Dressed from head to toe in his dark blue naval uniform, Lieutenant Commander Oliver Brown doesn’t look anything like an archetypal HIV activist. We’re meeting by the commander’s offices at HM Naval Base, Portsmouth. Late last year, Brown’s campaigning efforts led to the announcement of a major sea-change in British military policy. It’s thanks to him that outdated rules which see HIV+ people discriminated against within the military are imminently due to be scrapped.
With two vast aircraft carriers visible through a window, it feels a long way from the protests, direct actions and LGBTQ+ activism which have for a long time been the frontline of the fight to improve the lives of – and tackle stigma against – people living with the diagnosis. It’s not hard to imagine some of those campaigners being surprised to find a naval warfare officer among their ranks.
“I’ve never seen myself as an activist,” Brown says, “because of where I am, who I am and what I do. But being in uniform lets me speak to a section of society who likely haven’t read anything about HIV since the 1980s. That’s a vital conversation to be had.”
Aged 19, Brown joined the military straight out of college. Growing up on Hayling Island, Hampshire, he spent his childhood in the shadow of the navy’s Portsmouth HQ. He’d been a cadet through adolescence so signing up seemed the obvious next step. For a year, he undertook his basic officer training at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth. Upon completion, he joined a mine-hunting ship. “These ships are seen as the jewel in the navy’s crown,” he explains, clearly proud. “‘I started out here in Portsmouth, then in Scotland, before flying out to Bahrain.” Soon, he’d qualified, allowing him to drive a naval ship from the bridge. A couple of deployments later, he was commanding his own patrol boat based across the UK. Next came the opportunity to work among naval high command.
“I became the Flag Lieutenant to the Second Sea Lord,” Brown says. “That’s like being an executive assistant to the deputy CEO and HR director of the navy.” At first, Brown was based at Navy Command in Portsmouth. When his boss got tapped on the shoulder for a promotion in London, Brown relocated, too. “That’s where the story completely changes for me.”
On an afternoon in October 2019, Brown set off from his Battersea pad for a short cycle through London, to collect some documents from his boss’s South Kensington home. “Just around the corner from my place, a plastic bottle got stuck in the spoke of my bicycle’s tyre and jammed my front wheel,” Brown says. “I lost control, ended up smashing into a brick wall and then – still attached to the bike – slid the other way across the pavement.” Thankfully, Brown says, the bike came off far worse than he did.
“One of my fingers had been shredded,” he recalls, “so I headed to Chelsea and Westminster hospital assuming I’d be out within a couple of hours.” But his doctors became concerned there was something more serious at play. “At first,” he says, “they thought it might be internal bleeding.” There were X-rays, blood tests and CT scans. Alarmingly, tests showed his lymph nodes were enlarged.
“The doctors,” Brown says, “were concerned they’d identified the early stages of cancer. I was only 29.” Military training kicked in. He tried to stay calm and collected. Two days later – Halloween – Brown was back in a hospital consulting room. “That was the first time I heard someone say HIV.”
Unbeknown to Brown, this hospital was part of an opt-out HIV testing scheme. “If it wasn’t for that,” he says, “which was either chance, coincidence or fate, I still may not know today. I went from a bike accident to concerns of cancer to then having the news broken that I was HIV+ all in just a couple of days.”
Focusing on thinking rationally in difficult circumstances had been drilled into Brown for his entire career. “I went through school while Section 28 was still in place,” he explains. “HIV was never talked about.” He racked his brain for context – at that stage, his only reference point was the musical Rent, set in late-1980s New York. He set about trying to answer three questions: “What’s my life going to be like? When will I die? And, do I still have a job?”
Almost immediately, answers for the first two were forthcoming. Modern treatment has ensured that, when started in time, living with HIV need have no detrimental effect on quality of life, let alone life expectancy. Within weeks, Brown would have an undetectable viral load in his body meaning he couldn’t pass it on. No medical professional, however, knew what the news might mean for the career Brown valued so much.
To this day, he doesn’t remember the journey he made after his diagnosis to meet a friend and colleague outside the Ministry of Defence. Within a few days, he’d informed his family, close friends and immediate colleagues. “My direct line manager couldn’t have been more supportive,” Brown says, “but it took a few days to actually get an answer to the question: what would my career look like?” Back in Portsmouth, naval medics finally confirmed what he feared: he’d be medically downgraded, making him “medically limited deployable”. In his office job, that had little practical consequence. Had he still been based on a ship, however, he’d have been removed – temporarily at least – deemed unfit to undertake his duties.
