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Tilda Swinton On Living Through The AIDS Crisis, How She Identifies As Queer

"Queerness is an attitude that...can bring more people together."

Tilda Swinton has discussed living in London at the height of the AIDS crisis, and how she lost dozens of close friends to the virus in a new interview with Out magazine.

"In 1994 alone, the year Derek died, I attended 43 funerals," the esteemed actress recalled of the year she lost a best friend in English actor Derek Jarman.

Swinton said her group of friends at the time were bound closer together by the crisis, and also England's "Section 28" law, which banned the "promotion of homosexual material" from the time it was enacted in 1988 to the time it was repealed in 2000.

"When many of our friends became, often mortally, ill, and then the reactionary right wing started their ominously oppressive campaign of violence on the culture, well-being, and civil rights of the LGBT community and the wider diverse life of the entire country, we joined the vanguard of a resistance movement that needed to be highly active. This is an extremely defined time in my memory," she said.

"The Thatcherite Clause 28, which sought to prosecute and suppress queer culture—against which we campaigned in outrage—was an attack on the civil liberties of us all. My grandmother, born in 1900, who lost two brothers and most of the boys she had grown up with between 1914 and ’18, counted the funerals and listened to the rhetoric from Parliament and said, 'But, my darling, you are at war.' That’s what it felt like. She got it."

Swinton added that since then, she has contemplated her "queer sensibility" and how it "has nothing to do with sexual orientation."

"I have lived for my entire adult life closely integrated into a queer aesthetic, occasionally in situations where I may have been—for months at a time —either the only cis woman present or the only person in a heterosexual relationship, without particularly questioning why it might be strange for me to be included," she said.

"Queerness is an attitude that, when acknowledged as shared, can bring more people together than could ever be divided by it being used as a term of rejection. I think this attitude is what I carry above my head, without any effort or influence."

You can read the full interview on Out.com.

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