this is bbc news. the headlines... a huge fire has ripped through one of the rohingya refugee camps in bangladesh. the blaze in cox's bazar district has been brought under control. more than 2,000 shelters had been gutted, affecting around 12,000 people. no casualties have

been reported so far. after more than a decade of negotiations, un member states have agreed to establish an international treaty to protect the high seas. environmental groups say it will help reverse marine biodiversity losses. military spending in china will increase by more than 7% this year. at the opening of congress, the premier, li keqiang, called for more soldiers to be trained under combat conditions. and prince harry describes writing his memoir as an act of service in the hope that sharing details will help others. you're watching bbc news. now it's time for witness 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 1980s 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 idea for a whole year and everybody told me

it was the stupidest thing they'd ever heard of. but i ignored them and kept going and found people who shared the vision, and it ended up becoming, i believe, the world's largest community arts project ever. newsreader: a quilt commemorating 40,000 people who've died from aidsi has gone on display in washington. quilts traditionally were made from castoffs, taking scraps of fabric and are of different colours and different textures and sewing them into something that is warm and comforting. behind all of those horrendous statistics were actual human beings that were part of families and communities and neighbourhoods. in the early 1970s, i was one of many thousands of young gay and lesbian kids who got here any way we could. of course, at that time, it was still a felony to be gay in this country, so we lived under a great deal of repression and fear.

i think this idea that gays are going to take over city government, it's... i think it's amusing when i hear that. there were a few blocks within the city where we could be completely free and be ourselves, and that meant you could hold hands with your partner, you could kiss. it was incredibly exciting. reporter: in 1981, american doctors . were baffled by a bizarre disease. l within six years, aids has spread to 71 countries and infected up to 10 million people. we're filming this interview at a restaurant called catch at the corner of castro and market street. i was living just a couple of blocks here when i read those first stories about this new disease. that was the summer of 1982. by the fall of 1985, almost everyone i knew was dead or dying.

people began to get skinny. we saw people die all around us. on one block in my neighbourhood, everybody died in the span of two years. ultimately, over 20,000 gay men would die in this neighbourhood. i actually acquired the virus in the winter of 1978, 1979. i did not begin to show signs of that infection until 1992. i got very, very sick very, very quickly and came close to dying in 1994 before i got access to one of the very 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 0ctober11th of 1987, they were placed on a national mall in washington, dc, and ended up on the front page ofjust 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. they were protesting against the introduction of new uk laws to limit lgbt rights. booan temple was one of those demonstrators. announcer: six o'clock news from the bbc with sue lawleyl and nicholas witchell. inaudible. in the house of lords, a vote is taking place now on a challenge to the... shouting. tory rebels have said that the... we're protesting about rights for lesbian and gay people. in general, britain was quite a hostile environment in the 1980s for the lgbt community. about 75% of people when surveyed said that it was mostly or always wrong to be gay. simply by walking down the street, if somebody identified

you as lesbian or gay, you could get abuse and you could be violently attacked just for being. there was a sort of catalyst moment where a book was published about a girl who lived with her two dads, and it kicked off a moral panic in parliament. section 28 banned local authorities from promoting homosexuality. the second part of it banned the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality in schools. basically it meant the closing down of services. so young people became very vulnerable particularly, and schools couldn't protect people from being bullied. all kinds of groups all over the country began to protest. reporter: actor ian mckellen| was at the head of a procession which stretched nearly two miles. a group of lesbians chained themselves to buckingham palace gates dressed as suffragettes. a group of lesbians abseiled into the house of lords. through all of the campaigning prior to the enactment,

we could not get the media to understand what the impact was going to be on our community, on our children. so, really, the only thing left was to actually be the news by being on the news. we met outside television centre, we managed to get through the security. the whole thing was timing, really. laughs and as soon as the lights changed, we barged in to the studio. the whole place went mad, i got smacked to the ground by i don't know how many people. one of our members managed to handcuff herself to a camera and the other one got behind the newsdesk where she was quite violently subdued by nicholas witchell, who's since apologised. sue lawley carried on trying to read the news. and i do apologise if you're hearing quite a lot of noise in this studio at the moment. i'm afraid that we have rather been invaded. laughs in the footage, it's all got rather muffled and you can hear little muffled shouts of, "stop section 28!"

and eventually we were all arrested. it did get huge media coverage. you know, the headlines were all about �*loony lesbians�*. but over time and beyond that, i've heard from quite a lot of people what it meant to them as young lgbt people in their own home, knowing they were gay but maybe not even out, and just felt. . .just felt a little bit empowered by it. so here we are at television centre again 30 years later. clearly, things are a lot better than they were in the 1980s, but it hasn't completely changed, and there are very dangerous and serious pockets of homophobia. i'm glad we did it. the fact we're here today means the story's been remembered. booan temple and the lesbian protest at the bbc. our next film is about the struggle for safety and acceptance in uganda. in 2009, ugandan mps tried to make acts of homosexuality punishable by imprisonment and even death.

