“The Crown” left out so much about Princess Diana’s revolutionary work with AIDS patients

If you happen to be a Royals watcher, a Princess Diana obsessive, or just a fan of lavish prestige TV soap operas, by now you’ve likely binged the first four episodes of season six of Netflix’s The Crown. The streamer is releasing the show’s final season in two parts, and this first batch of episodes, which dropped November 16, narrows its focus to the weeks in the summer of 1997 leading up to and immediately following the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

That’s something of a departure for the series, which in seasons past has tended to devote only a single episode to specific flashpoints during the reign of Elizabeth II (played in Season 6 by Imelda Staunton). And yet, of all the crises that rocked the monarchy over the six decades covered by the series up to this point, none was quite as seismic, as culturally omnipresent, or as compulsively watchable as Diana. It makes sense then that The Crown would give her a proper send-off.

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But as the series says goodbye to the late Princess of Wales with its most recent four-episode arc, I can’t stop thinking about what The Crown got wrong — or, more accurately, left out — about her work on the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s.

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The show’s version of Diana was introduced in the first episode of Season 4, played winningly by Emma Corrin, before her marriage to Prince Charles (played in Season 4 by Josh O’Connor) in 1981. By the fourth season’s finale, set nine years later, the Wales’s marriage has disintegrated, and Diana embarks on her first solo trip overseas as a member of the Royal Family, visiting New York City in 1990.

While there, the Princess visits the pediatric AIDS unit of a Harlem hospital. After a doctor explains that many of the children there have been abandoned and that people are afraid to foster them due to the stigma around HIV/AIDS, Diana is shown spontaneously hugging a young boy with the disease.

All of which really did happen, though the show fudges the dates a bit, setting Diana’s trip in 1990 to better coincide with the events leading up to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s resignation. In fact, the Princess’s trip to New York happened in early 1989, and contrary to The Crown’s depiction, it was far from Diana’s only encounter with the AIDS epidemic. Nor was her outreach limited to children suffering from the disease.

“No cause, perhaps, was more ready for the Diana effect in the 1980s than AIDS,” Tina Brown writes in The Diana Chronicles, possibly the definitive biography of the Princess of Wales.

Nearly two years prior to the New York trip, Diana made headlines in April 1987 when she attended the opening of the U.K.’s first AIDS ward at Middlesex Hospital in London. She reportedly refused to wear gloves during her visit and shook hands with 12 adult male patients suffering from the disease. Brown describes the decision as “the shake felt round the world.”

Last year, Professor Rob Miller, who was a doctor on the hospital’s AIDS ward at the time of Diana’s visit, wrote that stigma around the disease was so intense that many hospital staffers would not even tell their families that they worked with AIDS patients, and none of the patients themselves wanted to be photographed.

But as the Daily Mirror reported at the time, Diana insisted on being photographed shaking hands with one of them without gloves, knowing the power the image would have. One man finally agreed to have his picture taken from behind so that he could not be identified.

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Miller wrote that Diana “showed the world that HIV cannot be acquired by everyday contact. It marked the start of her outstanding efforts to help change public and media attitudes towards people with HIV.”

Brown writes that Professor Michael Adler, who also worked with AIDS patients at Middlesex Hospital at the time, credited the Princess with helping to destigmatize the disease. “It was seen to be mainly occurring amongst gay men and it involved sex, all things we are not good at handling,” Adler said. “But she actually cut through that. She gave it respectability and profile.”

“If a royal was allowed to go in and shake a patient’s hands, somebody at the bus stop or the supermarket could do the same,” John O’Reilly, a nurse who was present for Diana’s visit, told the BBC in 2017. “That really educated people.”

Diana brought that same message to Harlem two years later. “HIV does not make people dangerous to know. You can shake their hands and give them a hug,” she said in a speech. “Heaven knows they need it. What’s more, you can share their homes, their workplaces, and their playgrounds and toys.”

The Crown, famously, has taken liberties with its depictions of historical events and its interpretations of what may have gone on behind the scenes in the lives of the British royals. Netflix even went so far as to add a disclaimer to the trailer for Season 5 clarifying that the series is a work of fiction “inspired by real events.”

Naturally, series creator and head writer Peter Morgan has filled the show with imagined interactions, conversations, and scenarios that may or may not have happened behind closed doors to create a compelling drama. Focused as it is primarily on the Queen and her direct heirs, there’s also plenty of history that the series has glossed over or left out entirely — like the passage, under Thatcher, of Section 28, a 1988 law banning the “promotion of homosexuality.”

Indeed, over the course of its six seasons, The Crown has featured few depictions of LGBTQ+ people and nothing of the movement for LGBTQ+ rights in the U.K. It’s dismaying, then, that Morgan and co. failed to take advantage of Diana’s support for and closeness with gay people to introduce and examine this essential part of late 20th-century history.

As Brown writes in The Diana Chronicles, “gay men formed much of the support network of Diana’s life,” and her friends in the fashion industry and gay members of palace staff “brought the specter of the [HIV/AIDS] home” to the princess every day. “As AIDS took its toll in the 1980s, she couldn’t bear to see her friends in such peril.”

While the Princess’s New York trip fits more neatly into Season 4’s narrative arc, it apparently comes at the expense of the Middlesex Hospital visit two years earlier. It also troublingly elides the role gay men played both in her life and activism in favor of the seemingly more palatable, more “sympathetic” pediatric AIDS patients.

The power of the Middlesex Hospital visit and the photo of Diana shaking hands with a gay man who would later die from the disease came from the fact that it showed her reaching out, embracing people that society would have preferred to ignore. As compelling as The Crown is, its creators’ decision to likewise ignore this aspect of Diana’s life and activism is a misstep we shouldn’t forget.