Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, history as told by the people who were there.

This week we look back over the 40 years since the emergence of HIV AIDS.

We hear what it was like to be diagnosed in the 1980s.

I think in many people's minds,

you got HIV through immorality. So the climate was really, really horrible.

Plus the development of the first successful drug treatment for AIDS.

There was no shortage of patients who implored us to enroll them into a study.

We were seeing signs of clinical improvement almost immediately with the first patient, which is quite unusual.

And the filmmaker Derek Jarman, one of the first artists to speak openly about being

HIV positive.

He went to the press and told everyone.

He was always very open about everything and thought that talking about things and having things out there

was helpful and he did change the world incredibly.

That's all to come but we're going to begin with a story about the so-called Patient Zero. In the early days of AIDS in the 1980s,

a misunderstanding made one man the public face of the epidemic. His name was Gaitan Dugar, a Canadian air steward, and Lucy Burns has the story

of how a misreading of scientific data had given the impression that he was responsible

for the spread of the disease. It was kind of a golden age I thought.

I lived in an entirely gay world.

This is Rand Gaynor.

He's gay and an artist and in the late 70s he was having a great time.

It was just after the Free Love era every weekend was party time and your sole objective was to get laid hopefully by someone different. If you weren't doing that, you

weren't living up to your responsibilities as a partying gay person.

...