Health
Learning the hard way
Local out black poz men band together to spread testing message
Seated from left are Venton Jones and Tori Smith. In back from left are Paul Gordon, Rodney McCoy Jr. and Samuel Hairston. (Blade photo by Michael Key)
The statistics are grim. The task is daunting.
In the D.C. area, of the estimated 16,500 people living with HIV/AIDS, 40 percent — or more than 6,700 people — who were infected with the virus were men having sex with men. The majority of these men — 60 percent, or nearly 4,100 — are black. Data, from 2010 suggests that of those, 40 percent were unaware of their HIV status before being tested.
Those scary statistics are constantly on the mind of Venton Jones, 27, who recently came to the nation’s capital from Texas where he was born and educated, earning a degree in community health and a master’s in health care administration.
But Jones’ real credentials about AIDS are different, giving him the “street cred” about HIV, credibility he wishes he never earned. In June 2007, Jones was diagnosed as HIV positive when he was going through a standard set of medical tests as he was seeking enlistment in the U.S. Army.
“It happened with someone I was sleeping with” that spring, says Jones, “at a time in my youth when I was wild, to say the least.”
He thought, “How could this happen to me?” He reviewed all he had going in his life: “I am educated; I have a degree in health; I should have known better.”
But Jones says, “there was a lot going on” in his life then, adding that he was dealing with “issues like coming out, and also what to do next” with his life, with what he calls “finding a purpose.” He says he “wasn’t necessarily on the ‘down-low,'” a term often used among black men to describe themselves as living life on the surface as “straight” but actually secretly having sex with men. He says a few of his friends already knew he was gay.
“If you asked me, I would tell you, but not too many people asked.”
In the spring of 2007 he came out to his parents.
Jones says he had regularly been tested and had always seen the results come back as negative for the virus. So he got cocky about it, basically feeling so-far-so-good. So he had unprotected sex. Now he knows better.
As a result, filling the giant vacuum of the “absence of strategies to reach young people, specially young black gay men, like the people I grew up with,” Jones says is his top priority today, as he gets ready to hit the streets to spread the message that testing for HIV is a crucial step to checkmate the renewed AIDS epidemic in the D.C. area.
On antiretroviral medication today, the virus in his body is, Jones says, “now undetectable,” and he says proudly that “now I am in the best physical and mental health I have been in my entire life.” But of course he knows the virus still lurks, waiting to pounce and begin to spread again, high-jacking other cells, especially white blood cells, eventually dooming his body’s immune system, if given the chance.
However Jones is doing more than fight HIV in his own body. He is now one of eight gay black men, all diagnosed as HIV positive, who are “HIV testing advocates” now finishing training under the auspices of the Bayard Rustin Mobilization Project, an outreach program aimed at raising HIV awareness among gay black males in D.C., funded by a grant from the federal government and directed by the national nonprofit advocacy group, the National Association of People With AIDS (NAPWA), in partnership with local groups like The D.C. Center for the LGBT Community.
Jones, who also works as a senior program associate in communications for the D.C.-based National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition, will tackle the role of being an advocate on his own time, away from his day job. And for that task, he says, “a big focus has been on reaching youth.
Jones has a lot in common with his fellow advocates. Like Samuel Hairston, a 44-year-old preacher with a passion for spreading the “good news,” ordained in 1996 as a full-time Pentecostal minister, currently living in D.C. but pastoring on weekends in Baltimore at the Church of the Everlasting Kingdom, with a congregation of about 50, he says, most of whom are not LGBT, and who all know that he is both gay and HIV positive.
Then a full-time Montgomery County firefighter, in 2005 Hairston learned he was positive when, he says, after years living life on the “down-low,” a “routine medical exam in his blood work prompted an HIV test, and I came up positive.”
He was “devastated,” he admits, not only for himself, but also because he had to go home and tell his “faithful and loving” wife that he had contracted HIV “and that I could possibly have infected her.” He says that “thankfully, that was not the case,” and she remains negative today. “The marriage was already on the rocks,” he says, and it did not survive. His children, then a 9-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter, took their parents’ divorce hard, though they survived it, and they did not learn until later that their father was infected.
“As I child,” he says, “I always felt an attraction to men and other boys, but there was no one I could trust to talk to.” His introduction to sex came when he was molested at age 5. He learned “at an early age,” he confides, “to keep secrets and hide my feelings.”
