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 services that hadn't imagined you existed. A GP treating dying patients while privately compartmentalising his own diagnosis. A decade spent keeping life deliberately small - no plans, no ambitions, nothing too far ahead - and the slow, confusing work of learning to want things again when the assumption of early death turned out to be wrong.

And everywhere, just beneath the surface, the people who were months too early for the drugs that would have saved them.

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:

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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.

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Gus Carins

People were dying left, right and centre all around you. So much so that you didn't want to go to any funerals anymore. I remember saying, I'm not going to go to any more funerals unless it's a really close friend.

Marc Thompson

And lots of gay men reflect now until, well, one of the rules we had was not to sleep with Americans. One of the rules we had in my community was, well, this is a white man's thing.

Peter Willis

I had the startling experience of, sometimes patients, people coming to me, because their current GPs wouldn't treat them.

Martin Fenerty

Underpinning everything was this assumption that I was going to die. So I didn't plan very far ahead.

Dan Hall

Welcome to this special compilation special featuring highlights from series one and two of HIV the morning after. It's here to keep the feed interesting and full series three drops in June. This is the third of five such episodes playing out across May. Today's program features four people who were told in different years and in different rooms that their lives would probably be short for people who are still here.

Dan Hall

Dan Hall

Gus Carins

Paul was from a very different walks of life from me. He was the son of a pub landlady, and an electrician. He was sort of a very. You sort of looked like a very rough and ready sort of skinhead guy. I met him on the dance floor, having more cliches that, And I was just knocked sideways by, as much by the power of his personality.

Gus Carins

He was, an extraordinarily kind of a story combination of the of being confronted and being warm as a person. He was very difficult. And frankly, he was an alcoholic, as if that had been, and if Aids had not caught him, I wonder if we would have stayed together. But he was also, like, a lot of alcoholics, sensitive underneath, vulnerable, warm and lovable.

Gus Carins

And we were together for four and a half years. We, went on a few holidays. He met my family. They were charmed by him because he was on his best behaviour. And then he started getting, dark marks on his limbs cos lesions. This would be 87. I remember he went on holiday, with me to see a friend of ours.

Gus Carins

Gus Carins

So we were both devoted to. They allowed me to smuggle the dog into the ward in through the cargo lift. Very, very naughty. And also then Princess Di came, and Paul was one of the people, who was chosen to talk to her. And the video. You'll see this, very skinny guy, very chatty, sort of Kent cockney wearing shorts that showed the cat's lesions on his legs.

Gus Carins

And when I asked him why he did that, he said, I want to. I want them to see what it was like. At one point I said to my friends, listen, I can't stand this anymore. I'm going to have to go to the pub and have a drink. It's the one time in my life I've poured beer down my throat and stayed completely sober.

Gus Carins

I remember that, came back. He was living in that a consciousness. And he said to me, oh, so he disappeared. So I'm giving you up. Then I said, I'm still here. At 2:00 in the morning, he wakes me up. I tried to struggle out of bed. I said, what are you doing? He said, I want to go to the loo.

Gus Carins

Is mum try? They can get you to the loo. And then he couldn't do it. And then he tried again and I said, look, Brenda, that was an I don't, don't help him. He needs to do this by himself. So he struggled to the loo, barely able to walk. I had to pee. I said did you did you manage to have a pee?

Gus Carins

He said yes. Fell back on the bed. That was his last moment of consciousness. About 5:00 in the morning, he wakes me up again, making some awful, terrible noise. Animal. I kind of noise the terror and screeching and and the the. I asked the nurse who was there. Is this it is. He digested. No. He's not.

Gus Carins

He's having a dream. And I remember thinking he's never going to wake up and be able to tell me what that dream was like at about midday on January. This, I suddenly noticed he wasn't breathing anymore. And that was bull as this. As soon as the doctor came along and certified him, I remember insisting on going down to Hackney Channel and having his death registered, and absolutely insisting that eins was recorded on his death certificate, because I know he would want it to be a.

