HIV: The Morning After

Content note: this episode discusses domestic abuse and suicidal thoughts. In 2016, Emma McAnally was diagnosed with HIV in a Scottish sexual health clinic while in an abusive relationship. This episode follows how that diagnosis led her to challenge outdated NHS maternity guidance and become an HIV educator in Scotland today. Summary Emma McAnally was diagnosed with HIV in 2016, in a Scottish sexual health clinic, while in an abusive relationship. Isolated and convinced she was the only person in Scotland living with the virus, she reached her lowest point before falling pregnant gave her a reason to leave. Motherhood brought fresh battles: she was denied a water birth because of her status, discouraged from breastfeeding, and, by 2023, discovered that Scotland's maternity guidelines for women living with HIV hadn't been updated since the early 1990s. Her research helped change them. Emma later met her partner, Paul, through a wild swimming group, and found in their mixed-status relationship the acceptance…

For over a decade, Veda Lady was the most recognisable drag queen in Dublin. They talk to Dan Hall about a childhood spent dodging the word "AIDS", the partner who begged them not to tell, and the 2019 disclosure that led to Ireland's first podcast made by and for people living with HIV. Summary Veda Lady has spent three decades as Dublin's reigning drag mother, but for a long stretch of that career they were keeping the biggest secret of their life. Growing up gay in 1970s and 80s Catholic Ireland, they were accused of having AIDS at twelve, years before they understood what it really meant. It was a fear that resurfaced when they received their own HIV diagnosis in the early 2000s. Veda describes the deal they made to stay silent, and then the 2019 disclosure timed to a new marriage and a song, "I Came Out One Night". Veda also traces the drag lineage behind their activism, from San Francisco's Trannyshack to Dublin's Alternative Miss Ireland, and explains how a lockdown drag show streamed from their…

In 2015, Adrian Hyyriläinen-Trett became the first openly HIV-positive parliamentary candidate in UK history, standing for the Liberal Democrats in Vauxhall. This episode follows their 2004 diagnosis at Camden's Mortimer Market Centre through twelve years on AZT, a complex PTSD diagnosis, and a new life as president of the LGBT Powerlifting Union. Summary Adrian Hyyriläinen-Trett was diagnosed with HIV on the 3rd of June 2004, at Camden's Mortimer Market Centre. Twenty-five and living in Beckton at the time, they made the journey home alone on the DLR, before waiting six months to tell their parents, on Boxing Day, that they were both gay and HIV positive. Eleven years on, standing as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Vauxhall, Adrian chose to go public about their status ahead of the 2015 general election, becoming the first openly HIV-positive parliamentary candidate in UK history. This conversation follows that journey through twelve years on AZT to a new single-tablet regimen, a 2016 mental health…

An actor and activist who was diagnosed with HIV at 16, kept the secret for 15 years, turned it into a one-man show that earned 53 five-star reviews, and was cast in It's a Sin while still performing at the Edinburgh Fringe. Summary Nathaniel Hall grew up in Gatley, a suburb of Stockport. He was a straight-A student, head boy, and quietly realising he was gay in a school where Section 28 was still in force and the only mention of homosexuality in his entire education was a video of a man dying from AIDS in a PSHE lesson taught by his maths teacher. He wanted to wear a cream tuxedo to the prom. The hire shop didn't have one ready, so he sat on a bench in a park playing Snake on his phone. A man with bleach tips in his hair came and sat next to him. That summer fling - possibly grooming, a question he still works through in therapy - ended when Nathaniel's parents found out. On holiday in Menorca, in a 45-degree heatwave, he fell violently ill. It wasn't the water. It was seroconversion. Two weeks before his…

A leading HIV consultant who went from writing prescriptions to needing them in the summer of 2002 - and became the first person living with HIV to lead the British HIV Association. Summary Tristan Barber was born in Cornwall in 1975, took his A-levels at 16, and arrived in London in September 1992 as a gay man from a rural county where nobody was out. Medical school felt like a small homophobic village. London in the 90s did not. He went to clubs every night, nearly failed his studies from enjoying himself almost too much, and eventually landed his first job in sexual health and HIV at a busy East London clinic in 2002 - the year everything changed. Towards the end of that rotation, Tristan got sick. A ten-day viral illness in the middle of summer. His GP prescribed antibiotics and didn't ask anything else. Tristan went for an HIV test himself, struggled to find a clinic where he didn't know anyone working, and bumped into an old colleague in the waiting room who asked why he was there. The test was…

A Black British-Caribbean woman diagnosed with HIV at 37 who told nobody for ten years - not her children, not her colleagues, not a single friend - and found her way back to her own body through yoga and Buddhism. Summary Louise Vallace grew up as one of the only Black children in a white Essex school, putting a tea towel on her head to pretend she had long flowing hair like the other girls. Her parents came from St Lucia during the Windrush era and were met with signs in windows: No Dogs, No Irish, No Blacks. Louise moved through school, the Caribbean, East London, and eventually into a senior career in local government - company cars, corporate cards, a visit from Tony Blair for a project she'd designed. On the surface, she'd made it. In 2006, aged 37, divorced, with three children, she went for her first ever sexual health test. She'd been sterilised and didn't think she needed one. The nurse told her everything came back negative apart from one result. Louise went home, checked her will, and put a smile…

