A Positive Life: HIV from Terrence Higgins to Today

An Epidemic Begins

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Episode notes

Sam Smith explores how AIDS became headline news in the 1980s, and how communities came together to raise public awareness - and fight a growing tide of fear and stigma. Terry Higgins' death in 1982 was one of the first in the UK from an AIDS-related illness. In the years that followed, a steady drip of information - as well as misinformation - slowly spread about HIV. Much of the early, pioneering work around HIV was done by volunteer organisations from within the queer community, like the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard and the Terrence Higgins Trust - while many of their members simultaneously faced their own ill health, and the deaths of friends and loved ones. The people most affected by HIV faced horrendous prejudice: in 1986, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, James Anderton stated publically that gay men, drug users and sex workers were "swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making." The British government eventually launched one of the biggest public information campaigns in UK history - with the slogan Don't Die Of Ignorance. It delivered facts about HIV onto TV screens and onto the doorsteps of every household in Britain. But it also stigmatised the condition even more. Sam Smith discovers what it was like to live through that period from writer Juno Roche, Bill Smart who worked in Manchester's gay bars, and Lisa Power, a former volunteer at Switchboard and one of the founders of Stonewall, about how they brought people from the queer community together to share information - and support those who were living with HIV in a time before effective treatment. In "A Positive Life", singer Sam Smith presents stories of HIV in the UK over the last forty years. They hear from people who remember the earliest years of the AIDS crisis; the grassroots activists and marginalised communities who came together to fight stigma and raise public awareness; and a new generation living with effective treatments for HIV in a radically-changed world. An Overcoat Media production for BBC Sounds Producer: Arlie Adlington Assistant Producer: Emma Goswell Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Sound Mixing: Mike Woolley Additional production: Nada Smiljanic