Later he convinced himself that through his early ordination in the ministry, at first when he was 14, he “would change my homosexuality,” but by age 15, he says he was “jumping in and out of cars and finding ways to feed my sexual appetite,” which felt “insatiable” to him. He calls himself a recovering sex addict. And though he preached a Christian message, he says, “I never believed (God) really loved me because I was gay.”
As the marriage was cracking apart and with the diagnosis of AIDS, his world was falling in on him. “I went into a spiral of serious depression” and he says he wound up meeting a man, “the first man to give me some attention” of the type he sought. They had sex and did cocaine.
“Drugs became my outlet,” Hairston says, as he sought “some release from the guilt and shame of living in the closet and the ‘down-low’ lifestyle, and the pain it caused my family.”
“Today I live life out in the open,” he says. “I’ve left the ‘down-low’ behind, because it’s so dishonest. The truth is liberating, and even as Jesus said, ‘The truth shall set you free.'” Today, Hairston says, thanks to regular devotion to a 12-step program, he’s “clean” of drugs and “celebrating two-and-a-half years of sobriety.”
One of his biggest life missions now “is to reach out to African-American men, who are on the down low, and to say that there’s a better life, to help them to embrace honesty,” the same transparency he has come to himself. As for himself, he says he has “reconciled” his sexuality with his spirituality. His target audience will be among those attending the black church, which traditionally has fostered homophobia rather than acceptance.
Meanwhile, another advocate, Tyranny “Tori” Smith, 30, will focus his outreach efforts differently — to those who inhabit what he calls the “vogue-fem” subculture: gay and transgender men and women who stylize their lives with makeup, hairdos, costumes and dancing. This is the “sweet” world of “ballroom” culture, and the “houses of families formed by choice, not birth that grow up within the world of urban, predominantly black “ballroom,” or fashion runway, competitions.
Raised in Oxon Hill, Md., Smith came out at age 14 and soon was a regular at the clubs like Tracks.
“I told my mother,” he says, that he was gay, “and once I told her, there was no one else to hide it from.” Now a resident of NE D.C., Smith is a member of the “House of Herrera,” named for famed Venezuelan-born American fashion designer Carolina Herrera. It’s his second “house.” He joined his first when 16 but five years ago switched to Herrera, which currently has about six members in D.C. and around 300 nationwide, five years ago. “In my house,” he says, “they’re my family.”
Smith discovered he was positive in June 2010, when he came down with summer pneumonia and was tested positive when given an HIV exam.
“I was surprised,” he says, “because I had been with someone for three years, and we had both tested negative at the beginning.” But with the benefit of hindsight, it was his partner (who later died, though not of AIDS) who infected him.
Now as an advocate for regular testing, Smith says that “my whole purpose is to reach people, like in the ‘ballroom’ culture, that the Health Department is not reaching — that’s my audience. Basically, we’re trying to put a face to HIV, our face, that’s our whole mission. And when I talk to people, my motto is this: ‘knowing is to live, not knowing is to die.’ So basically I tell them, ‘get tested.'”
Two other Rustin Mobilization Project testing advocates are Paul Gordon, 40, born in Portsmouth, Va., and Rodney McCoy, Jr., 43, born in Brooklyn, N.Y. Both men now live in the D.C. area.
Gordon, who felt he was gay from age 5 on, was molested at age 14, raped at gunpoint and “with a knife at my neck” by someone he calls his father’s “best friend.” The assailant was eventually arrested and convicted and served eight years of a 20 year prison sentence. Gordon, who then began to have sex with boys his own age, came out when he was about 18. His HIV status was diagnosed positive in 1989, contracted from a partner, a decade older, with whom he moved to Atlanta at age 20 after graduating from Hampton University in coastal Virginia. Gordon never knew his partner, who eventually died after their three-eyar relationship, was positive
“I was just trusting,” he says.
When he learned he was infected, Gordon remembers that “I went to a place of denial. Regardless of what the doctor said, I didn’t believe it.”
McCoy, in the field of HIV prevention for 16 years and now an outreach advocate as well as a manager of the Mobilization Project program, was diagnosed HIV positive in 2002, when he was so weak with the flu that someone urged him to get tested.
“I really didn’t expect to be positive,” he says. “I had risky behaviors before but I had always tested negative. I felt I was just managing my risks well enough.” When dating one person, for only a month, the man insisted he was negative, and looking back, McCoy says, “To this day, I’m sure now that he didn’t tell me the truth.”