A Nigerian-born Anglican priest who spent years praying the gay away, married a woman under church pressure, came out in 1994, was diagnosed with HIV in 2003, and founded the first inclusive church in Nigeria - now operating across 22 countries. Summary Jide Macaulay grew up in Nigeria, the son of a powerful conservative theologian. His father was not available emotionally and would later support a Nigerian bill that could imprison his own son for 14 years simply for being gay. He called Jide a disgrace. But before any of that, Jide tried to fix himself. He fasted for 40 days, pleading with God to remove his same-sex feelings. When a woman said yes to a relationship, he believed the prayer had worked. It hadn't. The feelings never disappeared. After four years of pressure from church leaders and family, they married. Three years in, Jide sat his wife down and told her the truth. The marriage became acrimonious. He came out as gay in 1994. Eight years later, in January 2003, Jide tested positive for HIV. He…

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT ISMAIL'S WORK Ismail Harerimana was fourteen before anyone told him what was making him sick. He grew up in the hills of Kisoro in southwest Uganda, was diagnosed with HIV after a routine eye infection, and spent years hiding his antiretrovirals in a tin of sugar so nobody at school would know. He was saved and rebuilt by Saturday support groups run through the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. What follows is a story of two school expulsions, a caning for missing class to collect medication, a newspaper confession that turned him into an advocate, a husband and a father. The episode closes on harder ground: the aftermath of the 2025 USAID and PEPFAR cuts, and the subsequent death of a child in Ismail's care. His testimony is in direct contradiction to statements made by Elon Musk and Marco Rubio. Key Moments [00:01:03] Growing up in Kisoro, on Uganda's border with Rwanda and the DRC [00:04:39] Years of unexplained illness, isolation and undiagnosed HIV in childhood [00:08:34]…

A man who survived a hijacked plane at 11, spent years numbing himself with drugs and chemsex, was diagnosed with HIV on a comedown in January 2020, and found clarity four years later on a single dose of LSD taken to treat a pain condition. Summary Hamish Noah was ten days old when he left England for the Philippines. By six, he'd lived in five countries. By nine, he was in Malawi, sobbing in a supermarket in Blantyre because he couldn't understand why children outside had no food while his family filled a trolley. By 11, he was visiting an HIV project in one of Africa's largest informal settlements, surrounded by children living with the virus - with no idea how much that scene would come to define his adult life. On 29 December 2000, aged 11, Hamish was on British Airways flight 2069 from London to Nairobi when a man with severe mental illness entered the cockpit and tried to crash the 747. The plane dived towards the ground and nearly flipped. The co-pilot pulled off what became known as a miracle…

A Ugandan-born woman diagnosed with HIV in 1988 who went back to Africa to die, arrived in the UK with a CD4 count of one, and built a career spanning 20 countries in African health policy. Summary Winnie Sseruma left Uganda on a scholarship to study sociology in Kansas in 1981. The students there asked her if she lived in a tree. By 1988, she was 27, back in the United States, and applying for an internship that required an HIV test. It came back positive. She told her partner, who blamed her, ghosted her, then called back weeks later to say his own test was negative. After that, Winnie stopped telling anyone. She sat through conversations where friends described how they'd treat an HIV-positive person - never eat in their house, never share a bathroom, never be friends - and said nothing. She was offered AZT, which she couldn't afford. The side effects turned her skin from shiny black to ashy. Between 1990 and 1993, her brother, her mother, and her father all died while she was trapped in the US. In 1994,…

Available now on Spotify and Apple Music. Apple Music / Spotify Profits from sales will go towards plugging the remaining £1k costs incurred in producing the #AIDS2026 specials, 'Rio Calling'. 'Rio Calling' crowd-funder: https://hiv-the-morning-after.captivate.fm/rethinkrebuildrise LYRICS: [Verse 1] They came to Rio, sun and rain, the world arrived to talk again, with rights and science, hand in hand, and here Brazil, she took a stand. [Pre-Chorus] The funding's running dry, and pharma's flying high, they warned us: cuts bring death we answer with one breath: [Chorus] So rethink, rebuild and rise, raise the science to the skies, no access, that's no justice so open up your eyes. [Verse 2] They spoke of jabs beyond the pill, long-acting shots to fit the bill, so bNAbs — is it hope or hype? The cure's still climbing up the pipe. [Pre-Chorus] The funding's running dry, and pharma's flying high, they warned us: cuts bring death we answer with one breath: [Chorus] So rethink, rebuild and rise, raise the science…

Featuring: Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Kene Esom (HIV policy & human rights), Dr Laura Waters (HIV/sexual health medicine), Simon Collins (HIV treatment advocacy), Eliane Becks Nininahazwe (HIV activism & arts), Pank Sethi (HIV advocacy & photography), Sita Shahi (HIV advocacy — women), Brenda Crabtree-Ramírez (HIV research & medicine), Maxx Boykin (HIV policy & organising), Olimbi Hoxhaj (HIV advocacy), Knowledge Mupembe (harm reduction & HIV), Antonio Flores (HIV/TB medicine — MSF), Davide Scalenghe (global health communications), Christabel Millar (HIV community advocacy), Damien Fagan (pharmaceuticals — Gilead), Michael (gay & bisexual network — Tanzania), Andrea Carolina (HIV & pharmacy access — Colombia), Derrick Mapp (HIV), Derrick Powell (HIV retention navigation), Joan Steven (HIV community facilitation), Sarah (HIV advocacy — women), Jonathan Blake, Eli Fitzgerald, Garry Brough, Peter Willis. CROWDFUNDER LINK The series closes on the cost that rarely finds its way into official reports. Dan Hall and…

