I was a 24-year-old Black gay man living in Chicago when the first cases of AIDS were diagnosed in 1981. Like everyone else, I thought then that AIDS was a “white gay disease”. I was wrong. Unknown to me at the time, I was already living with HIV. I tested positive for HIV in 1985, only a few weeks after the United States Government licensed the first HIV test. My doctors gave me 6 months to live. When I came out to my father, he told me: “Since you have to do your own dying, you might as well do your own living.” I decided to focus on the living part.
In 1988, my good brister (brother and sister) Reggie Williams, other gay men and I joined together to create the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention to educate Black gay men about HIV, raise awareness of the epidemic’s disproportionate impact on Black gay men, and demand increased funding for HIV prevention. In 1999, I founded the African American AIDS Policy Training Institute (later to become the Black AIDS Institute), the country’s first and only thinktank at the time focused exclusively on ending the AIDS pandemic in Black communities.