For McCoy, it comes down to this: “We often say ‘use condoms every time,’ but often we simply don’t acknowledge that love, trust and pleasure trump knowledge and information every time. And you can say this, I found out the hard way.”
“Self-determination” is the watchword of the Bayard Rustin project and its sponsoring organization, NAPWA, whose president Frank Oldham, Jr. says that “While the epidemic impacts us directly, we also impact the epidemic by identifying ways to reduce its new infections, mitigate its stigma and alleviate its suffering.”
It was NAPWA, which advocates for 1.3 million Americans living with AIDS, that created the annual event of National HIV Testing Day.
The Rustin project is simply one more step in the proverbial journey of a thousand miles, until the disease can be cured and even prevented. In the meantime, Oldham says, “we help individuals living with HIV learn how to tell their stories. We’re taking the fight to the streets,” with advocates who are HIV positive, one man reaching out to another man, one step at a time.
Health
CMS moves to expand HIV-positive organ transplants
HIV/AIDS activists welcome potential development
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is pushing forward a proposed rule that would make it not only easier for people with HIV in need to get organ transplants from HIV-positive donors, but also make it a priority where there was often a barrier.
The Washington Blade sat down with people familiar with this topic — from former heads of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to HIV activists and to the first HIV-positive person to donate an organ — about what this proposed change could mean.
HIV is a virus that attacks the body’s immune system, particularly targeting the body’s T-cells, which makes it harder to fight off infection and disease. If left untreated, HIV can become AIDS. Without treatment, AIDS can lead to death within a few months or years. The virus is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids — often through sex, unclean needles, or from mother to baby during pregnancy.
According to HIV.gov, a website managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, approximately 1.2 million people in the U.S. were living with HIV in 2022. Of those 1.2 million, 13 percent don’t know they have it.
The virus disproportionately impacts men who have sex with men and people of color.
The CDC’s statistics show men are most affected, making up almost 80 percent of diagnoses, with gay and bisexual men accounting for the majority. Racial disparities also are present — Black people make up 38 percent of diagnoses. The World Health Organization estimates that around 44.1 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses globally as of 2024.
Since the virus was first detected 45 years ago, scientists have been working on ways to treat and prevent its spread. In 1987, the first breakthrough in fighting HIV came as the U.S. approved the first HIV medication, AZT — marking the beginning of antiretroviral therapy. This medicine — and later descendants of it, like today’s widely prescribed Biktarvy — stop the HIV virus from reproducing and allow the body to keep its T-cells.
Then in 2012, another big step toward minimizing the scope of the potentially fatal disease came as the CDC approved the first HIV prevention medication, Truvada, more commonly known as PrEP. As of 2024, nearly 600,000 people in the U.S. are using PrEP, according to AIDSVu, which uses data from Gilead Sciences (manufacturers of Truvada and Biktarvy) and is compiled by researchers at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.
The following year, in 2013, the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act was signed into law, enabling the use of organs from HIV-positive donors for transplants into HIV-positive recipients, overturning a 1988 ban.
There are an estimated 123,000 people waiting for organ transplants in the U.S. The number of HIV-positive people on that list is estimated to be smaller, harder to precisely quantify, but they are still in dire need.
A study from the New England Journal of Medicine, published in 2024, analyzed the outcomes of 198 kidney transplantations to people with HIV at 26 medical centers across the U.S. from 2018 to 2021.
Results from the study showed that for kidney transplants performed using organs from 99 donors with HIV and 99 without HIV, one-year survival rates for HIV-positive recipients were nearly identical (94 percent and 95 percent, respectively). Three-year survival rates were also similar (85 percent and 87 percent). Organ rejection rates were also numerically on par after three years (21 percent and 24 percent). Other measures for surgical outcomes, including the number of side effects that occurred, were also roughly the same for both groups.
This shows that, overall, HIV-positive-to-HIV-positive transplants are nearly identical in outcome to transplants between HIV-negative donors and recipients.
Where we are now
Now in 2026, CMS is pushing past the clinical trial testing phase it has been in, making HIV-positive-to-HIV-positive organ transplants more widespread and more accessible.
Adrian Shanker, the former deputy assistant secretary for health policy and senior advisor on LGBTQ health equity at HHS, explained to the Blade that the HOPE Act was a step in the right direction, but this policy change from CMS will expand the ability to help HIV-positive patients in need.