CROWDFUNDER LINK Featuring: Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Sophia Strachan (Sophia Forum), Garry Brough (European AIDS Treatment Group), Dr. Brenda Crabtree-Ramírez (Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Médicas y Nutrición Salvador Zubirán), Sita Shahi (International Community of Women Living with HIV Asia Pacific), Dr. Laura Waters (The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust), Kene Esom (United Nations Development Programme), Dr. Chinedu Emmanuel (mothers2mothers), Julie Foreman (BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS), Deborah Carpenter (FHI 360), Andrea Domânico (CRT DST/Aids-SP). Plus archive intervews with: Caroline Guinness, Susan Cole-Haley, Ellie Harrison, Angelina Namiba. The drug trials were run on men. The women were left to work out the rest for themselves. Dan Hall and dan glass mark AIDS 2026's focus on neglected groups, with Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA opening and closing on the clinical case for research that finally caught up. Archive testimony comes from Caroline Guinness, co-founder of Positively Women…

CROWDFUNDER LINK Featuring: Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Antonio Flores, Damien Fagan (Gilead), ICWAP, Thorne Harbour Health, Derrick Mapp, Laura Walters (Gilead / NHS Royal Free Hospital), Luca Stevenson, Joan Stephen, Axel Bautista (Mpact Global Action), Derrick Powell, Brenda Crabtree, Maxx Boykin, Eliane Becks Nininahazwe, Fatima Hassan. Plus archive from Anthony Bird, Jim Vogiatzis, Mark S King and Chris Smith. The drugs worked, but conversations are rarely happened about what comes next. Dan Hall and dan glass spend Day Four of AIDS 2026 exploring the gap between the headline and the aftermath, with Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA bookending the episode on managing a condition nobody's lived with this long before. Archive testimony comes from Anthony Bird, diagnosed in 1995 after an illness that nearly killed him, on an ordinary life once the side effects settled down; Jim Vogiatzis on the peripheral neuropathy that combination therapy left behind; Mark S King, an American writer and activist diagnosed in…

CROWDFUNDER LINK Featuring: Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Andrea Carolina, Fatima Hassan, Derrick Powell, Sophie Strachan, Simon Collins, Eliane Becks Nininahazwe, Davide Scalenghe, Kene Esom, Pankaj Sethi, Winnie Sseruma, Louise Vallace, Reverend Jide Macaulay, "Jan". HIV has always found the margins first. Live from Rio, Dan Hall and dan glass connect UK testimony to the wider global picture, with Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA opening and closing with the clinical picture. Archive testimony comes from Winnie Sseruma (episode drops 7 August), raised in Uganda and diagnosed in the United States in 1988; Louise Vallace (episode drops 28 August), a yoga therapist of Windrush Caribbean heritage, on shame in a small community where everyone knows everyone; Reverend Jide Macaulay (episode drops 21 August), a British Nigerian priest and founder of House of Rainbow, on his own father's support for a law that would criminalise him; and an anonymised contributor known only as "Jan", diagnosed while living in Turkey, on the…

CROWDFUNDER LINK Featuring: Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Carluz, Davide Scalenghe, Eliane Becks Nininahazwe, Joan Stephen, Kene Esom, Pankaj Sethi, Vincent LeClerc, Martin Fenerty, Marc Thompson, Nathaniel Hall, Alexander Cheves Not the tombstone-era kind. This one lives in your dating apps and your GP's waiting room. Dan Hall and dan glass spend Day Two of AIDS 2026 asking delegates where stigma still bites, with Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA framing the episode with the clinical view from the consulting room. Archive testimony comes from Martin Fenerty, a counsellor and psychotherapist from Liverpool diagnosed in 1993, on having his confidentiality broken early in his diagnosis; Marc Thompson on U=U and the men who didn't believe him anyway; Nathaniel Hall (episode drops 11 September 2026), actor and theatre maker diagnosed at seventeen, on the fifteen years he kept his status secret and the case for saying it louder; and writer Alexander Cheves on naming shame as the real enemy. Links BHIVA HIV i-Base AIDS…

CROWDFUNDER LINK Featuring: Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Matthew Hodson, Gus Cairns, Diego Agurto Beroiza, Silvia Petretti. Plus on-site interviews with Simon Collins, Kene Esom, Joan Stephen, Derrick Powell, Vincent LeClerc, Eliane Becks Nininahazwe, Luca Stevenson and Sophie Strachan. The cuts are real, and they're killing people. On the opening day of AIDS 2026, Dan Hall and dan glass ask conference delegates what happens when the money that built forty years of progress simply stops arriving. Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA tops and tails the episode with the clinical reality of clinics shutting their doors. Archive testimony comes from Matthew Hodson, writer, activist and former executive director of NAM aidsmap, on why the death toll is rising again; Gus Cairns, HIV journalist and educator diagnosed in 1985, on the collapse of US assistance to Africa; Diego Agurto Beroiza, Chilean theatre maker and activist, on PrEP funding disappearing in Argentina; and Silvia Petretti, chief executive of Positively UK, on…

