HIV: The Morning After

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...

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 arti...

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 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 fo...

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 Undergr...

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 narrati...

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 fun...

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 wa...

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...

Summary 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...

Summary 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 wri...

Summary 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 compe...

Summary 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. E...

Summary 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 drummi...

Summary 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'...

Summary 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...

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...

Summary 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 follo...

Summary 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 Rugb...

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, e...

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...

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...

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 treatin...

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 ag...

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 dismiss...