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HIV: The Morning After

HIV: The Morning After

Written by: Dan Hall
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 An oral history and public-education audio archive documenting the lived experience of people living with HIV in the UK. The series captures testimony at a moment when institutional memory, peer support, and long-term survivor narratives are being eroded, despite medical progress. Led by Emmy award-winning documentary producer Dan Hall, the project is building a long-form archive of recorded testimonies for public, community, and educational use.Copyright 2026 Dan Hall Hygiene & Healthy Living Science Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Silvia Petretti: Peers, Power, Persistence

    Silvia Petretti: Peers, Power, Persistence
    Mar 13 2026
    SummarySilvia 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 medication.For months, Silvia told almost no one. She felt unlovable, untouchable, toxic. While her friends were getting married and planning futures, she was planning her funeral. Then a doctor at St George's Hospital suggested she visit a support group called Positively Women. Walking into that room, seeing women of all backgrounds living well with HIV, changed everything. Within six months, she was volunteering. By 2001, she was working there. Today, she is Chief Executive of Positively UK, the organisation that Positively Women became, leading peer support services embedded in NHS clinics across London and beyond.Timestamped Takeaways00:02:19 - Rome to London. Silvia's mother died when she was twenty. Grief brought her to London for what was meant to be a two-week English course. She stayed.00:03:22 - 1980s London. The city was vibrant with clubs, warehouse parties, the acid house scene. For a young woman from traditional Rome, it had everything to offer.00:04:09 - Brixton and African culture. Living in Brixton, Silvia fell in love with Afro-Caribbean culture, blues parties, squats, artists. She studied African languages and Yoruba culture.00:05:21 - Malaria and diagnosis. In 1997, Silvia contracted cerebral malaria in Senegal. In hospital in Rome, not recovering, a nurse offered an HIV test at the bedside with no counselling. The result was positive.00:07:13 - Terror and shame. There was no information, no support. Silvia told no one and cried for weeks. The first six months are a blur of trauma and shock.00:08:29 - Thirty years old. Silvia was working multiple jobs, trying to save for a master's degree. She had no financial stability. Everything around her said this was her fault, that she was shameful, unlovable, untouchable.00:10:34 - Invisible as a woman. In 1997, HIV was still framed as a gay disease. There was nothing for women, no condoms given, no conversation about what came next.00:11:02 - Eighteen pills a day. Silvia's first regime included drugs like Invirase, Ritonavir, and DDI. Some needed food, some didn't. Alarms through the night. Impossible adherence. You didn't know if AIDS or the medication would kill you.00:12:57 - Body dystrophy. The drugs caused fat redistribution, deformed bodies, thin arms, enlarged stomachs. Women stopped being asked if they were pregnant. For women, whose appearance is so often tied to value, it was devastating.00:14:39 - Fragile and toxic. Silvia felt her body was hosting the enemy. Her future was gone. While friends planned weddings and children, she planned her funeral.00:16:51 - Back to London. After her father died, Silvia returned to London with £100 and a virus. She hadn't told her brother. She was grieving, lonely, and very low.00:17:16 - St George's Hospital. A doctor named Davidson saw Silvia regularly. For 45 minutes each visit, Silvia just cried. Eventually, the doctor suggested antidepressants and a support group called Positively Women.00:18:19 - The first support group. Walking in, Silvia couldn't believe it. Women from Africa, women with children, a crèche. Everyone looked well and lively. She kept asking: are they all living with HIV?00:19:17 - Learning to live. Slowly, attending regularly, Silvia heard women discussing dating with HIV, something she couldn't imagine. She learned her eighteen pills could become two. A peer told her to demand better treatment from her doctor.00:20:40 - Women's invisibility. Women are 52% of people with HIV globally, over eighteen million, yet most research is done on men. Treatments had worse side effects for women because they weren't studied on women's bodies.00:22:20 - Speaking up as a woman. Socialised to be quiet, to not speak about her needs, Silvia found it hard to contribute in meetings dominated by articulate British-born gay men. She advocates for critical mass: at least three women in any room, so voices can be heard.00:24:38 - Sheila and Janey. Positively Women was founded in 1987 by Sheila Gilchrist and Janey Davis, women who ...
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    51 mins
  • Diego Agurto Beroiza: Archives, Activism, Alarm

