Emma Cole was 22, straight, and newly graduated when a condom failed with a man she'd met at a classical concert. In 1991, with no treatment available and an original prognosis of eight to ten years, she was told to accept a positive HIV diagnosis - and went on live television with it six weeks later.

Summary

Emma Cole met Ian across a crowded concert hall in the spring of 1991 and fell into old-fashioned dating, walks on Hampstead Heath, condoms used every time bar one. When that one condom failed, Ian told her he was HIV positive...

Content note: this episode includes descriptions of childhood abuse, sexual assault, strong language, and discussion of current US HIV policy that some listeners may find distressing.

Juan Michael Porter II was turned down for PrEP by five different doctors in 2014. The following year, he was diagnosed with HIV. That same week he discovered his boyfriend had been unfaithful. Now a senior HIV journalist and host of the International AIDS Society's podcast HIV Unmuted, he talks about PrEP access, stigma, and 2026-era funding cuts that are starting to look like the 1980s again.

Summary

...

Content note: this episode discusses substance use, homelessness and a violent eviction.

In 2008, Saul Silva was diagnosed with HIV in Leeds, and told to keep it quiet. This episode follows the decade he spent running from that diagnosis, through homelessness and addiction in London, to becoming an advocate who helped build a widely used tool for disabled people applying for benefits.

Summary

Saul Silva was diagnosed with HIV in 2008, in Leeds, and told his restaurant manager that same evening. She laughed in his face and accused him of lying to get the weekend...

Content note: this episode includes a detailed account of drug-facilitated sexual assault, rape, and suicidal thoughts.

In October 2006, Stephen Hart's drink was spiked and he was raped. Months later he learned his attacker was HIV positive, and so was he. This episode traces how a boy raised under Section 28 in 1980s Glasgow became one of the UK's most visible HIV advocates.

Summary

Stephen Hart grew up in 1980s Glasgow under Section 28, watching famous gay men die of AIDS on television with no one in the classroom explaining why.

In October 2006, his...

In the mid-1980s, at 24, Luke Adams was told he had two years to live. Forty years on, he's a psychologist, ACT UP veteran and recent political refugee from the United States, now living in London.

Summary

Luke Adams was 24 and living in Santa Cruz, California, when a test came back positive for what doctors then called HTLV-III. His nurse, Ed, gave him two years to live, then brilliantly made Luke furious enough to act.

Luke channelled that fury into decades of AIDS activism: building safer-sex education programmes with student volunteers, joining ACT...

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...

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...

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 Bo...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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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...

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...

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...

Available now on Spotify and Apple Music.

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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 f...

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...

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 d...

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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...

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...

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...

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.<...

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...

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...

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...

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 t...

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...

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 yo...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...