Rio Calling is a six-part daily spin-off of HIV: The Morning After, broadcast from inside AIDS 2026 - the biggest HIV conference on the planet. Every day for six days, we're bringing you what's actually being said on the conference floor, what it means for people living with HIV, and how it lands against decades of lived experience from the podcast archive. Please help to cover our costs! RIO CALLING Fundraising Link Hosting duties fall to two Dans: Dan Hall, producer and presenter of HIV: The Morning After, and Dan Glass, ACT UP activist, author, and a man with infinite energy to make the world better. Together they unpack each day's theme, with clinical steer from Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA. Wrapped around the raw interviews from the conference itself are clips from podcast guests including Jonathan Blake, Marc Thompson, Silvia Petretti, Ellie Harrison, Susan Cole-Haley, Angelina Namiba, Ellie Harrison and Alexander Cheves. Please help to cover our costs! RIO CALLING Fundraising Link Six days. Six themes.…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link A Ukrainian DJ who started injecting heroin at 16 to help him sleep, survived six overdoses on the streets of Kyiv, and became one of Europe's most forceful voices for harm reduction and HIV treatment access - now fighting to keep supply chains open during a war. Summary Anton was born in Kyiv in 1986, just before the Soviet Union collapsed. His parents were public servants on small salaries, and while they worked to feed the family, the streets outside were filling with new substances flowing through newly opened borders. He started using drugs at 14. At 16, someone told him heroin would help him sleep between DJ sets. It did, briefly, and then it took over everything. For 11 years, Anton lived rough in Kyiv - sleeping in stairwells, dodging police who saw drug users as easy shakedown money, and surviving six overdoses. The door opened through a harm reduction programme. Someone offered him a clean needle, asked if he wanted a sandwich, and didn't start with…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link A young woman diagnosed with HIV at 21 in 2018 on her 1,199 days of silence, the book of lies she kept to track her cover stories, and why being called brave is part of the problem. Summary In the summer of 2018, Ellie Harrison was 21, working in London fashion, and ordered a routine STI test because she thought a break-up was coming. The clinic called it a false positive. It wasn't. She found out for certain on a Monday lunchtime, walking towards a Greggs in Birmingham, when 40 missed calls from an NHS number lit up her phone. She never made it to the sandwich. What followed was 1,199 days - a number now tattooed on her arm - during which Ellie told fewer than ten people and kept a physical notebook of lies to remember which cover story she'd given for the daily tablet she took at lunch. She showered in water so hot it blistered her skin. She convinced herself she was the only woman in the world with HIV. When a boy she'd drunkenly told at a freshers' party…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link A fashion industry hair and makeup artist who tested positive for HIV in 1985 and went three decades without medication - his body carrying a rare genetic mutation that science wouldn't fully explain for years. Summary Laurence Close grew up in Zambia, where being gay carried a prison sentence. He came to London in 1983, fell for a diplomat twenty years older, and trained as a hair and makeup artist while shuttling to Paris on weekends. When a bag from Yves Saint Laurent Beauté under the boyfriend's bed confirmed the affair, Laurence went to Gower Street for a test. He already knew. The positive result arrived in 1985, five weeks late because of back-to-back photoshoots abroad. His first thought was not how to live but when to die - timed to look like an accidental overdose, because in his parents' farming community, that would be easier to explain than AIDS. A woman called Eunice, a Nigerian lesbian who had acquired HIV through rape, changed his mind in a…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link An American HIV journalist and long-term survivor reflects on four decades of living with HIV, from the pre-AIDS era of early 1980s West Hollywood to the age of Undetectable equals Untransmittable. Summary In 1980, Mark S King was a 19-year-old with a strawberry blonde fringe who won a car on The Price Is Right. His boyfriend Charlie was in the audience wearing a matching outfit. Five years later, a friend tested him for HIV after hours in a doctor's office - off the record, because a positive result could cost him his home and his job. The phone call that followed was brief: you're HIV positive, good luck, goodbye. No referral, no medication, no next steps. There was nothing to offer. What followed was a decade spent in the thick of the West Hollywood AIDS crisis - running experimental drugs across the Mexican border, holding dying friends' hands through the Shanti Foundation, and finding moments of wilful joy on San Diego dance floors. Mark lost Ron at 26 in a…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link A preview of the third series of HIV: The Morning After — ten new interviews with people living with HIV across four decades, five countries, and every assumption you thought you had. Summary Series 3 of HIV: The Morning After brings ten new voices to the podcast. An American journalist who smuggled AZT across the Mexican border in the boot of his car. A fashion makeup artist who lived with HIV for 30 years without a single day of medication, carrying a rare gene mutation his doctors couldn't explain. A young woman who kept a physical notebook of lies to remember which cover story she'd given for the pill she took at lunch. A Ukrainian DJ who survived six overdoses on the streets of Kyiv and now drives antiretroviral medication through a war zone in his own car. A Ugandan-born woman who packed six months of pills and flew home to die, arriving in the UK with a CD4 count of one. A man who survived a hijacked 747 at eleven and found clarity on a single dose of LSD…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link This is a special compilation episode featuring highlights from Series 1 and 2 of HIV: The Morning After, released ahead of Series 3 in June 2026. This episode covers what that means to be here today. It covers learning to live with uncertainty as a medical instruction and a life philosophy. The specific weight of a 20-year prognosis delivered cheerfully, echoing in your head on the London Underground for days. The six months after a diagnosis so bleak and depressive that living and dying became things you could weigh against each other with