homophobia was rife with tabloid papers printing the names and addresses of gay people. many feared for their lives, including the activist victor mukasa. uganda already has a law that can be used as homosexuality, but the new backbench bill goes much further. the penalty for gay sex could be death. i got death threats, my children got death threats. the story of lgbt activism was lonely sometimes, but i felt that we are notjust going to be buried like this. reporter: in a country where biblical values i are deeply ingrained, homosexuality is generally deplored. my family was a very conservative family, staunch catholic family. me being the first—born girl there, i had issues with gender identity.

i transgressed gender unintentionally from the time i started being aware of my existence. they bought me a very nice yellow dress and i went and changed, i put football shorts — i felt more comfortable that way. and then, when i came out, my father was in the hallway and he gave me a slap and said, "go back and dress "up appropriately. " and then i put on that yellow dress and i coiled inside, i felt like i was different now, i wasn't proud anymore, i wasn't happy anymore. i fought against my sexual orientation for so many years. i was on my own because my family didn't want anything to do with me at that point and, eventually, i was homeless. so i felt that i needed to hear from this thing that is causing me suffering, and so i took myself to churches. reject sodomy! reject perversion!

they were praying for me. and then, as they're praying, they started taking — stripping me off. it was my clothes making me a man, so they stripped me naked. and they started to lay their hands on me, and these are boys and their pastor, they laid hands in particular on my genital area because they say that was the centre of it all. and that is when i felt that it is torture. but i said, "this is who i am." inside me, ifelt it was ok to be the way that i was, and that god was not mad at me. last year, under the headline �*hang them', a tabloid magazine published the names and addresses of 100 gay men and lesbians. the effects of that publication were major. they were horrible. a lot of people during

that period lostjobs, were evicted from homes, killed. shouting and cheering. lawyers and activists had challenged the antihomosexuality act on the grounds that it violated human rights. my children know me as daddy and they call me daddy. they don't say, "hey, trans daddy! "hey, former lesbian trans daddy." you know, they call me daddy. it shouldn't matter, but it matters now that i identify as a transgender man because that is the beginning of a conversation about what transgender is. not for me, because i have survived, but the people who are still struggling to come out or to even ask for what they need. so then it matters. victor mukasa and the fight for lgbt rights in uganda. remember, you can watch

witness history every month on the bbc news channel, or you can catch up on all our films, along with more than 2,000 radio programmes in our online archive. just search for bbc witness history. now to the 1990s, and how a chance encounter with a trans sex worker inspired the serbian film director zelimir zilnik to make a groundbreaking film. marble ass celebrated the lives of the lgbt community in belgrade and made a star out of the trans actor merlinka. this piece does contain some outdated language which you might find offensive.

now, the situation is so weird, and so upside down, we have a feeling that we are free to just show ourselves as we feel. i was heading towards a railway station, a woman approached me and said, i know you from the press, i am interested to spend some nice time with me? i said, let me go, i have a train in ten minutes, and she said, you are too old so you are afraid of women, and i said, no, just let me go now, and then

she pulled the wig off and i saw it was a friend of mine, who i metjust ten years ago, and i was surprised. that is something that i never expected to see in belgrade — i thought, if a man went in women's clothes, he would be attacked and beaten up on the street. we are a patriarchal society. i was very satisfied that we have now the possibility to become friends with these people who have been suppressed, so we have had the feeling that we are somehow helping some idea of free expression.

the atmosphere was like in a stove — full of anger but also interest. and then the audience burst, some people had been shouting, this is not belgrade, so we went on the stage, 15 of us also, and then people started throwing eggs on us and said, stop, stop! i am asking the audience are there any transvestite, gay and lesbian people, i said, come here on the stage, and about 400 people came on the stage, so it was an explosion, an unexpected explosion!

magda and herfriends, they mostly boosted and encouraged the people to come out. serbia's first lgbt film. our final witness is one of the founders of the first gay games, launched in california in 1982, the event attracted athletes from all over the world, but it was not plain sailing, and a row with united states olympic committee nearly scuppered the whole thing.

when we marched in, we had all of these people on both sides of the stadium clapping for us, we all cried, we all cried. may i welcome you, athletes and spectators from all over the world, to the first gay games? tom was the founder of the gay games, an athlete in the 1968 mexico olympic games. a lot of the men and women in the olympics at the time were in the closet, they did not want to come out. if they did, they got harassed in the locker rooms and what tom wanted was for everyone to be part of the games and at the time i was a bigwig in women's softball. when i met tom, it was a kindred feeling, it's like love at first sight the way it is supposed to be. he had the same feminist values that i had, he didn't ask for my help, he said he needed my help.

