00:00very powerful moving piece because you were out at the time a young gay man clubbing you know
00:06bumping into boy george all this kind of thing but you also began to see people that you knew
00:11so ravaged by aids and it was heartbreaking and yet that was a that was an epidemic which we never
00:19took as seriously as we're taking covid19 in fact the opposite we stigmatized gay people
00:26at the time who had hiv who died from aids they were shunned by society we didn't all come together
00:33to help the gay community well in fact we were demonized actually um i mean i it was it was
00:41our
00:41time in the 1980s we were young we were walking on water homosexuality had only been legalized
00:46legalized 15 years earlier 1967 uh it was our time in the same way the pill liberated heterosexual
00:53people in the 1960s uh people like richard branson spotted the potential of the income of the pink
00:58pound he bought heaven the biggest gay club in europe but what we hadn't realized there was this lethal
01:04virus hunting us down literally nobody knew why it was just particularly gay people and you would go
01:11to a bar you'd go to a club and you hadn't seen somebody for three or four weeks and you
01:16heard this
01:16terrible phrase that i heard in uh russell t davis's brilliant series it's a sin oh they've gone
01:22home for good they'd gone home to mum and dad to die and often when they went home it was
01:27a terrible
01:27shock for mum and dad because they didn't know their children were gay because people weren't as
01:31out and bold and brave as they are today because the world has been transformed and piers the difference
01:36with the pandemic then it wasn't on tv very much until the press got hold of the idea it was
01:42just
01:42gays and then it was a gay cancer gay plague i had i couldn't go into my local pub anymore
01:47unless i
01:48took my own beer glass because the regulars thought they might catch something off a glass i'd use that's
01:54how stigmatizing it was and of course there were always the the bully boys who wanted to beat us up
01:59on the way home from these bars and as i'm pointed out in my piece of the mail they tended
02:04to wear gloves
02:04in case we bled and then they got the infection yeah it was a terrible time andrew it was such
02:09a powerful
02:10and important piece
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