Gus Carins

He told me the power of defiance and the power of absolutely standing up for yourself. He was in many ways a valuable, traumatised, difficult person. He'd had a difficult childhood. He had a big drink problem. He I don't know if we'd have stayed together, but I think we'd always have been friends again, even if we hadn't. But he had enormous self-respect and I learnt lessons from him that you can only learn from somebody you love.

Dan Hall

Just a year later, from Gus's story, we join Mark Thompson in south London's iconic Brixton. He's recently out and it's 17 years old. He tests positive what little clear sex education there is appears in nightclubs that are predominantly marketed at white gay men.

Marc Thompson

In the early 80s. Yes, the gay scene was based predominantly in central London, mainly in west London, as you said, and it was caught and partly in Soho then. But for many black queer people and queer people of colour, those places were not particularly welcoming to us as as black queer people, either because of racist door policies.

Marc Thompson

You know, you had to kind of prove that you were gay. And that put lots of people off, or you'd get into the spaces and you had to deal with racist punters. You know, let's not live in this world where there was this guy utopia. So for many of us going into those spaces were not comfortable and they weren't safe.

Marc Thompson

If I looked at any news coverage and there was news coverage, it was white gay men. They were older than me. They were in the United States. And lots of gay men reflect now until, well, one of the rules we had was not to sleep with Americans. One of the rules we had in my community was, well, this is a white man's thing.

Marc Thompson

When I started to access services, I would go and I would be the only black gay man there. I'd be the only person who was young. I would be any person who frequently the only person in those spaces who hadn't had any form of illness. But then even when I wasn't in those spaces and I looked around my friendship group, nobody I knew was positive.

Marc Thompson

Every, every or they certainly didn't know what tell me. So that felt like a huge weight and a huge burden, because there was nobody I could look at and just say, okay, you're going to be okay, or are you scared as I am and had your family feel about it? And how are you going to tell your boyfriends in the future?

Marc Thompson

And I knew that all of this intersected with my blackness and my queerness, and they were not inseparable. So if I'd looked out on the world and saw only white gay men like getting this thing, was I going to be the only black man had it? And I became known in the small black and gay community as Mark with the virus.

Dan Hall

Did you find in this period an awareness of a growing HIV community, and was it providing support to you?

Marc Thompson

I mean, I become aware of that. I was part of the HIV community before that, just by going to places like the landmark, and also because by this time I'd set up the first black gay men's group for positive black gay men at the lighthouse. And I remember there were only four of us. It turned up on the Sunday afternoon, but it was probably one of the most important days of my life.

Marc Thompson

So I started to slowly become more aware of the community. I wasn't really political. Paul Small p at the time, but my black gay community was expanding. There were more and more men who were stepping up to the bat.

Dan Hall

Why was that afternoon with four of you in the room so important?

Marc Thompson

Being in community with those guys who came from similar backgrounds for me, either from the Caribbean or from the African continent, we had similar family experiences. We were all worried about our HIV in a very unique way, you know? And that's not to say it was lesser or more than anybody else's experience, but it was ours because it was rooted in our black British experience of of feeling isolated for all these years and then suddenly going, oh my God, I'm not alone.

Dan Hall

GP Peter Willis appeared in the previous episode, but now we joined him earlier in his time line is he experiences HIV on both sides of the consulting table.

Peter Willis

A GP, in those 31st days, I had the startling experience of, sometimes patients, people coming to me, and because their current kids wouldn't treat them until 1 or 2 cases, we got the right call. The envelopes were there and sometimes reach me. Was HIV positive written in red on the outside of the packet. And, this, of course, was very unethical.

Peter Willis

It was, apart from anything else, he told everybody who handled the, the, records without even know that it's that, the patient had HIV and was probably gay.

Dan Hall

What is it like for you, from a professional perspective, to be presented with a condition of which, really, you can do nothing,

Marc Thompson

Or very little.

Peter Willis

And they change from, jumps you medicine. When I started, one of them, since I used to say about it, was that it was a wonderful speciality because you people would come in enormous distress and, you could make everybody better. And then HIV came along. Well, clearly. And initially you really couldn't do anything. It's like, oh, I like calling little Malcolm.

