In the 1980s and 90s, as a new and apparently unstoppable disease ravaged the gay community, volunteers began to record for posterity interviews with the men infected with what would eventually be identified as the HIV virus, and with their friends. The tapes are now archived at the British Library and have never been broadcast before. In the documentary, actors lip-sync to them. What sounds on paper like a terrible gimmick works beautifully, bringing you closer to appreciating all that was lost as the crisis unfolded and government inertia demanded that ordinary people step up and do extraordinary things to save themselves and others.
Then, in London, Heaven opens – the largest and most unapologetically gay nightclub this septic isle has ever seen and an oasis of freedom, within its four reverberating walls, from fear. Attendees and later activists Rupert Whitaker and Martyn Butler remember it as “Amazing … entrancing” and “the first time we had a place to call our own”. Taped interviewee John (Luke Hornsby) had a particularly wonderful coke-and-champagne-fuelled time as a “Heaven babe”, complete with a vivid anecdote about what happened when you finished the champagne. The exuberance and excesses of the time were, as many note, partly in reaction to the suppression and oppression in their daily lives. “Having sex with loads of people was an act of liberation, of defiance,” says one. Also, he adds, “It was a huge amount of fun.”
This first episode takes us through the terrible ending of that fun. Professors Anthony Pinching and Jonathan Weber explain how they started to gather a scientific cohort together to study the pattern of infections and cancerous lesions that were beginning to appear in the UK as they had done in the US. Terrence Higgins, famed barman and “terrible dancer” at Heaven, became among the first to die from Aids in this country and Whitaker, Butler and Nick Partridge set up a trust in his name as part of the growing grassroots response to the crisis.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0018t1c/episodes/player if you do not live in the UK you can access these via a VPN
