Suffering in silence: The hidden women of the HIV/AIDS crisis




The British television drama It’s A Sin, released on Channel 4 in 2021, was a timely and telling depiction of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Following the lives of several members of the LGBTQ+ community living in the London in the 1980s, the show painted a vivid and harrowing picture of Thatcherite Britain. With painful dramatic irony, the audience watched as the main characters battled against the mysterious disease, without understanding how it was spreading, or why it seemed to be specifically targeting their community.

For the average British schoolchild, shows like It’s A Sin provide a rare and valuable insight into the health crisis of the 1980s. As a historical event, the crisis is omitted from GCSE and A Level curriculum and, most strikingly, it is not included in the GCSE course Medicine through Time. Despite purporting to be a comprehensive history of health and medicine, the absence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from this course is both peculiar and, perhaps, pointed.Such omissions make series such as Its’ A Sin particularly important. The series aired on the 22nd of January, deliberately coinciding with the National HIV testing week in the UK. Sexual health charities estimated that the number of tests taken in that week was at least three times the number of tests carried out in previous years, and they crediting the show for its active promotion of testing. There are many stories of HIV suffers from this dark period of British history that are yet to be told and many of these are stories of women.