complete neutrality - and the moment of choosing to live, not because it would be easy, but because there would also be great food, great sex and the possibility of wonder. This episode also includes an exclusive clip from Series 3 featuring journalist Mark S King. Resources Terrence Higgins Trust - HIV information, support and campaigning www.tht.org.uk NAM aidsmap - Clear, evidence-based information about HIV…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link This is a special compilation episode featuring highlights from Series 1 and 2 of HIV: The Morning After, released ahead of Series 3 in June 2026. The epidemic had a story. A specific kind of story, told in a specific kind of voice - white, male, gay. It wasn't false. But it was one story, and it left a great many people out. This episode covers what it costs to be absent from the dominant narrative: to be a Black woman told by her GP that HIV doesn't affect ladies like her; to grow up without seeing a single image of yourself in any HIV information; to spend years planning your funeral while your friends planned their weddings. These are remarkable people. And the episode ends with a white, gay man whose activism is aimed very much at ensuring all voices are heard, not just those that look like him. Resources Terrence Higgins Trust - HIV information, support and campaigning www.tht.org.uk NAM aidsmap - Clear, evidence-based information about HIV www.aidsmap.com…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link This is a special compilation episode featuring highlights from Series 1 and 2 of HIV: The Morning After, released ahead of Series 3 in June 2026. What do you do when you were quietly certain you were going to die, and then you didn't? This episode is about the long aftermath of survival. It covers what grief becomes when it stops being a storm and turns into ordinary weather: going to so many funerals you stop going. It covers the particular invisibility of being a young Black gay man in HIV services that hadn't imagined you existed. A GP treating dying patients while privately compartmentalising his own diagnosis. A decade spent keeping life deliberately small - no plans, no ambitions, nothing too far ahead - and the slow, confusing work of learning to want things again when the assumption of early death turned out to be wrong. And everywhere, just beneath the surface, the people who were months too early for the drugs that would have saved them. Resources…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link This is a special compilation episode featuring highlights from Series 1 and 2 of HIV: The Morning After, released ahead of Series 3 in June 2026. What did HIV do to four people across four different decades, and what effect was left when the acute crisis passed? Seven and a half stone in an ambulance. A bruise on a chest that didn't go away. Retiring on the basis of six months to live and then watching six months keep getting longer. Seven pills before school, wrapped in tin foil at house parties and smuggled to a toilet cubicle so no one would see. And what it means to have never known life without HIV: no before, no after, just the continuous fact of it, and the pills that became, in their own way, a form of certainty when everything else felt out of control. Resources Terrence Higgins Trust - HIV information, support and campaigning www.tht.org.uk NAM aidsmap - Clear, evidence-based information about HIV www.aidsmap.com Positively UK - Peer support for…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link This is a special compilation episode featuring highlights from Series 1 and 2 of HIV: The Morning After, released ahead of Series 3 in June 2026. A life can divide cleanly into before and after. This episode sits in the gap between them - in the waiting room, the clinic corridor, the flat you don't remember getting back to. It covers what it felt like to receive a diagnosis across four different decades, from 1982 to the early 2020s: the isolation that followed, the absence of information aimed at people like you, the impossible mask worn at work, the referral slip kept under a bed for months. It covers what it means to plan your own death and then, for reasons you didn't expect, not go through with it. And it covers what it means to be the youngest voice in a series like this - diagnosed in an era of effective treatment, never having personally lost anyone to HIV, and yet carrying the weight of that history as something visceral and present. Content note: this…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link dan glass was born in 1983, the year HIV was first identified as HIV rather than the gay plague. They grew up under Thatcher's Section 28 with only EastEnders' Mark Fowler and tombstone adverts for reference. Death, isolation, internalised stigma - that was all HIV meant. When dan was diagnosed in their early twenties, they got drunk, went to a friend's house, cried, and she helped them to the toilet. The next morning, they told their boss it wasn't flu after all. For five years, dan refused treatment. The fear was too deep, the conditioning too absolute. Section 28 had taught them they were wrong, that whatever happened was their fault, that no one would help. The gravity of that silence was lethal. When dan finally saw a doctor in Berlin who told them their CD4 count meant they had AIDS, they collapsed in the shower the next day. What followed was transformation through community. A friend in Berlin, Juliana, threw a party where everyone screamed in each…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link In 2007, Nikolaj Tange Lange wrote a punk song with the chorus "Gay is the new punk because we don't give a fuck about dying while we're young." A few months later, he tested positive for HIV. He was 27, newly arrived in Berlin, and had just discovered a city where condoms were already the exception in dark rooms and sex clubs. The song, it turned out, was prophecy. Nikolaj is a Danish writer and musician who has spent nearly two decades navigating the gap between what the world thinks HIV means and what it actually means to live with it. He's published five novels, performed in porn under his real name, and written extensively about transgressive sex, chemsex, and queer culture. His novel Romeo and Seahorse is available in English from Cipher Press. The night of infection was at a party during the Berlin Film Festival. A guy with a mohawk, a few beers left on the coffee table, straight to the bedroom. Nikolaj told him to stop, but was slow about it. He was…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link Jan describes himself as a global citizen. He is Turkish, Kurdish, gay, and HIV positive, and he's had to come out about each of those identities