Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC

Sounds.

Hello and thank you for downloading the podcast of Witness History from the BBC World Service.

This week we're marking World AIDS Day and the 40th anniversary of the first report on HIV AIDS in a medical journal.

And we're starting back in the early 1980s

when a misunderstanding led to one man becoming the public face of the new disease.

Lucy Burns spoke to people who knew Gaitandougaougaus, mistakenly described as patient zero.

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. and your

responsibility, responsibility as a partying gay person.

You keep me dancing through the moonlight.

Rand lived still does in Halifax in eastern Canada which at the time was home to a

number of flight attendants working for Air Canada several of whom were also gay. For us living in a small coastal city they did have a glamorous kind of

...