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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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 writer and musician who has spent nearly two decades navigating the gap between what the world thinks HIV means and what it actually...

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 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.<...

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.

Eli came out as a trans man at around the same time he was navigating adolescence with a diagnosis he couldn't tell...

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 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...

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'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...

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 the rest of the UK was as suffocating as the valleys. Perhaps another country would be better.

London, when he arrived, was transformative. Within...

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...

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 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...

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 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...

Ten episodes of brilliance from ten inspiring people living with HIV.

Episode 1 drops Friday 6 February, 2026.

Email: HIVTheMorningAfter@gmail.com

Links:

Series 2 of HIV: The Morning After will arrive on 6 February 2026. Guests include activist Dan Glass, author and sex columnist Alexander Cheves and Positively UK Chief Executive Silvia Petretti. Join them and other inspiring guests for a new ten-part series telling the stories of people living with HIV today.

Dan Hall

Email: HIVTheMorningAfter@gmail.com

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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: