LGBT history special

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We hear from a Cypriot lawyer, imprisoned by the British for almost two years during the "Cyprus Emergency” of 1955-1959. Our guest, Professor Rebecca Bryant, explains how this ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is media, culture and creative industries lecturer Sarah Jilani. We start in 1954 with the Japanese film Seven Samurai which is widely considered to be one of world ci ...  Show more

In the 1990s, doctors in Berlin began a cutting-edge treatment programme that led to a patient being cured of HIV/AIDS. The so-called "Berlin patient" was Timothy Ray Brown: he was suffering from leukemia as well as HIV/AIDS, and was given a bone marrow transplant from a donor wi ...  Show more

The Bollywood film "Fire" was the first in Indian history to depict a lesbian relationship. Released in 1998, the movie sparked a row over censorship and then a wider debate about LGBT rights in a country where homosexuality was then illegal. In 2015, Lucy Burns met Bollywood sup ...  Show more

How do we understand something as huge as a global epidemic?

Similarly to Covid, the AIDS epidemic, which was most destructive in the 1980s and 90s, had such universal reach. Yet within that, there were millions of personal experiences.

What was it like to ...

In 2007, a man known as the "Berlin patient" was cured of HIV through a stem cell transplant. It was an incredible accomplishment that researchers all over the world scrutinized for years to come. He was the first and only documented case of a person who has been cured of HIV unt ...  Show more