Discourses of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) revel in its radical potential as a global HIV
prevention technology, offering a promise of change for the broader landscape of HIV
prevention. In 2018, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired The People vs The
NHS: Who Gets the Drugs?, a documentary focussed on the ‘battle’ to ...
Discourses of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) revel in its radical potential as a global HIV
prevention technology, offering a promise of change for the broader landscape of HIV
prevention. In 2018, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired The People vs The
NHS: Who Gets the Drugs?, a documentary focussed on the ‘battle’ to make PrEP available
in England. In this article we explore how the BBC documentary positions PrEP, PrEP
biosexual citizen-activists, as well as the wider role of the NHS in HIV prevention and the
wellbeing of communities affected by HIV in the UK. We consider how biosexual
citizenship (Epstein 2018) is configured through future imaginaries of hope, and the spectral
histories of AIDS activism. We describe how The People crafts a story of PrEP activism in
the context of an imagined gay community whose past, present and hopeful future is
entangled within the complexities and contractions of a state-funded health system. Here,
PrEP functions as a ‘happiness pointer’ (Ahmed 2011), to orient imagined gay communities
towards a hopeful future by demanding and accessing essential medicines and ensuring the
absence of needless HIV transmissions. This biomedical success emerges from a shared
traumatic past and firmly establishes the salvatory trajectory of PrEP and an imagined gay
community who continues to be affected by HIV. However, campaigns about the
individual’s right to access PrEP construct the availability and consumption of PrEP as an
end goal to their activism, where access to PrEP is understood as an individual’s right as a
pharmaceutical consumer.