    Diego Agurto Beroiza: Archives, Activism, Alarm
    Mar 6 2026
    SummaryDiego 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 knowledge, he thought, until suddenly he felt he knew nothing. Treatment came within a month, but what stayed with him was the memory of his new community, the history of those who came before him, who didn't have what he now has. That history, he believes, must be preserved and performed.Timestamped Takeaways00:02:38 - Chile's dictatorship and patient zero. The coup began in 1973. Chile's first HIV case was recorded in 1984. The dictatorship declared it wasn't a national problem, just one case, just gay people. The bodies from that era are still being searched for today.00:03:29 - Diagnosis changes everything. Diego was an activist before testing positive. He thought he had the knowledge. When the diagnosis came, he felt he knew nothing. His identity shifted. He became part of a community with a different history.00:05:41 - Arriving in London. Diego arrived in 2023 with connections through Terrence Higgins Trust. For others without those links, language barriers and fragmented information make access harder. There's also fear that speaking publicly about HIV status could affect immigration.00:07:20 - Stigma built in the 80s. Chile's patient zero died during the dictatorship. The mass media, closely aligned with the regime, framed HIV as a "gay cancer." That construction of stigma persists.00:09:02 - Diaspora as reinvention. Moving to London allowed Diego to speak publicly about his status in ways that felt impossible in Chile. The legal protections in the UK made a difference. He used his condition to speak politically, in universities and other spaces.00:09:39 - Telling his family. Diego didn't want to tell his mother because she would cry, and he didn't have the energy to explain everything. This year, he finally had the conversation, setting boundaries first: he would explain what happened, that he's undetectable, that he won't die. Questions could come tomorrow.00:11:08 - The far right wins Chile. The week before this recording, Chile elected a far-right president with close ties to Pinochet-era politics. Diego's community is in danger. They know what these politicians think about LGBTQ+ people, about women's rights, about those living with HIV.00:12:36 - Guilt as a weapon. The far right uses guilt, Diego explains. Catholic ideas of sin, the notion that people living with HIV are responsible for their condition and should pay for their own treatment. In Argentina, funding for PrEP has been cut. The same ideas are spreading.00:14:28 - A pandemic returning. If funding is cut and treatment becomes unaffordable, the pandemic will come again. HIV rates are already rising in parts of Europe and Latin America. Nobody wants to call it a pandemic, but Diego believes it could become one.00:15:08 - Why should you pay? Diego answers the question directly: because we are a society. He pays taxes for schools and maternity care despite having no children. Healthcare is collective. One part of the community's problem is everyone's problem.00:16:56 - Conservative strategies are old. The Bible, the family, the same playbook for a thousand years. Queer communities need new strategies, need to think faster. Maybe performance isn't enough right now. Maybe the street is needed.00:18:06 - Why the UK should care. When Chile falls to the far right, it becomes an example for others. Trump's victory enabled others. Argentina, El Salvador, Chile, these are models being watched. The UK is not safe.00:20:30 - Human rights are universal. When one group is endangered, it's a problem for humanity. The genocide being watched on Instagram isn't just Palestine's problem. It's everyone's. The same applies to HIV.00:21:43 - Real action, not hashtags. Diego is concerned about the future. Sharing stories on Instagram and sending hugs isn't enough. Something really active is needed. Connections between groups, between activists, across borders.00:22:12 - Theatre as testimony. The Living Museum of Emotional Archives collects testimonies and performs them. When audiences hear ...
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    29 mins
  • Garry Brough: Peers, Passion, Perseverance

    Garry Brough: Peers, Passion, Perseverance
    Feb 27 2026
    SummaryGarry 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 turned out to be Kaposi's sarcoma. His CD4 count was 84. The Aids diagnosis arrived four years before he was supposed to die. He'd done everything right, and it hadn't worked. On his 30th birthday, a birthday he was never meant to see, Garry started combination therapy. Within days, he felt more alive than he had in years.The decades since have been spent building peer support infrastructure across the UK, from the Bloomsbury Clinic to Positively UK to the NHS. Garry now works on Fast Track Cities, the initiative aiming for zero transmissions, zero deaths, and zero stigma by 2030. He recently got married. The 23-year-old who couldn't imagine being loved would never have believed it.Timestamped Takeaways00:02:15 - Growing up in the Welsh valleys. Garry describes an insular community with fixed expectations. Boys became miners. They married their childhood sweethearts from the next street. He didn't fit.00:03:16 - Teased before he knew why. Long before Garry understood he was gay, his peers recognised difference. The daily torment started early.00:06:20 - Finding others. At seventeen, Garry met people from neighbouring towns who were going down to Cardiff at weekends. There was suddenly a group with something in common, and it was liberating.00:08:21 - Italian as an escape route. At eleven, Garry chose Italian over Welsh, reasoning that a foreign language would take him further from home than anywhere else in the UK.00:09:45 - London, week two. At Camden Palace, in satins and makeup, nobody pointed or shouted or spat. The sense of belonging was immediate and lasted for years.00:12:38 - Drinking as escape. From sixteen, alcohol released Garry from fear. In London, with clubs every night of the week, the drinking escalated. By his final year, he was passing out nightly.00:15:09 - Detox and relapse. A lecturer suggested drink might be the problem. Garry detoxed medically, got sober for a year, then convinced himself he could drink normally again. Within three days, he was back to lunchtime drinking.00:16:04 - Testing every year. From 1985, when the test became available, Garry went annually. Friends thought he was mad. He wanted to know.00:17:26 - The positive result. In February 1991, eight months sober, he assumed everything would be fine. It wasn't. He traced it back to those final chaotic weeks of drinking before his first detox.00:19:45 - Five years to live. The doctor laid it out plainly. Two to three years before symptoms, another couple after that. Garry was 23. He decided to finish his degree.00:22:18 - Planning the end. Garry told friends and family he wouldn't allow himself to become bedridden and nurse-dependent. When it got bad, he would take his life. He wrote a living will.00:23:22 - Miserable drinking. After graduating, Garry started drinking again, but this time it was solitary and joyless. After six months, he asked himself: do you want to die drunk and miserable, or have five years of life?00:26:42 - Watching friends disappear. The early to mid 90s was the peak. Young men with walking sticks. People you saw deteriorate. The phrase "so-and-so's in hospital" became commonplace.00:30:01 - The Aids diagnosis. In 1995, a bruise that wouldn't fade turned out to be Kaposi's sarcoma. Garry's CD4 count was 84. Combined with the candidiasis already present, it was an Aids-defining diagnosis. He had spent four years doing everything right. It felt like a cheat.00:33:26 - The long-term survivor quiz. Reading American newsletters, Garry found a list of twelve qualities associated with longer survival. He ticked eight. He resolved to get all twelve.00:36:48 - Seeing someone rise from a deathbed. A friend meant to be dying walked into a bar saying he was going dancing. He'd started the new combination therapy in hospital. Garry went to his doctor.00:38:16 - Treatment on his 30th birthday. Garry insisted on making it to thirty on his own terms, with chemotherapy alone. On his birthday, he started the new drugs. Within days, he felt more ...
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    1 hr and 6 mins
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