 1988, the World Health Organisation held the first World AIDS Day, but that’s not where the story starts.

 

The first cases of what we now know as AIDS were being reported in late 1982 and early 1983 in Australia, growing concern prompted the Queensland state cabinet to discuss what should be done to raise awareness in Queensland.

 

"This matter is of great importance to groups within the community including male homosexuals and those persons requiring frequent treatment by transfusion and the administration of blood products,"  then- Health Minister Brian Austin’s June 20 1983 cabinet submission read.

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Through a simple amendment to the Health Act, AIDS became a notifiable disease. This meant doctors were required to advise of any cases that were identified, allowing medical experts to keep a close watch on the disease. However, at that stage there were still no known cases of AIDS in Queensland, and the Bjelke Petersen government decided not to take further action.

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"If more stringent measures are subsequently required in relation to this disease, they can be granted by adding the syndrome in the Communicable Diseases section of the Act," the submission read.

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Further action was taken, but it wasn’t the government that acted first. It was people living with HIV, affected communities, clinicians and allies who mobilised together to support and protect each other, amid their time of unfathomable pain and grief.

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Then the shadow of fear and stigma already cast onto the community became darker. In 1984, several babies were transfused with blood containing HIV in Queensland.  Even though the accused had donated not knowing they were living with HIV, a media fuelled hate campaign ensued. The then shadow came to life on everyone’s TV, in the form of Commonwealth Governments 1987’s “Grim Reaper”. These three weeks made the lives of those trying to live with HIV while their loved ones were dying around them even more torturous.

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By 1988, experimental drugs were starting to arrive, bringing a mix of hope and despair. Horrible side effects. Some survived, many didn’t. The first World AIDS Day that year became a space to grieve, to remember, to speak out, and to look to the future.

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World AIDS Day still offers that same space. Every year we come together to grieve for those we’ve lost, to remember those who came before us, to speak out on inequalities and injustice impact people living with HIV and affected communities, and to look to the future.

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Thirty-seven years after the first World AIDS Day, things have changed. People can live long and positive lives with HIV, with the science of Undetectable = Untransmissible (U=U) empowering those living with HIV and protecting the community. 

 

Queensland’s community organisations, together with people living with HIV, clinicians and researchers, have joined government in a long-lasting and powerful partnership, that is the bedrock of our world leading HIV response. A response that is now connected to community, led by evidence, with people at the centre.

 

We’ve come a long way, but there is work to be done. There are still people living with HIV who don’t know yet, there are communities of people who don’t have the opportunities to access treatment, testing, and care they deserve, and there are some people who are at real risk of being left behind.

 

World AIDS Day, together with the organisations that work in communities affected by HIV have a shared mission.
To continue the important work that needs to be done so that no one is left behind.

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Read about how Queensland's organisations and communities share their histories and mission below.

 

Queensland Council for LGBTI Health (QC)

 

World AIDS Day has always been a day for us to tell the truth about who we are and what we stand for. Before we were the Queensland Council for LGBTI Health, we were the Queensland AIDS Council – and before that, we were simply people in Queensland who refused to let our lovers, friends and communities be written off as collateral damage in a health crisis.

 

When HIV first appeared here, it landed in a state already marked by heavy-handed policing and deep stigma towards queer communities. Gay men were bashed and arrested, drag queens harassed, people living with HIV spoken about in whispers. Some were turned away from services, others died without the comfort of family because fear and shame were louder than love.

 

In the middle of that, community stepped in. People living with HIV, their partners and friends, lesbians organising rosters, trans folk, Sistergirls and Brotherboys, doctors and nurses who were willing to risk their reputations – together they built something that hadn’t existed here before. Volunteers sat by hospital beds when others would not. Care teams formed around kitchen tables and in small community centres. People drove each other to appointments, cooked meals, changed dressings, held hands through bad news and good. Activists marched, agitated and negotiated for better treatment, better information and better laws.

 

Those early years were full of grief. We lost people long before their time. We watched partners become carers overnight. We carried funerals in our bones. But alongside the grief was something else: a fierce insistence that our lives mattered, and that we would define our own response. That insistence became the DNA of the Queensland AIDS Council. It is still the heartbeat of our work now.

