Category: Community

By Steven Vargas, Achieving Together Partner

I never told my mother of my own HIV-positive status. Several months after I found out about myself having HIV she would pass away. I would begin my downward spiral into depression, isolation, and drug use. I was disappointed in myself for becoming a statistic—another young gay man with HIV who would likely follow in the steps of other gay men with HIV to an early grave. We did not know any different in the days prior to 1996, the year antiretrovirals were introduced. If you had HIV, you were most likely dead within the next couple of decades at the longest. It was what I witnessed for years helping my mother and her friends.