Russell T Davies: ‘I looked away for years. Finally, I have put Aids at the centre of a drama’

The acclaimed screenwriter recalls his life during the 1980s Aids crisis, and reveals why it is only now, with his new TV series It's a Sin, that he feels able to tell a story that has haunted him for decades

There are things I can't say here. Men I dare not name. The first man I ever had sex with. A man I loved for three months in 1988. That hilarious friend I spent a mad week with in Glasgow. All of them dead, now. And they all died of Aids.

But I can't say their names because their families said they died of cancer or pneumonia. And they maintain that story to this day. Even now, I've had to change a few details in those opening sentences, just in case. The stigma and fear of Aids was so great that a family could go through the funeral, the wake and then decades of mourning without saying what really happened.