LGBT history special

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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 with a rare genetic mutation which killed off the HIV virus. We find more about Timothy Ray Brown's story and the latest research on an HIV cure.

Also, in a special edition on LGBT history, how Bollywood lesbian drama "Fire" raised awareness of LGBT issues in India; the trans film star who made headlines in Yugoslavia during a time of war; and the first couple in the world to celebrate a same-sex civil union.

PHOTO: Timothy Ray Brown in 2012 (Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC with me Max Pearson
0:09.7	and the team who bring you witness history on the World Service. This week personal stories from the past related to
0:16.2	LGBT history, including the first gay couple in the world to have a legal same-sex civil union.
0:23.0	The sun was shining and we were driven in in horse carriages through Copenhagen.
0:35.0	It was a nice trip.
0:37.0	Also, the Bollywood lesbian drama that shocked India in the 1990s.
0:43.6	We were actually shooting in a very crowded area in Delhi and I think if word had gone out,
0:50.7	it could have got us into trouble.
0:52.6	Plus the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy in the US military, and we meet Malinka,
0:57.4	Yugoslavia's first transsexual film star.
1:00.5	She put the wig off and I saw that that is a friend of mine whom I met 10 years ago and I was surprised.
1:08.0	He never mentioned he feels himself as a girl.
1:11.0	All that's coming up later in the podcast, but first an amazing moment from the history of HIV
1:16.1	AIDS, the disease which back in the 1980s led to something akin to a moral panic and was
1:22.0	cruelly labeled the gay plague in some quarters.
1:25.0	Initially it was identified as being a potentially deadly illness among gay men,
1:29.0	but today there are more women with the HIV virus than men and just this past week scientists in the
1:35.2	US announced that a woman had been successfully cured of HIV using a novel technique involving
1:41.6	umbilical stem cells. We'll have more on that in a moment.
1:45.2	That woman is the third person in history known to have been cured, that's to say the virus has
1:49.7	disappeared from her body. The first dates back to 2007. His name was Timothy Ray Brown,
1:56.7	and Ashley Byrne has been speaking to his partner Tim Hoffkin. On the 7th of February 2007 there was a major breakthrough in the fight against HIV and AIDS in Berlin, Germany.
	...

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