By : Robert Kelly
There are people we remember because history remembers them, and there are people we remember because once, long before the honours and obituaries, we simply knew them.
Martyn Butler was one of those people for me .I loved his laser knowledge and his warm gentle Welsh attitude.
I knew Martyn through friendship, London’s nightclub world and, perhaps appropriately for a man who would spend much of his life bringing difficult subjects into the light, lasers. Years before I would think of him as Martyn Butler OBE, co-founder of the Terrence Higgins Trust, I knew an extraordinarily intelligent Welshman who could happily disappear into a conversation about laser technology.
Martyn was born in Newport, South Wales, in 1954. He moved to London during the 1970s and worked across advertising, cinema and entertainment. London was also where he became part of a rapidly changing gay scene, one which was beginning to emerge from the shadows and build institutions, friendships and communities of its own.
Heaven nightclub became part of that story. Beneath the arches at Charing Cross, Martyn worked with lasers while another Welshman, Terry Higgins, worked as a DJ. It sounds almost impossibly evocative now: Terry on the decks, Martyn controlling beams of colored light above a generation discovering a new freedom.
I remember another side of Martyn. He was a laser boffin in the best sense of the term, fascinated by the technology when lasers were considerably more temperamental creatures than today’s compact diode projectors.
At one point I hired Martyn’s little 9 milliwatt red laser. Nine milliwatts sounds almost comically modest beside the multi-watt RGB projectors available today, but this was another technological age. I loved that laser. And I remember Martyn being particularly pleased when I paid him every penny I owed him for using it.
It is a tiny memory. But perhaps those are the memories that make a person human.
History remembers Martyn for something infinitely more important.
When Terry Higgins died in 1982 from an AIDS-related illness, Britain stood at the beginning of a catastrophe it barely understood. Fear travelled faster than reliable information. People living with HIV and AIDS faced not merely illness but prejudice, misinformation and, frequently, abandonment.
Martyn Butler and Terry’s partner, Rupert Whitaker, decided to do something about it.
Together they helped establish the organisation that became the Terrence Higgins Trust, Europe’s first HIV-response organisation. Its purpose was strikingly humane: to put a human face on the emerging epidemic, support people affected by it and provide information that could prevent further transmission.
Martyn did not merely lend his name to the enterprise. He organised its first fundraiser. He helped produce its early information. He spoke publicly when AIDS remained surrounded by fear. Most strikingly of all, he allowed his own telephone number to become an early AIDS helpline. People frightened by an unknown disease could telephone, and somebody would answer.
That requires a particular sort of courage.
The Terrence Higgins Trust grew from those improvised beginnings into one of Britain’s most important HIV and sexual-health organisations. Martyn remained associated with its work for five decades, and his contribution was eventually recognised with an OBE for services to charity and public health.
Martyn died suddenly on 21 February 2026, aged 71. His death prompted tributes from the Terrence Higgins Trust, politicians, campaigners and people whose lives had intersected with his work. His brother Guy said the family was heartbroken but enormously proud of what he had achieved.
I discovered only now that Martyn had died.
That makes writing these words unexpectedly personal.
The history books will quite properly record Martyn Butler OBE as a pioneering HIV campaigner and one of the founders of the Terrence Higgins Trust. They will record the meetings, campaigns, telephone lines, leaflets and decades of advocacy.
My memories are smaller.
I remember the Welshman. I remember the intelligence. I remember conversations. I remember lasers.
And I remember that wonderful little red beam.
Sometimes history arrives beneath spotlights. Sometimes it begins with a few determined people, a telephone in somebody’s home and the conviction that frightened human beings deserve compassion rather than condemnation.
Martyn Butler helped provide that compassion.
Tonight, an old friend remembers him. And somewhere in that memory, a tiny red laser is still shining.
