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 her; to grow up without seeing a single image of yourself in any HIV information; to spend years planning your funeral while your friends planned their weddings.

These are remarkable people. And the episode ends with a white, gay man whose activism is aimed very much at ensuring all voices are heard, not just those that look like him.

Resources

Terrence Higgins Trust - HIV information, support and campaigning www.tht.org.uk

NAM aidsmap - Clear, evidence-based information about HIV www.aidsmap.com

Positively UK - Peer support for people living with HIV in the UK www.positivelyuk.org

National AIDS Trust - Policy and advocacy www.nat.org.uk

Samaritans - Free, confidential support if you're struggling Call: 116 123 | www.samaritans.org

Links

Listen to the full episodes:

• Gus Cairns - Series 1, Episode 9
• Marc Thompson - Series 1, Episode 10
• Peter Willis - Series 1, Episode 8
• Martin Fenerty - Series 2, Episode 4

Music by Paul Leonidou: www.unstoppablemonsters.com

Subscribe and listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTubeThis 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.

Resources

Terrence Higgins Trust - HIV information, support and campaigning www.tht.org.uk

NAM aidsmap - Clear, evidence-based information about HIV www.aidsmap.com

Positively UK - Peer support for people living with HIV in the UK www.positivelyuk.org

National AIDS Trust - Policy and advocacy www.nat.org.uk

Samaritans - Free, confidential support if you're struggling Call: 116 123 | www.samaritans.org

Links

Listen to the full episodes:

• Gus Cairns - Series 1, Episode 9
• Marc Thompson - Series 1, Episode 10
• Peter Willis - Series 1, Episode 8
• Martin Fenerty - Series 2, Episode 4

Music by Paul Leonidou: www.unstoppablemonsters.com

Subscribe and listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Mentioned in this episode:

RIO CALLING! Crowd-funder

We're taking over the feed for 'Rio Calling': six daily despatches from AIDS 2026, the world's biggest HIV conference. Each day Dan Glass and I will bring you the stories that matter most to people living with HIV and the people working to end it - straight from the conference floor in Rio. The wonderful folks at BHIVA have helped get us there, but there remains a funding gap. The rest is down to you. If you can chip in via the Crowdfunder link below, you'll be helping to put these six episodes in people's ears - and we'd be genuinely grateful. Thank you for listening, and for keeping this going.

RIO CALLING Fundraising Link

Susan Cole-Haley

When I got my diagnosis, I said that it must be a mistake. Could they please test again? Because I really didn't think it would be something that would ever affect me.

Angelina Namiba

Oftentimes when you hear about African people, living with HIV is often the negative. We are portrayed as statistics, you know, as recipients of services.

Silvia Petretti

But I do remember, for me, a very important tipping point was when I decided to be open about my status. Because I at that point I realised that my invisibility was colluding with stigma.

dan glass

Part of our purpose in life is people living with HIV, queer people, any marginalised people is to tell our own stories because the state, the establishment aren't going to do it.

Dan Hall

Welcome to this special compilation episode featuring highlights from series one and two of HIV the morning after. It's here to keep the feet interesting. The full series three drops next month. This is the fourth of five such episodes playing out across May. It is crucial when listening to testimony to get as varied a group of people as possible, to ensure that often silenced voices are given spaces to be heard.

Dan Hall

With that in mind, this episode is titled Who Gets to Tell this Story?

Dan Hall

For.

Dan Hall

Susan Cole-Haley

So I rocked up for the results. And the doctor, the immigration doctor, who probably knew very little about HIV, said to me, well, the good news is you don't have syphilis. And I was like, yay! No syphilis. But the bad news is you're HIV positive. Before my HIV diagnosis, I asked my GP about getting an HIV test and he said to me, oh no dear, that doesn't affect ladies like you.

Susan Cole-Haley

And it could mean that you won't get, like a mortgage or health insurance or anything like that. So, even trying to explore getting information about HIV.

Angelina Namiba

Like I.

Susan Cole-Haley

Heard stigmatising things.

Susan Cole-Haley

But when I told my father, one of the first things he said to me was, make sure you don't tell anyone about this. So it really brought home to me that this was quite a stigmatising thing.

Dan Hall

What does that feel like?

Susan Cole-Haley

It didn't feel good. It made me feel quite ashamed. But I my my dad's passed away now, but I think that his motivation was really to protect me by not telling anyone that. I think, you know, that stemmed from his experiences of hearing about HIV. He was living in Jamaica at the time, and there is so much stigma, in the Caribbean.

Susan Cole-Haley

I had breast cancer about 12 years ago. And I remember the first time I met with an oncologist to discuss my treatment. One of the first things the doctor asked me was how I got HIV, how I wasn't passing it on to my HIV negative husband, and he also wrote HIV positive with a big circle around it.

Susan Cole-Haley

When I went to get a blood test, I worked for an Aids map. Then I went to work for the UK Coalition of People Living with HIV UK, which was an absolute hoot. The vast majority of people working there were living with HIV themselves, and it was extraordinarily liberating for me to be with other people, living shamelessly with HIV.