Peter Willis

Died of Aids after 16 years together. And to me, it was quite clear that he had Aids. He didn't want to be tested. And in the early days, there was no point. But he actually he was extremely busy in the theatre world and clearly engrossed in it. And he just didn't seem to want to be involved in that sit down and sort and self-awareness of his own.

Peter Willis

Was he wanted to get on with life. The lovely thing was that my youngest brother and his then, of course, much younger children, were going on holiday to the mainland of Europe and and instead of leaving early in the morning, on the night when ultimately Malcolm died, they left early from Northampton to come down to London and spend the night with me.

Peter Willis

And we all and I remember standing by the bedside for some time in silence, and then turning and realising that niece and two nephews were standing there silently beside me. They had to leave after early in the morning to go down to Dover to get that ferry. But, I stayed on until ultimately I was lying in bed with Malcolm and he was having terrible pain from pleurisy.

Peter Willis

I don't know whether he was conscious enough to hear me, but ultimately, and I must say this is difficult to do, and I sympathise and feel very much for others who have done it. But to say quietly and in his ear, it's all right enough. You can go. It'll be all right without you. And very soon you stopped trying to breathe and died.

Peter Willis

And we had a wonderful service with us, standing room only, and his medical team and the nurses in the middle. Since the, students from the Guildhall, his parents, my mother and, I'm sure I walked in and sat down in the front and I thought, I'm not going to be able to say anything, because then I heard Malcolm's voice, as it were, calling from on high somewhere, saying, it's absolutely unforgivable to let personal emotions interfere with the performance.

Peter Willis

And I thought, right. And I got up and gave my 20 minute little talk. And as we all walked out with a bowl of some bowl of tolling, which I hadn't expected, and the organist managing on the oldest organ in London play, there will be a place for a time and place for us. And take my hand and I'll let you live in organist heroically managing to play this.

Peter Willis

And as I walk past the churchwarden, she she said, I've never heard anything so wonderful about love, and I'm very proud of that.

Dan Hall

Martin Fenerty

My life was sort of, was sort of frozen in a way, or I was frozen, from that point with, just in terms of how I, I guess, thought about myself and thought about life and.

Martin Fenerty

Underpinning everything was this assumption that I was going to die. So I didn't plan very for ahead. I didn't have any aspirations beyond violence. But also I was sort of, I found myself really faithful, of doing anything good was sort of too far in the future or too ambitious. I, I very much suffocate my mental health.

Martin Fenerty

And I think I had quite strong thoughts of suicide and, I've never had that never been any immediate danger of me, acting on those thoughts. But I held onto that idea of suicide as a as a safety net, as if everything, if ever, if anything gets too difficult, if things get too complicated, issues difficult, then at least I can end my own life.

Martin Fenerty

That's something I can can do.

Martin Fenerty

Martin Fenerty

That led to a sort of transformation in my health. So it was then that I actually realised the full extent of how well I'd been. Up till till then, my energy levels really rebounded, my body physically rebounded. So I started to see, strangely, I started to become, ill with a variety of different things, and it was because my immune system had been rebooted and I had lost immunity to some things, cos my immune system had been under attack.

Martin Fenerty

So it was like I was meeting some of these books and some of these things for the first time, like, as a child. And so I was responding to me physically in the same way my wife is, is really very good. You start realisation that that I was waiting to die with the realisation that I had to live and that I had to take control of and I, and that I wanted to actually wanted to take control of my life and to to make choices and to live and to learn how to live.

Martin Fenerty

And I think that's something that I have done over the last, 20 years. I'm as healthy as I as I can be from 55 year old Mark. I have health problems, but nothing that enables a 55 year old man, which you could not expect to have. To give. I'm physically very nimble. I roll, I go to the gym, and I go, I, I work full time, very demanding, simple but fulfilling.

Martin Fenerty

Career. And, I'm in a relationship. I'm married. Married to some guy who is HIV negative. We have a nice little home here in Liverpool, and and life has worked out really well for me.

Dan Hall

Full conversations with Gus Cairns, Marc Thompson, Peter Willis and Martin Fenerty 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.