22/11/2021
ITV has prepared a heartwrenching but also deeply human documentary, now available on its Hub Platform, which deals with the very beginning of the AIDS Crisis of the nineteen eighties. With interest in properly remembering those who died from AIDS now back in the spotlight in the wake of the acclaimed Channel Four Series “It's A Sin”, the makers of the ITV documentary felt that it was time to trace the very first man to die of AIDS in the UK. His name was John Eaddie who was forty nine in October 1981 when he passed on. By cross referencing hospital records with medical reports, the programme makers found Mr Eaddie's legacy, and traced friends and family, making sure it was okay with them that his story should be told. Mr Eaddie never knew what killed him – indeed the medical establishment did not know as there were only a handful of whispers then coming out of the States about a strange assemblage of illness afflicting IV drug users and gay men in the major cities of America. Speaking of the events of the eighties all these years later, many of Mr Eaddie's friends spoke of the trauma of living as a gay man through those years. But they were largely pleased to be able to put flesh on the clinical records of Mr Eaddie and to breathe life into his story. Like those of all those who died in that era, theirs is a story that is part of our shared LGBTQIA history and deserves to be told.