Susan Cole-Haley

I wrote for a magazine called Positive Nation, and when I was pregnant with my son, I did a naked cover of the magazine to show that women living with HIV could have children born free of HIV, and some people didn't actually like the fact that I did this naked cover. I was in four inch coochie heels, reclining on chic skin, heavily pregnant.

Susan Cole-Haley

They actually airbrushed out my cellulite for the magazine cover, so it looked. It did look good. And, soon after the magazine came out, women got in touch with me and said that her doctor was trying to persuade her to have a termination because she had HIV. And when she saw the article, she realised that she didn't need to.

Susan Cole-Haley

And then she went on to have an HIV negative baby.

Dan Hall

Dan Hall

But first, we're going to start back at that moment when Angelina received her diagnosis because there was more of her story to share.

Angelina Namiba

What made it even hard for me to face up to what could be was the fact that my own brother, who was also here studying, at the North London, poly he had also been diagnosed with HIV, but unfortunately, because it was the pre-treatment era, he was so ill the whole time. You know, he had all the call the indicator conditions.

Angelina Namiba

He had meningitis. He had Kaposi's sarcoma, which is a form of cancer. He had, epileptic feeds. And he spent the last year of his life, in between. Do you know, if you had of the ward in a good street? Gideon Mandela had sent lots of photographs and written about it. So in between good splits with all the witches and HIV specialist Ward, and then in the London lighthouse.

Angelina Namiba

And then he subsequently died in the Mildmay Hospice. So this is what I knew of HIV, and I thought I just couldn't face up to it. We as people immediately experience stigma in so many different ways, but one of that is the internalised stigma. So if you think about it like for me, when I was diagnosed, all I knew about HIV was the negativity was people getting ill, people dying.

Angelina Namiba

And so when you're diagnosed with HIV, almost don't want to be associated with HIV. But also the stigma, the moralising, the judgement that if to get HIV, you must have done something wrong. But actually, you know, and it was until you meet other people living with HIV for me anyway, that till you actually no, you should not buy into that judgement that the more HIV is a virus, not a moral issue then.

Angelina Namiba

And there's still women today who are not technical services. In fact, when I worked at Positively Women, because we had the helpline, we had support groups, the same women who'd called the helpline, and I supported them for years but never saw them because they couldn't physically come into the organisation.

Dan Hall

Do you think that was because the internalised shame was so strong that they couldn't even bring themselves to be in a space with other HIV positive women who were in exactly the same situation as them.

Angelina Namiba

Yeah, so there's the shame, but then there's the fear as well. So there's a lot of there's not just a shame, and a lot of the shame is what people foist their on to you. I mean, I have to say, I mean, in the, in the early days when I was, open about my status and I remember I would do interviews, with the media, and then the journalists would always ask me, how did you get HIV?

Angelina Namiba

And I used to get really angry. And many of us get upset about that because why is that so key to you? And we realise that earlier on that they ask us that almost that they can places into a box of, yeah, she did something wrong. So then I stopped being angry. And the next time a journalist asks me, you know, so how did you get HIV?

Angelina Namiba

And I said to him, well, how I got to be is I getting HIV is not because of what I did right is because of what I didn't do. And what I didn't do was what millions of other young women and young people my age are not doing. I didn't use a condom.

Angelina Namiba

From the time, you know, HIV was, shall I say, came to be in the UK like 40 or so years ago, and you never really hear the positive stories of African people. So what we wanted to do was to celebrate our contribution to amplify our leadership. Just to show that we've also been here equally, responding to the response that if that makes sense, alongside other, you know, healthcare providers, clinicians, researchers.

Angelina Namiba

So we put together this book called Our Stories Told by Celebrating the African Contribution to the UK HIV response, which does exactly what it says on the tin. But we also wanted to tell our stories in our own words, in our own way, because if we didn't do that, somebody else was gonna do it in their own words.

Dan Hall

Today. Sylvie Peretti runs positivity UK as chief executive, but we join her in this episode in her home country of Italy 30 years earlier, she has just left a hospital in Rome where she has tested positive.

Silvia Petretti

The thing that I felt immediately was an incredible fear and shame. I didn't tell anyone. I went home and I just, you know, cried for weeks on end. I just I got very, very faint memories of the first six months that in the trauma and the shock were so strong and I didn't have anyone to talk to, and I just felt like if I could, I'm so very scared to show my status, scared of the judgement, scared of, you know, or people.

Silvia Petretti

Yeah, maybe avoiding me or rejecting me. And as well, everything around you in society is telling you that somehow this is your fault and that what you have is, shameful and almost. Yeah, it makes you unlovable, untouchable. And that's how it felt. You feel like your own body was toxic, and, you were hosting the enemy inside.

Silvia Petretti

And these very, very dark place to be.

Dan Hall

When you are frightened and when you feel this, this pressure to then be untouchable on that and feel that you cannot have even the touch of comfort, the touch of someone's arms around you. That must compound the problem hugely.

