Love, Loss & Life: Real Stories From The AIDS Pandemic

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Actor Jonathan Blake describes the excitement of his youth when he first encountererd the gay scene in London and San Francisco. His story is both delicious and dangerous and life was joyful. He tells how he had to rally against ‘a terrifying disease’ and the world stopped. Jonathan reveals how the impact changed his behaviours, but his humour and exuberant love of life continues.

This podcast series features stories taken from our first book, a collection of essays, reflections, and testimonies also entitled ‘Love, Loss & Life’ which you can buy here.

An audiobook is also available here.

Visit the National HIV Story Trust website

Your feedback means a great deal to us. Please text us your thoughts by clicking on this link.

In the early years of the AIDS pandemic, the focus was on the physical needs of people with the illness. But by the 1990s it was becoming clear that people with AIDS could also become acutely psychiatrically unwell, often as a result of the illness attacking the brain, and that the NHS didn’t have the facilities to cope with this aspect of the condition. Flick Thorley recalls the pioneering work she was involved with at that time which helped remedy the situation, and the care given by the London Lighthouse.

This podcast series features stories taken from our first book, a collection of essays, reflections, and testimonies also entitled ‘Love, Loss & Life’ which you can buy here.

An audiobook is also available here.

Visit the National HIV Story Trust website

Your feedback means a great deal to us. Please text us your thoughts by clicking on this link.

As a young woman, Winnie only gradually became aware of the word Slim, as AIDS was called in Africa, which was devastating communities in Uganda in the 1980s. When she was diagnosed HIV positive, she believed she was under a death sentence until she came to the UK and found both support and effective treatment. Her mission ever since has been to convince others that HIV need not be a barrier to living a full and fulfilling life.

This podcast series features stories taken from our first book, a collection of essays, reflections, and testimonies also entitled ‘Love, Loss & Life’ which you can buy here.

An audiobook is also available here.

Visit the National HIV Story Trust website

Your feedback means a great deal to us. Please text us your thoughts by clicking on this link.

Jane Bruton began her nursing career in Leicester and first encountered HIV
patients when she became Ward Sister in the infectious diseases unit there.
After a short spell as a health advisor in the Sexual Health Clinic at the
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, in 1989 she became Sister on Broderip
Ward, the dedicated HIV ward at the Middlesex Hospital.  Jane returned to
the Chelsea and Westminster in 1999 for a further 14 years in various Senior
Nurse roles in HIV.  She has also worked with HIV patients in rural Uganda, and she is now the Clinical Research Manager in the Patient Experience Research Centre at Imperial College, London.

This podcast series features stories taken from our first book, a collection of essays, reflections, and testimonies also entitled ‘Love, Loss & Life’ which you can buy here.

An audiobook is also available here.

Visit the National HIV Story Trust website

Your feedback means a great deal to us. Please text us your thoughts by clicking on this link.

“It was profoundly moving that a bunch of people, pilloried by society and told that AIDS was their own fault, were utterly non-judgmental themselves.”

When Kelly Hunter’s close friends in the theatre began dying of AIDS related illness, she put her career on hold for two years to volunteer with the Terrence Higgins Trust. She used her theatrical contacts to raise money for AIDS charities and was the driving force behind some of the most memorable fundraising initiatives of the late 1980s.

This podcast series features stories taken from our first book, a collection of essays, reflections, and testimonies also entitled ‘Love, Loss & Life’ which you can buy here.

An audiobook is also available here.

Visit the National HIV Story Trust website

Your feedback means a great deal to us. Please text us your thoughts by clicking on this link.

This podcast represents just one example of many stories from the full form Audiobook "Love, Loss & Life" published by the National HIV Story Trust.

 Alan Burgess was diagnosed as a child in 1967 with a moderate form of haemophilia. A painter and decorator by trade, he was married with children in the 1980s when he was given NHS contaminated blood products and became infected with HIV, eventually losing his business and much else besides. He joined the Birchgrove Support Group, a campaigning group set up by haemophiliacs with HIV, and has given evidence to the Infected Blood Inquiry which got underway in 2018. 

This podcast series features stories taken from our first book, a collection of essays, reflections, and testimonies also entitled ‘Love, Loss & Life’ which you can buy here.

An audiobook is also available here.

Visit the National HIV Story Trust website

Your feedback means a great deal to us. Please text us your thoughts by clicking on this link.

This podcast represents just one example of many stories from the full form Audiobook "Love, Loss & Life" published by the National HIV Story Trust.

 Although her partner died of AIDS-related illness in 1998, Adrienne was not diagnosed herself until four years later, by which time she had a viral load of over 2 million. She found being a woman with HIV a lonely experience at first, and hid her status from her son for many years. 

This podcast series features stories taken from our first book, a collection of essays, reflections, and testimonies also entitled ‘Love, Loss & Life’ which you can buy here.

An audiobook is also available here.

Visit the National HIV Story Trust website

Your feedback means a great deal to us. Please text us your thoughts by clicking on this link.

This podcast represents just two examples of many stories from the full form Audiobook "Love, Loss & Life" published by the National HIV Story Trust.

 After studying International Relations at Keele University, Sir Nick Partridge was living in Amsterdam when news of an illness affecting gay men in America started to percolate through to Europe. He returned to England, volunteered for Gay Switchboard, and then in 1985 secured a job as office administrator with the Terrence Higgins Trust (THT), the first charity in the UK to be set up in response to the AIDS pandemic. He went on to become its Chief Executive from 1991 to 2013. Honoured with an OBE in 1999 for his services to charity and knighted in 2009, he was named by the Independent in 2010 as one of the top 100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain. 

Having graduated with a degree in social sciences and having qualified in social work in 1981, Janet Green was a volunteer on London Lesbian Line before starting at the Terrence Higgins Trust at the same time as Nick Partridge, sharing an office with him as the charity’s first two paid employees. In her role as Counselling Co-ordinator, she was for the next eight years instrumental in setting up many of the charity’s counselling and befriending initiatives. Afterwards, she continued to specialise in HIV as a local authority social worker, later working more generally in disability services, until her retirement in 2007. From their different perspectives, Nick and Janet look back at the early years of the Terrence Higgins Trust and the support it offered to those with HIV and AIDS. 

This podcast series features stories taken from our first book, a collection of essays, reflections, and testimonies also entitled ‘Love, Loss & Life’ which you can buy here.

An audiobook is also available here.

Visit the National HIV Story Trust website

Your feedback means a great deal to us. Please text us your thoughts by clicking on this link.

This podcast series features stories taken from our first book, a collection of essays, reflections, and testimonies also entitled ‘Love, Loss & Life’ which you can buy here.

An audiobook is also available here.

Visit the National HIV Story Trust website

Your feedback means a great deal to us. Please text us your thoughts by clicking on this link.

This podcast represents just one example of many stories from the full form Audiobook "Love, Loss & Life" published by the National HIV Story Trust.

George Hodson can legitimately claim to have been there at ‘Ground Zero’, living
in San Francisco when the very first cases of HIV/AIDS began to appear among
the gay community in America in the early 1980s. Diagnosed with AIDS himself
a decade later, when there was still no effective treatment for the virus, he has
somehow survived through several different cancers and a heart bypass operation
into his seventies, but watched his lover, his friends and his fellow patients in the
London Lighthouse dying of AIDS related illnesses.

This podcast series features stories taken from our first book, a collection of essays, reflections, and testimonies also entitled ‘Love, Loss & Life’ which you can buy here.

An audiobook is also available here.

Visit the National HIV Story Trust website