separately. Growing up in Ankara, he learned early to hide parts of himself. Kurdish was spoken at home but never taught to the children. It was too dangerous, too divisive. By fourteen, Jan had figured out that status and achievement could compensate for ethnic complexity. By the time he realised he was gay, he understood that no amount of status would protect him. His ticket out was a scholarship abroad. The plan worked. Jan got his master's degree in the United States, had a job lined up, a future mapped. Then Covid happened. He lost his visa, his right to work, and found himself back in his parents' flat in Ankara, confined with them for 34 days straight during lockdown. A casual homophobic remark made him snap. He came out as gay in the middle of a pandemic, in a 70-square-metre flat, with nowhere to go. He had…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link Eli Fitzgerald is 26 years old and has never known life without HIV. There is no before and after, he says. There just is. He was taking seven pills a day as a child, alarms set for morning and night, unable to leave for school until he'd taken his meds. When the regime dropped to three pills, it felt life-changing. Those pills became his one certainty, the one thing he had control over. Eli came out as a trans man at around the same time he was navigating adolescence with a diagnosis he couldn't tell anyone about. The waiting list for gender-affirming care was six to seven years. There were no role models, no one to look up to who had been through both. The isolation was profound. In the school playground, friends made jokes about AIDS without knowing what they were saying. Eli kept his secret completely hidden. At some point, the lack of control over everything else led Eli to try to control his HIV in the only way available: stopping his medication, missing…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link Silvia Petretti came to London from Rome in 1986, aged twenty, fleeing grief after her mother's sudden death. The plan was a two-week English course. She never went back. London in the late 80s was vibrant with clubs, music, warehouse parties, the summer of love. She settled in Brixton, fell in love with Afro-Caribbean culture, studied African languages and arts, and began promoting drumming and dance. In 1997, while in Rome caring for her father who had Alzheimer's, Silvia contracted cerebral malaria on a trip to Senegal. In hospital, recovering slowly, a nurse offered her an HIV test at the bedside, no counselling, no privacy. The result was positive. She was thirty years old, alone, and told she might have one or two years to live. Her first treatment regime was eighteen pills a day, some with food, some without, alarms set through the night. The drugs were toxic. Skin flaked. Bodies deformed. You didn't know, she says, if AIDS was going to kill you or the…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link Diego Agurto Beroiza is Chilean, HIV positive, and living in London. When someone in his community dies from HIV-related causes, he says, we become incomplete. So he's building a museum. Not a building, but a living archive made of testimonies performed on stage. He calls it the Living Museum of Emotional Archives, built on a simple idea: when someone dies, their emotional archive shouldn't disappear with them. This conversation, recorded while Diego was in Santiago, covers the shadow of Chile's dictatorship over the early HIV response, the experience of being a migrant accessing services in London, and the rising threat of the far right across Latin America and beyond. Diego is direct about what he sees: funding cuts to PrEP in Argentina, conservative victories in Chile, the same playbook spreading across borders. He doesn't think the UK is immune. Diego was an activist before his diagnosis, but receiving his own positive result changed something. He had the…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link Garry Brough grew up in a Welsh mining village in the 1970s and 80s, where being different meant being singled out. He was teased and tormented daily, long before he knew he was gay. His father, the local football team manager, kept trying to take him to matches. It never took. At eleven, Garry dropped Welsh and took Italian, reasoning that a foreign language was his ticket out. He assumed the rest of the UK was as suffocating as the valleys. Perhaps another country would be better. London, when he arrived, was transformative. Within two weeks, he was at Camden Palace in makeup and satins, watching a psychedelic goth diva, and nobody looked twice. He went out six or seven nights a week and drank at every one. By his final year of university, it was falling apart. A lecturer gently asked if drink might be a problem. He detoxed, got sober, then relapsed after his HIV diagnosis in 1991. He was 23. The prognosis was five years. In 1995, the bruise that wouldn't fade…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link In 1993, Angelina Namiba was finishing her finals at Manchester Metropolitan University when she fell seriously ill. Her GP suggested an HIV test. She took the referral paper, put it under her bed, and didn't go. When he wrote again, underlining "strongly" in red, she went for the test but never collected the results. She already knew what HIV looked like. Her brother, studying in London, had been in and out of specialist wards with Kaposi's sarcoma, meningitis, and epileptic fits. He died at Mildmay Hospice. She was terrified. Eventually, pre-test counselling gave her the courage to try again. A friend from secondary school in Kenya called and said: ring me when you get the result. Whatever it is, I'll be there. Angelina tested positive in her early twenties, believing she had perhaps six months to live. She didn't die. She took a job the same week as her diagnosis to keep busy whilst waiting for the end. That decision, and the peer support she found through…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link Alexander Cheves grew up on a 500-acre farm in rural Georgia, raised by evangelical missionary parents who blocked gay websites and warned him that choosing this "lifestyle" meant choosing death. At sixteen, he decided to come out anyway, convinced he was trading a long life for a brief, honest one. He tested positive for HIV at twenty, in 2013, during his final year of college. What followed wasn't the manageable adjustment the medical timeline might suggest. In the six months after diagnosis, Alexander fell into a depression so severe he nearly didn't survive it. He went through a period of manic sex without disclosure, behaviour he's since written about with unflinching honesty in his memoir My Love Is a Beast. He later learned from infectious disease specialists