attacks targeting schoolgirls and in the past few weeks hundreds of girls have been hospitalised and aid agencies say they may have been singled out by religious groups. this is bbc news. now on bbc news witness history. hello. i m ben boulos. thanks forjoining me at the queer british museum in london for this edition of witness history. i ll bring you important moments from the past as told by the people who were there. in this episode, we re focusing on lgbt history, stories about lesbian, gay and trans people from all over the world. coming up: we hear how lesbian activists broke through bbc security to stage a protest on live tv. plus, the fight for lgbt rights in uganda where being gay was punishable by death. how the balkans war inspired a groundbreaking film about trans sex workers. and the fight to use the word 0lympics for the very first gay games. but first to san francisco, and the aids memorial that would make headlines all over the world. activist cleve jones
history: lgbt special. hello. i m ben boulos. thanks forjoining me at the queer british museum in london for this edition of witness history. i ll bring you important moments from the past as told by the people who were there. in this episode, we re focusing on lgbt history, stories about lesbian, gay and trans people from all over the world. coming up: we hear how lesbian activists broke through bbc security to stage a protest on live tv. plus, the fight for lgbt rights in uganda where being gay was punishable by death. how the balkans war inspired a groundbreaking film about trans sex workers. and the fight to use the word 0lympics for the very first gay games. but first to san francisco, and the aids memorial that would make headlines all over the world. activist cleve jones was living there in the 19805 when a mysterious disease started killing his friends. the suffering he saw inspired him to create one of the world s biggest ever arts projects. i talked about this ide
and that was deliberate. once people could see what i was talking about, then they kind of got the power of it. by october 11 of 1987, they were placed on a national mall in washington, dc, and ended up on the front page of just about every newspaper in the world. this quilt is a pretty extraordinary testament to what we went through, and it s a place that s known for its monuments, they re made out of stone and steel, and we took a monument there that was made of cloth and thread and sewn by ordinary americans and people from all over this planet who love someone who died of aids and wanted them to be remembered. it was that simple and that amazing. clevejones and the story of the aids memorial quilt. now to 1988, and the moment lesbian activists invaded a bbc tv studio live on air.
first clinical trials. i miss my friends. i miss them a lot. i barely passed high school biology, but i understood clearly that there was no such thing as a gay virus, and that what we were experiencing here was going to be experienced by all sorts of different kinds of people all around the planet. i remember one day exclaiming in rage to my friends, you know, if this was a meadow with a thousand corpses rotting in the sun, then people would look at this, they would see it. so each panel is three feet by six feet the approximate size of a grave and that was deliberate. once people could see what i was talking about, then they kind of got the power of it. by october 11 of 1987, they were placed on a national mall in washington, dc, and ended up on the front page of just about every