we didn't have very much money, so we hustled. we were trying to do as many fundraisers and raise as much money as possible to put on the sports, to get the medals, and about six weeks before we were putting on the games, we were running like crazy and we got hit from a lawsuit, objecting to the word 0lympics, saying they owned it. i never saw them owning the word, so they were suing us, but we found the police and firemen 0lympics, i didn't see them suing las vegas over the poker 0lympics. we had to get the word 0lympic up everything we had done, that was devastating to us, all i had time for was get your butt into gear, come into the office and start crossing off everything. it is with greatjoy that i am here to celebrate the opening of the first international gay

athletic gay 0lympics games. 0pening ceremonies for gay... oh, i still get tears... we had no idea how many people were buying tickets and all of our athletes marching in, the balloons, everything. a0 years later, it still runs my mind. we played yesterday... had you feel about - the gay games overall? i love it, i've never felt so at home, in a long time, it's nice to put your arm around your girlfriend or whatever, it's really nice and comfortable. every sport facility was full, packed, and every day that went by, they got more packed. what was the most memorable moment? to feel that you are unified, everybody is for everybody else.

we had about 1360 athletes. it took away the stereotypes and made them athletes. tom was a wonderful human being, which is why i asked him to have a child with me, i wanted to have a child. we worked on getting pregnant right away and i got pregnant right away. when i look at my daughter, she will be 38, she happened because of the gay games! the amazing family behind the first gay games. and that's all for this edition of witness history, here in the queer museum in britain, london.

we will be back with more first—hand accounts from extraordinary moments from the past but, for now, from me and the rest of the witness history team, goodbye. hello. well, it's been a fairly cool, cloudy sort of weekend for most of us, but the weather is changing over the next few days. a bit of a u—turn back into something more wintry as we see a cold air mass potentially bringing some travel disruption. so some snow and some ice for monday and tuesday, especially for the north and east of scotland and north—east england as well. in fact, we're already seeing a weather front working in here through this evening and tonight, so a spell of wintriness for parts of scotland. and then that cold arctic air mass is going to push its way gradually further south across all parts of the uk over the next couple of days. so, for the here and now, still a lot of cloud as we end

sunday, a period of more persistent snow and some icy conditions for parts of eastern scotland overnight. and then the main weather front moves in later in the night, introducing those more widespread snow flurries in the north. towards the south, then, variable amounts of cloud, temperatures getting down a few degrees below freezing where we do see some breaks in that cloud for parts of eastern england, for instance. so, through monday, here's the cold front sinking its way south, bringing a few splashes of rain. to the north of that, sunshine, but some fairly heavy snow showers, even to low levels across northern and eastern scotland and north—east england. so temperatures here about 2—6 degrees in the north. further south, still about 7—10 celsius. sojust holding onto that milder air. a few splashes of drizzly rain around. heading on into tuesday, and the cold front pushes its way further south. it may welljust linger for parts of southern england, bringing a bit more cloud, a few spots of rain through the day on tuesday here. but elsewhere, most of us back into more sunshine on tuesday. but again, the cold northerly blast of wind bringing snow showers from northern and eastern scotland and down the east coast of england as well. temperatures colder for all of us, so around about 2—7 degrees

on the thermometer. but when you add on the wind chill, it's going to feel subzero for many of us. gusts of wind around about a0 miles per hour across parts of scotland and north—east england. so these are the areas most likely on monday and tuesday to see the snow flurries — 5—10 centimetres, perhaps as much as 20 centimetres over the highest ground of scotland. but having said that, there could be some wintriness elsewhere as well. heading into the middle of the week, and it looks like we're seeing low pressure from the atlantic starting to move in, trying to spill this milder air in from the south—west. but certainly that is going to bump into the cold air in place. so temperatures particularly towards the south edging up later in the week, but the potential for some disruptive rain, sleet and snow during the second half of this week. bye for now.

this is bbc news — welcome if you're watching here in the uk or around the globe. i'm luxmy gopal. our top stories... fire sweeps through a bangladesh camp destroying shelters that housed thousands of rohingya refugees. police in athens clash with protesters, who blame the government for greece's worst ever train crash, in which 57 people died. military spending in china will increase by more than 7% this year, way above the target for economics growth in the same period. and britain's prime minister pledges to deport all small boat arrivals by asylum seekers. if after a decade of talks, more than 100 un member states agree on a treaty to protect our oceans. the ship has reached the shore.

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