that this response is statistically common, though rarely discussed. This conversation covers Alexander's decade as a sex worker, his move from Atlanta to New York to Berlin, his relationship with…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link In 1987, Chris Smith received an HIV diagnosis and was told he might have months to live. His doctor's advice? Learn to live with uncertainty. Thirty-eight years later, he's the Chancellor of Cambridge University. This episode traces Chris's journey through the darkest years of the epidemic whilst serving in the heart of British politics. He recounts the moment he came out as gay at a Rugby rally in 1984, his hands shaking, only to receive a standing ovation twenty seconds into his speech. He describes navigating Section 28 debates whilst secretly managing Kaposi's sarcoma and the brutal side effects of alpha interferon. And he shares the unlikely deal he struck with the Sunday Times that eventually led to a phone call from Nelson Mandela. Chris reflects on what it meant to carry a secret whilst holding public office, the transformation that combination therapy brought, and the friend he lost in the late 80s whose memory still stays with him. His closing message…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link Ten episodes of brilliance from ten inspiring people living with HIV. Episode 1 drops Friday 6 February, 2026. Email: HIVTheMorningAfter@gmail.com Links: Other work from Producer Dan Hall. Positively UK - A peer-led organisation offering support and advice for people living with HIV, including women, youth, and migrants. The Love Tank - An organisation focusing on wellbeing of queer communities, especially Black and brown people, through projects like PrEPster and The Grass Is Always Grindr. Positive East - London-based support centre offering HIV testing, counselling, community outreach, and health services. PrEPster - Community-led PrEP (HIV prevention pill) education project. Offers clear and inclusive info for diverse audiences across the UK. National AIDS Trust - A UK policy and campaigning organisation dedicated to ending HIV stigma and promoting effective HIV policies. aidsmap - A trusted source for up-to-date, evidence-based information on HIV. Great for…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link The lead commissioner of the London HIV Prevention Programme, diagnosed at 17 in 1986, who didn't know anyone with HIV who looked like him - and built the representation, the communities, and the change he desperately needed. Summary In 1986, Marc Thompson was 17, newly out, and discovering the gay scene in south London - not Soho, not Earl's Court, but the Prince of Wales pub in Brixton and house parties on council estates in Peckham. The central London venues were not welcoming to Black queer people. Racist door policies. You had to prove you were gay. And if you got past the door, you faced racist punters inside. So Marc's community made its own spaces. HIV, as far as he knew, was a white man's thing. The news coverage showed older white men in the United States. The rules in his community were simple: don't sleep with Americans, and this doesn't affect us. No one talked about protection. The first safer sex information for UK gay men hadn't been produced…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link An Oxford graduate who fell in love at first sight in July 1985, was diagnosed with HIV weeks later, and drifted through accidental purpose into becoming one of the UK's most respected HIV educators - now remixing old cassette tapes. Summary Gus Cairns was 29 in July 1985: a bright but aimless Oxford graduate drifting through London's expanding gay scene. That month, he fell in love at first sight for the first and only time. The relationship with Paul was short and explosive. Paul had had a difficult childhood, a big drink problem, and enormous self-respect. He fought AIDS like a lion by insisting on being himself, almost up to the moment of death. The timing was just wrong. Gus's diagnosis came the same year. What followed was a journey through devastating loss, near-death, and what Gus calls an extraordinary magical resurrection - combination therapy - that transformed him into one of the UK's most respected HIV educators and activists. He worked at Gay…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link An 83-year-old retired GP who treated patients and friends during the epidemic while quietly assuming he was positive himself, lost his partner Malcolm to HIV, and told him at the end: it's all right, love - you can go. Summary Peter Willis is 83, a retired GP who brings a dual perspective to HIV: doctor and patient, clinician and bereaved partner. During the height of the epidemic, he was treating patients and friends while living with the private assumption that he too was positive - long before his actual diagnosis confirmed it. His partner Malcolm was a theatre director with his own company, an intensely critical scholar from a working class background, and the only person in his school ever to have taken an O-level. They were together for sixteen years. When Malcolm was dying of pleurisy, Peter lay in bed beside him. His two nephews - young men on their way to a ferry for a European holiday - drove down from Northampton in the middle of the night to stand…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link One of Britain's most enduring HIV and LGBTQ+ activists, who lived privately with HIV for years before becoming its most visible advocate. Summary Matthew Hodson has lived openly and, in his own words, shamelessly with HIV for over 27 years. His career in activism spans the pre-treatment era through to the age of U=U, and his core philosophy is simple: every time you take something that is used against you and make it into your own armour, it loses its power to hurt you. Matthew worked as the first admin assistant and then project manager of the Positive Campaign Group at Gay Men Fighting AIDS, producing campaigns that encouraged openness about HIV status - while he himself had not yet gone public. A volunteer called James Quinlan was the one who stood in front of the camera: very handsome, very brash, drove like a maniac, and happy to be photographed in leather trousers and no shirt. James had made the decision that he wasn't going to hide. He died about…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link A graphic designer who went from a back clinic to an AIDS diagnosis in 1995, was hospitalised with PCP at seven and a half stone, and watched 30,000 balloons released at Pride - each one representing someone who died - thinking: next year one of those is going to be me. Summary Tony Bird moved to London in 1990 and worked as a graphic designer in Soho. By autumn 