HIVstory: Real Stories of the HIV & AIDS pandemic

HIVstory is a first-of-its-kind, three-year, UK-wide outreach programme that seeks to raise awareness and understanding of the history of HIV & AIDS pandemic.

One metric for a good project is how much I learn about a subject along the way.

Our work is wholly diverse, reflecting the experiences of men, women, trans, gay and straight, of all races, UK born and migrant. The stories of those involved are already in danger of being forgotten, yet the pandemic was the most significant event in modern day LGBTQ+ life and continues to affect this community, and wider society today. It changed the way that people were cared for and died, and much is owed to the activists from that time for saving so many more lives. Put simply, the AIDS pandemic probably advanced gay rights more than anything else in history, and many of the freedoms the LGBTQ+ community enjoy today are due in great part to the changes that the AIDS pandemic ignited. It has also left a legacy of ground-breaking care methods enjoyed by the whole of society.

We have filmed and transcribed 120 in-depth, broadcast quality interviews, to create the largest filmed archive of HIV related experiences in the UK. That amounts to over 200 hours of first-person testimony of the age, and we plan to collect many more stories from people affected by the pandemic over time. By achieving all this we continue to advance our social history. While one of our aims is to create a feature film and other productions from the interviews, we also want to preserve them in their entirety for future generations. That’s why we have teamed up with The London Archives, the largest County office in the UK, to preserve the materials in perpetuity. The first 100 film interviews from the collection are now available for researchers, historians and the public. They are subtitled, transcribed and fully searchable across the collection, representing a massive resource that will be available for the next 1000 years. The work of the NHST charts not only a key and tragic part of LGBTQ+ history, but of our society’s shared history through activism and the many acts of compassion and love.

Based on the interviews that have been undertaken by The National HIV Story Trust, we are sharing incredible real stories of love, life and loss – tales full of both the terrible times, and times of hope. Each person’s story is of course unique to them, but as you will see their experiences often intersect.