international news _ 23rd October, 2006
Tiesto’s HIV Test Admission
Text by Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)
Trance icon DJ Tiesto chatted to Skrufff this week about his involvement in
AIDS awareness charity Dance4Life and revealed that he’s personally
experienced the fear of being HIV positive.
“Yes, I‘ve been tested and it's pretty scary,” Tiesto told Skrufff, “Because
when you are waiting for the result you really think about it and how your
life would be different if you find out you have HIV.”
The definitive superstar DJ recently teamed up with Faithless frontman Maxi
Jazz to record a track called Dance4Life and is passionate about helping the
cause, he said.
“The name of the organisation says it all; Dance4Life makes people dance in
order to create awareness for the AIDS/HIV problem,” Tiesto explained. “I
make people dance all around the world with my performances and therefore
it’s the perfect combination.”
“I think it’s all about bad education,” the Dutch star continued, when asked
why safe sex message continues to be ignored by many. “The information
provided is not sufficient enough and most of the time young people in a lot
of countries don’t even get the proper education.”
“I had proper education during my teenage years and was always scared to get
a disease,” he concluded, “Therefore I always used condoms and never had to
be afraid of any STD (sexually transmitted disease) scares.”
Tiesto’s record emerged just under two years after Italian dance producer
Fran released a similarly inspired track called Violent Silence which drew
heavily on his own experiences of being HIV positive. Chatting to Skrufff at
the time Fran said he believed he contracted HIV from unsafe sex on London’s
gay scene ten years ago and recounted the terror he felt as similarly
infected friends started falling ill.
“I was losing friends, and seeing lots of them getting really ill to a point
of losing their sight, or literally losing their minds as well,” Fran
recalled.
“I had a few friends who got toxoplasmosis through HIV and I’ve seen a lot
of horrible things that that can do to you. One friend of mine used to get
lost in his own house, he wouldn’t remember where the toilet was, or where
the bedroom was, so when all that happened I was terrified. I clearly
remember sometimes lying in bed at night, really thinking about the reality
of my situation and what, if, when, anything went wrong, what could happen.”
“Being ill and stuck at home I realised how the whole HIV situation has been
lost, it’s disappeared from public attention and there’s no way of mirroring
such an experience in society,” said Fran. “It’s easy to feel invisible and
isolated, people don’t understand how that contributes to the illness,” he
added.
Related Article
Interview : Tiesto Video Interview (20/03/2006)
Related Link