“Over time,” Brown says, “this label made me feel debilitated. Being called ‘limited deployable’ made me feel like I wasn’t able to do my job when I knew that wasn’t the case.” At first he kept his head down, desperate to ignore it. A year later, medics cleared him to return to work on a navy ship. “But every time I walked into my cabin,” Brown remembers, “I would sit on the chair, staring at the wall, crying my eyes out in hysterical distress. When I had a task that needed completing, I’d shut down all emotion and walk out the door.” He put on a brave face in public, but privately the pressure was just too much.
Brown also found that the military wasn’t free of broader societal stigma and prejudice. “Our humour is unique at the best of times,” he explains, “much like other high-pressure jobs, it is a coping mechanism.” But now, these jokes hit Brown differently. “It wasn’t unusual,” he says, “for someone with any nature of illness to be told: ‘It could be Aids.’” Navigating when and how to disclose his diagnosis to an ever-changing roster of colleagues became a deep source of anxiety and shame.
“I developed this paranoia,” Brown says, “second guessing every situation. I was broken.” He was downgraded again with depression and anxiety, and signed off work temporarily. With support, he worked hard to build himself back up again. Brown went to counselling with the Terrence Higgins Trust; it was revelatory. “At this point I could regurgitate thousands of statistics about HIV, but it was a defence mechanism. I’d never considered how it made me feel.” Only two years into his diagnosis, there was close to three decades of stigma still to unpack. “I found myself thinking the thoughts most people used to jump to: you’re dirty, promiscuous, reckless and negligent. Those labels are routinely slapped on to people with HIV.”
Emboldened, he looked to the military’s policies on HIV, determined to understand better the situation for people living with HIV across each of the armed forces. What he discovered was deeply uncomfortable. “The way each talked about HIV was out of touch with the modern day,” he says.
Most striking was the military’s blanket ban on HIV+ people joining the armed forces. With what Brown now knew about the virus, this made no sense. “If you went on to the NHS website,” he explains, “it set out the restrictions on people living with HIV in the UK. It meant problems travelling to certain countries, and other things totally beyond the control of the British government. The only barrier to life domestically was joining the armed forces.” A similar prohibition was in place for people taking pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), preventive medication which reduces the risk of getting HIV from sex by about 99%.
For those already serving upon diagnosis, it was a slightly more complex picture. But diving deeper into the army, navy and air force’s respective policies did little to placate Brown’s concern. The RAF’s document referenced the prospect of “cognitive degradation” of those living with HIV; pilots could be barred from flying for 12 months.
The navy, meanwhile, seemed concerned with the prospect of flying body shrapnel, alongside a similar 12-month period away from the frontline. “It dawned on me that within the navy, if I was blown up by an incendiary device, their principal concern was how a small part of my body might transmit HIV to those around me as if I was a virus-laden bullet. But this was almost laughable; certainly not a potential method of transmission.”
Brown, and others like him, were deemed to be a risk to their colleagues and operations. In reality, they presented no danger. With the support of HIV organisations, he set about challenging this. His time spent in Whitehall meant he knew the doors to knock on and being so well informed about HIV ensured he knew precisely what to say. “It was a relentless battle,” Brown says, “there wasn’t a lot of knowledge base to build from. I just continued to ask why.”
There were meetings with the Government Equalities Office, the Department for Health, and the Number 10 policy team. Brown lobbied MPs from the All Party Parliamentary Group, defence ministers and military top brass. Almost every conversation unfolded in a similar fashion: once Brown had set out his case, and the science which backed it, there was universal agreement that something needed to urgently change.
On 1 December 2021, the Ministry of Defence put out a press release: “Armed Forces make major changes to end HIV being a barrier to service.” In it was a commitment to ensuring being HIV+ would no longer exclude anyone from the option to join the military. Candidates taking PrEP could now be welcomed; serving personnel with HIV could be recognised as fully fit. Brown was in a taxi when the news came. “When I got that call telling me it was official and that the prime minister would tweet the announcement,” he says, “it was the first time I was truly at peace with the fact I was someone living with HIV. I never thought it would happen, let alone so quickly.”
Today, Brown has a tattoo of a red ribbon on his big toe. “When I was feeling low,” he says, “I had a conversation with my brother. ‘What does HIV mean to you?’ he asked. Well, I thought, it’s no more important than my big toe. A part of me, yes. But it doesn’t matter too much.” At first, he’d look at this tattoo fairly regularly. More recently, Brown has started to forget that it’s even there.