Silvia Petretti

Yeah, it was really hard. And especially I remember at the time and most of my girlfriends, which I hadn't told my status yet when getting married and having children and planning the lives and the future. And I felt completely alienated, like, you know, the, I was planning a funeral.

Silvia Petretti

Silvia Petretti

And so, yeah. And so I decided not to, you know, to speak with the media, to have my pictures taken, to be on the front of a positive women's magazine. I did this sculpture with the artist and, my, my queen that portrayed my body. It was a Castleman body with antiretrovirals and, and was a sponsored, at the Wellcome Trust for a few years there at the entrance.

Silvia Petretti

But it was like this, this idea that, in order for stigma to end people living with HIV, women living with HIV, we need to be visible and we need to be heard and nobody's going to do it for us. We need to win. You know? Nobody's going to give you the space you need to step up and take it.

Dan Hall

Today, Dan Glass is an activist and author and co-founder of Act Up London. But we join them in Brighton when they're in their early 20s. The moment that they test positive. At that time, the only representation of HIV that they could think of was Mark Fowler. Mark was a character from the BBC soap opera EastEnders. We joined Dan on their first thoughts on testing positive and what it meant to them.

dan glass

Death, death, it just meant death and isolation and, internalised stigma and that it's your own fault. And it was just savage and I when you mentioned Mark Fowler. I still love you. Talk to me. You actually were such a salvation for me, even though it was really miserable seeing you get on your motorbike and leave the square on your own.

dan glass

That was my only frame of reference. It was like. It was. It was. It was deeply lonely. It was deeply scary. And I just didn't have a Danny LaRue about what it actually meant, let alone on a scientific level. I just knew that it meant death. Really? Because that was a that was at the heart of the height of the crisis, really.

dan glass

The 80s and 90s. I didn't have any friends. I didn't know any friends who were HIV positive. And I really that time, any queer friends ever. So I didn't really have any kind of ropes to hang on to.

Dan Hall

I was obviously aware of Act up being so. I'm born in 73, and I knew of Act Up through a lot of the films I was watching in the 90s. Even things like Zero patients act up a big part of that and feature in that. And always, and I've always believed that direct action is very much needed alongside sort of suits and, and nice dinners and polite conversation and, and and looking at things like outrage, the amazing direct action that they did and their, their knowledge.

Dan Hall

And I think I ate up very much happiness as well. That knowledge that you need the wow moment. Yeah. And now it seems obvious. Now we know that you need the photographic, the single photograph image that represents it all. But people like act up and people like outrage realised that years ago. I would imagine it must be an incredibly intimidating thing to to reform such a fantastic organisation.

Dan Hall

But actually it sounds like for you it wasn't. It sounds like it was just a natural step of something that had to happen.

dan glass

Yeah. I think, you know, seeing the footage of the meetings in the LGBT centre in New York of the the fierceness, the vibrancy, the urgency, the joy, the cruising. You know, because I had such a deep need for reconnection because if, as I've talked about section 28 and let alone my my biological ancestry is like complete obliteration because of the Nazi Holocaust, I have a real deep connection, deep need for community built, rebuilding community, as so many of us do.

dan glass

I remember actually, the second meeting, there was four of us, and there was two younger, guys there who must have been around 25, and two older guys who were coming back to act up. And it was really interesting facilitating that meeting. The two young guys were dealing with, cancer. One of them came six and one of them with early diagnosis and, and were dealing with their own traumas.

dan glass

And one of the older guys said, listen, I don't know what you younger generation, we've got to deal with. We lost all of our friends. And I was like, hang on a second, hang on a second. This is not the oppression Olympics. It's not a competition of how much trauma we've dealt with. Let's like, stop and listen to each other's realities because we're all part of the same.

dan glass

It's reality, the same symptom of institutional marginalisation, of oppression against us all. And for me, facilitating intergenerational conversations, how we can learn from each other and learn about our connections and our similarities so that we can move forward in unity is is fundamental part of our purpose in life. As people living with HIV, queer people, any marginalised people is to tell our own stories because the state, the establishment aren't going to do it.

dan glass

And I think the main things that were missing was really when you zoom out the brilliance of our community because we weren't told about the actual true human stories of everyone who should be, who isn't, and every single single person has a huge wealth of creativity, of characteristics, of a whole personality, not just a statistic. And and really, we're all or all it was, was statistics.

dan glass

The main threat that I see throughout my what my spark was to spark me to become active in activist is challenging silence, you know. And that's why the the pink triangle silence equals death. Is it my call? Challenging silence and stigma is everything.

Dan Hall

Full conversations with Susan Cole, Haley, Angelina Namibia, Sylvia Petretti and Dan Glass are available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and wherever you normally listen to podcasts.

Thank you to Paul Leonidou at unstoppablemonsters.com for his wonderful theme tune, and to Moray Laing for his continued support. Please rate and review the show as it helps to spread the word.

Series three of HIV: The Morning After begins in June, I've been Dan Hall.