 

Today, the landscape looks very different. We have effective treatment, we know that undetectable means untransmittable, and many people living with HIV in Queensland are building long, full lives – working, loving, parenting, grandparenting, ageing. But the legacy of those early days still shapes us. Our mission – to support people living with HIV and to strengthen the health and wellbeing of LGBTIQ+  communities across Queensland – grows directly out of that history of community care and collective defiance.

 

When we say our vision is for longer, happier lives with no one left behind, we are thinking of all those stories. We are thinking of the man in regional Queensland who picks up his medication every month from a pharmacist who knows his name. We are thinking of the woman living with HIV who finally finds a GP who treats her as a whole person, not a risk factor. We are thinking of the young trans person who, decades after the height of the AIDS crisis, should still benefit from the principle that care must be evidence-based, affirming and grounded in human rights. We are thinking of mob who have carried their own stories of HIV and grief, and who continue to lead deadly responses in their communities.

 

The values forged in the AIDS crisis – community at the centre, solidarity across our differences, equity and justice in the systems around us, and a kind of everyday courage that just keeps showing up – still guide us. They show up when a peer worker sits with someone newly diagnosed and says, “You’re not alone. There is a future.” They show up when our staff and volunteers travel across the state to connect people with care and community. They show up when we sit across from decision-makers and remind them that numbers on a page are human beings with histories, families and futures.

 

On World AIDS Day, we remember the people whose names we know and the people whose names were never spoken out loud. We honour the stories that built this organisation – the hospital visits, the late-night phone calls, the marches, the arguments, the jokes that kept us going when nothing was funny. And we recommit ourselves to the work ahead: holding that history, standing alongside people living with HIV now, and fighting for a Queensland where all of our communities can live well, with dignity, joy and love.

 

The HIV and AIDS crisis in Queensland made us who we are. Those stories are still our heartbeat.

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Queensland Positive People

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Coming soon. Read their history.

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QuIVAA and QuIHN

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QuIVAA was originally known as the Queensland Intravenous AIDS Association and is now known simply as QuIVAA. QuIVAA was one of several not-for-profit, community-owned organisations established by people who inject drugs, gay-men, and sex-workers throughout Australia, in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

 

QuIVAA was formed in 1988 and spent 16 years providing harm reduction services to stop the spread of HIV and viral hepatitis amongst people who inject drugs and their sexual partners.

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QuIHN’s journey also began here. The community members that came together to form QuIVAA Inc. laid the foundation for QuIHN Ltd. In 2005 QuIHN was created to expand services on a statewide basis and was an amalgamation of the three drug user community organisations (QuIVAA, SCIVAA, and DUNES). QuIVAA is our founding member and remains an active part of our organisation and our key partner in representing the interests of people who use drugs in Queensland.

 

As the needs of our communities evolved, so have our services. But we remain deeply connected to our roots and history and in our commitment to harm reduction, evidence-based services, and partnerships with community.

 

2Spirits Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporation for Queensland LGBTIQ+ Sistergirl and Brotherboy Health and Wellbeing

 

In 1994, on Country in Hamilton Downs, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTIQ+ Sistergirl and Brotherboy people gathered and spoke openly about the growing impact of HIV in our communities. These were not policy discussions — they were truth-tellings rooted in grief, love, and responsibility. People shared stories of losing family, of shame silencing conversations, and of health systems that did not see or understand us. From that gathering came a powerful commitment: our mob would not face HIV alone. The foundations of a movement were laid — one grounded in culture, community, and social justice, and led by those most affected.

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By 1996, those foundations took shape in Queensland through the establishment of the Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander HIV/AIDS Project (QATSIHAP) under the Queensland AIDS Council. QATSIHAP represented a turning point — the first time a program existed in Queensland that recognised the unique needs, strengths, and voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTIQ+ Sistergirl and Brotherboy mob. It wasn’t just a health initiative; it was a space where culture, identity and sexuality were affirmed rather than hidden. As the work matured and understanding deepened, the name 2Spirits was embraced in 2009 — not as a cosmetic change, but as an act of cultural reclamation, honouring our long-held, multi-spirited identities and the knowledge our ancestors carried.

