Luke Adams: Activism, Addiction and Asylum

HIV: The Morning After · Oct 15, 2026 · 59m

In the mid-1980s, at 24, Luke Adams was told he had two years to live. Forty years on, he's a psychologist, ACT UP veteran and recent political refugee from the United States, now living in London.

Summary

Luke Adams was 24 and living in Santa Cruz, California, when a test came back positive for what doctors then called HTLV-III. His nurse, Ed, gave him two years to live, then brilliantly made Luke furious enough to act.

Luke channelled that fury into decades of AIDS activism: building safer-sex education programmes with student volunteers, joining ACT UP alongside Larry Kramer, and watching…