“The original HOPE Act asked for scientific research,” Shanker explained. “There were 10 years of clinical trials. The Biden administration promulgated a rule that removed clinical trial requirements for kidney and liver transplants between people living with HIV. This proposed rule is further implementation on the CMS side with the organ procurement organizations to ensure they’re carrying out the stated intent of the HOPE Act law. It’s building on consensus that has existed through multiple administrations.”
The proposed change would go into effect on July 1, and, according to Shanker, would help everyone in need of an organ — not just HIV-positive people.
“People living with HIV, their ability to receive organs from other people living with HIV in a more streamlined way means that the overall organ waitlist is sped up as well,” he added. “So it benefits everyone on the waitlist.”
Shanker, who was also a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, spoke about how this is a rare moment of bipartisanship.
“There’s no secret that the Trump administration has been quite adversarial to LGBTQI plus health, and to the health of people living with HIV/HIV prevention resources as well … From destabilizing PEPFAR to shutting down one of the primary implementation partners, which is USAID, to firing almost the entire staff of the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV Policy at HHS … But what this is is a glimmer of hope that we can have bipartisan solutions that improve quality of life for people living with HIV.”
Harold Phillips, the CEO of NMAC, a national HIV/AIDS organization that pushes policy education and public engagement to end the HIV epidemic, and an HIV-positive American, sees this as a huge gain for the HIV-positive community.
“For a number of years, we were excluded from that pool of potential donors,” Phillips said. “Many people living with HIV were excluded from being able to get organ transplants. So this opens up that door. This is a positive step forward that will help save lives.”
That “open door,” Phillips said, does more than just provide life-saving organs to people in the most need. It provides a sense of being able to support their community.
“I remember when I was no longer able to check that box on my driver’s license,” Phillips recalled during his interview with the Blade. “I remember what that meant — that my organs might not be able to save a life. The potential that now they could is really exciting for me.”
“To think about people living with HIV donating their organs to other people living with HIV and helping extend their health and well-being — that’s an exciting moment in our history. It reinforces that HIV is not a death sentence anymore.”
Human Rights Campaign Senior Public Policy Advocate Matt Rose also sat down with the Blade to explain the realities of HIV-positive people in the U.S. right now who are looking for a transplant.
“If you’re HIV positive and on the waitlist for an organ right now, your chance of getting one is slim to nil,” Rose said. “This at least gives you a real shot.”
He went on to explain that while the HOPE Act started to move in the right direction, it hasn’t done enough for HIV-positive people in dire need.
“This bill [HOPE] was supposed to fix that — and it never really has. But every administration, we keep chipping away at the next hurdle,” he said. “This latest move will drastically expand the ability for someone who is HIV positive to donate an organ.”
That slow chipping away, in addition to the non-stop trials being done to prove the efficacy and ability for HIV-positive people’s bodies to accept organ donation, is part of the broader push to normalize this practice and remove outdated restrictions.
Shanker elaborated, explaining all that time was necessary to figure out the efficacy of HIV-positive-to-HIV-positive organ transplants but now that the data has been collected — its time to expand the availability.
“There were over a decade of clinical trials between the original HOPE Act law being signed by President Obama and our rule being promulgated at the end of the Biden administration. It was to allow those clinical trials to run their course,” Shanker said.
Nina Martinez is the first HIV-positive person to donate an organ to another person with HIV.
She explained that the stigma and lack of understanding from the general public is another hurdle that those working to improve the quality of life for people living with HIV have to deal with.
“People don’t generally understand that treatment works,” Martinez said, who became the first person to undergo HIV-positive organ donation in 2019. “When you have access to antiretroviral therapy, it lowers the virus in your bloodstream to levels so low that lab tests can’t detect it. Clinically, that correlates to good health and an inability to transmit HIV sexually. I was healthy enough to pass the same evaluation as any other living donor without HIV.”
She continued explaining:
“Just by having a diagnosis of HIV, they’re labeling donors as medically complex, and that’s not accurate. Every donor with HIV has to pass the same evaluation as donors without HIV,” she said. “If someone passes that evaluation and still isn’t allowed to donate, that’s discrimination. If a patient is willing to accept that organ and you block it because of preconceived notions, you’re denying someone care based on disability. That runs counter to basic fairness.”
When asked about her decision to become a donor and what message she hopes it sends, Martinez emphasized that the choice should remain personal.
“I didn’t undertake this endeavor to say that people with HIV should donate. This is a community that’s been through a lot and has contributed to science — we have served. But for people who wanted a way to leave a legacy, and that is what I wanted, they should be supported in that. There shouldn’t be arcane scientific perceptions and myths getting in the way of that.”