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Today, 2Spirits continues this legacy by working relationally — with community, with Elders, with peer networks, and with community partner organisations across Queensland. These partnerships are not incidental; they are essential. They allow us to create culturally secure pathways, dismantle stigma, and ensure mob can access HIV and sexual-health care without judgement or erasure. Our work is strengthened by collective responsibility — because no single service can carry the weight of HIV prevention, healing, and justice alone. As we mark World AIDS Day, we honour every relationship, every act of advocacy, and every step taken by our communities since 1994. Our story is not defined by a virus — it is defined by how we have cared for each other, stood firm in our identities, and insisted on a future where our people are safe, visible, and thriving.

 

Respect Inc

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Respect Inc is Queensland’s sex worker organisation. Formed in 2009 with governance, staff, volunteers and a membership of current or former sex workers. Our focus is on the health, safety and rights of sex workers in Queensland and builds on the sex worker communities’ work on HIV and sexually transmissible infection prevention, access to testing, treatment and care over many decades.

 

Sex worker groups USNQ (United Sex Workers North Queensland) and Crimson Coalition (based in South East Queensland) worked together with the broader sex worker community to form our organisation following the voluntary closure of SQWISI (Self-health for Queensland Workers In the Sex Industry) in 2007.

 

Health promotion has always been at the core of the work of our organisation, our predecessors and the broader sex worker community. Ensuring sex workers have access to safer sex supplies; the skills, knowledge and information to implement safer sex into work practices; access to free and anonymous testing and care; protection from stigma, discrimination, harmful laws and over policing.

 

The context around our work is that sex workers have been stigmatised as ‘vectors of disease’ for as long as we have existed–our history in Queensland is one of criminalisation, police corruption and incarceration in lock-hospitals and prisons. British-style control of contagious disease approaches reinforced the belief that sex workers are immoral and a risk to the community. This particularly harmful, false stereotype became alarmingly prevalent when the HIV pandemic began. We carry collective grief and unspeakable sadness as so many members of our community, our partners, friends and family have been lost to AIDS.

 

Despite living with entrenched stigma, discrimination, vilification and criminalisation–the sex worker community response to HIV was immediate and tangible with effective health promotion strategies, which are still in place today. Sex workers organised together distributing condoms to other sex workers on outreach, sharing information and skills through peer education, supporting each other and building community through events and advocating for evidence and rights-based policy, all while and in spite of the criminalisation, targeted policing and entrapment occurring at the time. Despite the extreme risk, the leadership of our organisation and movement has included sex workers living with HIV, LGBTIQ sex workers, sex workers who use drugs, Asian and migrant sex workers and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sex workers.

 

Harmful criminalisation, heavy policing and mandatory testing also impacted on sex workers' access to health services and testing. Discrimination experienced by sex workers accessing healthcare was also significant, reinforced by a requirement to report sex workers with HIV and criminal laws related to condom use, testing and working with HIV. Sex workers living with HIV have been vilified and incarcerated, their legal names and addresses published in media outlets despite no known transmission to clients or partners. The evidence gathered since the beginning of the HIV epidemic has clearly shown that criminalisation of sex work, condom use and mandatory testing of sex workers reduces public health outcomes, increases stigma and discrimination.

 

Sex workers have been central in the response to HIV in Queensland and remain committed to leadership in this movement. Four decades on we can see the results–Queensland sex workers now consistently maintain high rates of prophylactic use and low incidence of HIV. Sex work was finally decriminalised in 2024, providing a supportive legislative environment for sex workers and our work as an organisation to maintain these outcomes. The work now is on sustaining this success as we navigate the new potentials and risks of new technology, ensuring health promotion messages and the benefits of decriminalisation reach all sex workers. We continue to work and partner with other organisations in this sector and with  governments to address the remaining legal and policy barriers, erosion of access to testing for sex workers and the enduring stigma and discrimination. 

 

No Queensland sex worker should be left behind or left out of the response to HIV. Peer education, free and anonymous sexual health testing, care and treatment, access to safer sex supplies and removal of stigma are key factors that must be prioritised in HIV prevention for sex workers moving forward.