1995, he had a cough his GP dismissed as nothing. He'd lost a huge amount of weight. At a back clinic, a doctor listened to his symptoms and said: I'm not the person to do this, but I think maybe you should have an HIV test. Three days later, Tony couldn't put his boots on. A gay GP neighbour called Julian came over, listened to his chest, and called an ambulance immediately. Princess Diana was on the television in the ambulance - the Panorama interview, three of us in this marriage. By admission, he was seven and a half stone. He was 28. The doctors said: we think you've got PCP. Are you aware of the…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link A pioneering HIV advocate diagnosed in 1986 with a three-year-old daughter, who co-founded Positively Women - the UK's first peer-led support organisation for women living with HIV - and spent nearly four decades doing the work that mattered. Summary In 1986, Caroline Guinness was diagnosed with what was then called HTLV-III after a locum doctor performed a test without her permission. She'd had a relationship with a bisexual man in an open couple and felt an icy premonition, but told the doctor she did not want to know the result. He came to her flat anyway. He said: I know you didn't want to know, but I think you're too intelligent not to. She was positive. Her daughter was three. Her first thought was her child. Her business partner screamed down the phone: I can't take another one - someone I love dying. Caroline felt a sheet of glass go down between her and the rest of the world. She was functioning but no longer part of it. She'd been working in music -…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link A gay man from Liverpool diagnosed with HIV in 1993 at 23, who held suicide as a safety net for years before channelling his experience into a career as an NHS psychotherapist - and who inherited a cat called Ava. Summary Martin Fenerty was 23 and had been out as a gay man for only a couple of years when, in the summer of 1993, a cold sore erupted into an extreme facial herpes outbreak that covered his face and neck. His GP didn't question why. He went to the Seaman's Dispensary in Liverpool, a sexual health clinic favoured by gay men and sex workers for its open-mindedness, but the service transferred to the Royal Liverpool Hospital while his sample was at the laboratory. A health adviser turned up at his door at five o'clock on a long, rainy November evening. For years, Martin held the idea of suicide as a safety net - if things get too difficult, at least I can end my own life. He kept it as a back pocket option while navigating the early antiretrovirals, the…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link An HIV survivor and activist diagnosed in 1988 who held the hand of a dying lover, left London Weekend Television through ill health, and found emotional support in a Battersea rescue dog called Ron. Summary In 1988, Jim Vogiatzis was working at London Weekend Television and noticing that his partner was becoming frail with unexplained illnesses - illnesses that coincided with his own. He asked repeatedly. His partner could not bring himself to say. Jim went to James Pringle House, identified only by a number in a waiting room of twenty men giving each other knowing looks. The two-week wait was a nightmare. On the tube journey back, he rehearsed every scenario. The doctor said: I'm really sorry to tell you, but you're HIV positive. Jim left the clinic as fast as he could, walked outside for fresh air, then went straight back to work. He had already watched friends die - stroking their hair, telling them they were loved - and he chose early to be in the fight…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link A mother of four, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and one of the UK's most influential HIV advocates - diagnosed in rural Louisiana in 1999 when an immigration doctor told her she had about seven years to live. Summary Susan Cole-Haley had recently married her second ex-husband - she collects them, she says, like shoes - and moved to rural Louisiana. The immigration HIV test didn't cross her mind. The doctor said: the good news is you don't have syphilis. The bad news is you're HIV positive. He gave her about seven years. Her children were five and seven. She didn't know anything about combination therapy. Back in the UK, her mother sent Aidsmap booklets across the Atlantic, and Susan realised the doctor was wrong. Her own GP had previously refused to test her - oh no, dear, that doesn't affect ladies like you. When she told her father, his first words were: make sure you don't tell anyone. Years later, an oncologist treating her for triple negative breast…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link One of the UK's longest-surviving people with HIV, diagnosed in October 1982, on bathhouses in San Francisco, standing in the darkest corner of the bar, and why a man in crimson pantaloons saved his life. Summary In 1982, Jonathan Blake was a 33-year-old actor waiting tables at Joe Allen in Covent Garden. London was horny. He'd just come back from San Francisco and the steam baths. His lymph nodes swelled until he was walking like a gorilla. At the Middlesex Hospital, the cultures took a couple of days. When the results came back: you have a virus, there is no cure, you've got between two and nine months to live. But you can go home. He felt like a modern-day leper. He would go to the bars in Earl's Court and stand in the darkest corner - wanting people but unable to engage. What was his opening line? Hello, my name is Jonathan, I have this killer virus coursing through my veins. He planned suicide: a hot bath, pills, razorblades. Then his mother's voice:…

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link Ten episodes of love, loss and courage from ten inspiring people living with HIV. Episode 1 drops Friday 19 September, 2025. Email: HIVTheMorningAfter@gmail.com Links: Other work from Producer Dan Hall. Positively UK - A peer-led organisation offering support and advice for people living with HIV, including women, youth, and migrants. The Love Tank - An organisation focusing on wellbeing of queer communities, especially Black and brown people, through projects like PrEPster and The Grass Is Always Grindr. Positive East - London-based support centre offering HIV testing, counselling, community outreach, and health services. PrEPster - Community-led PrEP (HIV prevention pill) education project. Offers clear and inclusive info for diverse audiences across the UK. National AIDS Trust - A UK policy and campaigning organisation dedicated to ending HIV stigma and promoting effective HIV policies. aidsmap - A trusted source for up-to-date, evidence-based information on…