National Donor Day, which raises awareness of organ donation, is on Feb. 14. To become an organ donor, visit registerme.org.
Health
CVS Health agrees to cover new HIV prevention drug
‘Groundbreaking’ PrEP medication taken by injection once every six months
CVS Health, the nation’s second largest pharmacy benefit manager company that plays a key role in deciding which drugs are covered by health insurance policies, has belatedly agreed to cover the new highly acclaimed HIV prevention drug yeztugo.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of yeztugo as an HIV prevention or “PrEP” medication in June 2025 as the first such drug to be taken by injection just once every six months. AIDS activists hailed the drug as a major breakthrough in the longstanding effort to end the HIV epidemic.
“We are pleased that CVS Health has finally decided to cover this groundbreaking new PrEP mediation,” said Carl Schmid, executive director of the HIV+ Hepatitis Policy Institute.
“Four months ago, 63 HIV organizations joined us in sending a letter to CVS’s president urging them to reconsider their refusal to cover Yeztugo and reminding them of their legal obligation to cover PrEP and describe the important benefits the drug would bring to preventing HIV in the U.S.,” Schmid said in a statement.
He noted that CVS Health now joins other leading pharmacy benefit manager companies and insurers in covering yeztugo. Gilead Sciences, the pharmaceutical company that developed and manufactures yeztugo, has said 85 percent of all people with health insurance in the U.S. now have coverage for the drug, according to Schmid.
“However, coverage does not automatically translate into access and usage,” Schmid said in his statement. “Too many people are being forced to pay copays while other payers, including employers, are failing to cover all forms of PrEP,” he said.
According to Schmid, the HIV+ Hepatitis Policy Institute is joining other HIV advocacy organizations in urging federal and state government officials to engage in “aggressive enforcement of PrEP insurance coverage requirements and sustained funding of state, local, and community HIV prevention programs.”
Health
Choose U ambassadors share lived experiences with HIV, personal reflections, and insights
The Choose U World AIDS Day panel brought together three longtime advocates living with HIV to talk about care, stigma, and what living with HIV over the long-term means to them. The conversation featured Jahlove Serrano, Joyce Belton, and Andrew Nichols, who have each lived with HIV for more than 20 years. News is Out hosted the event in partnership with Gilead Sciences.
“Co-created with community representatives from around the world, Choose U is comprised of inspiring examples of how the outlook for aging with HIV has dramatically changed,” Gilead shared in the recent launch of the program. “By focusing on the real-world experiences of people in different circumstances, Choose U spotlights individuals prioritizing starting and staying on HIV treatment, self-care, and overall strategies to help them lead healthier lives.”
The Choose U ambassadors opened with a clear message: Lived experience drives understanding.
Each panelist talked through the decisions, relationships, and periods of uncertainty that shaped their HIV care. They also described their approaches to HIV treatment and adherence, including the importance of staying on treatment to help lower the risk of HIV drug resistance. They reflected on the shifts they have seen in HIV treatment over the decades, the value of honest conversations with providers, and how staying engaged in care and on HIV treatment helped them lead longer, healthier lives.
The panel discussed U=U, which stands for “Undetectable equals Untransmittable.” Undetectable means there is so little virus in the blood that a lab test can’t measure it. Research shows that taking HIV treatment as prescribed, and getting to and staying undetectable, prevents HIV from spreading through sex.
The panelists also spoke about the emotional side of living with HIV over the long-term and the stigma they have faced. Joyce described a personal moment when her pastor visited her in the hospital and how that experience began her work educating her church community about HIV.
Jahlove talked about how his biological family reacted to his diagnosis. “When I disclosed my status, they told me that I put a shame on the family,” said Jahlove. When he shared his status with his peers, they responded with support, which gave him a sense of empowerment.
Andrew, a professional therapist, described how he has experienced stigma in dating and in his workplace, and why he turns to therapy for guidance. “Therapy has really helped me rebuild my confidence and realize my self-worth has to come from me,” said Andrew. “Then after that, I can help with the greater community.”
The panel closed with a message for others living with HIV: They encouraged viewers to start and stay engaged in HIV treatment and care, ask questions, and rely on supportive networks. Their stories show how starting and staying on treatment over the long-term, community, and affirmation can shape well-being.
A recording of the full 30-minute event is now available on YouTube, which you can access here.
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