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
United States Conference on HIV/AIDS grapples with federal budget cuts
Annual gathering is largest of its kind in the country
Advocates, public health experts, and healthcare providers gathered for the United States Conference on HIV/AIDS on Sept. 17 in Anaheim, Calif.
The conference is the largest of its kind in the nation and came amid a wave of new challenges for HIV research and treatment. Since the beginning of the second Trump-Vance administration, federal spending cuts have targeted HIV/AIDS programs, including the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development and proposed cuts to PEPFAR, which supports HIV testing and treatment globally, in 2025.
Last year, Congress maintained funding for HIV programs after proposed cuts faced opposition from advocacy groups and bipartisan criticism. Yet, this year Congress has proposed similar cuts to many of the same programs, which would cut nearly one billion dollars in HIV funding. The majority of the cuts would impact HIV prevention and outreach, which includes ending nearly all Centers for Disease Control and Prevention HIV prevention activities.
“If we continue down this path,” said Jeremiah Johnson, the executive director of PrEP4ALL, an advocacy group that supports expanding access to HIV prevention. “We’re going to see more people falling off treatment. We’re going to see more wait lists. That’s going to lead to more people dying from AIDS-related complications.”
Cuts and challenges
The funding cuts loomed over the conference and inspired protest from activists.
On the first day of USCHA, activists with Save HIV Funding organized a mock funeral outside the convention center. Advocates living with HIV wrote eulogies for themselves, meant to show the consequences of diminished access to treatment. Then activists marched through the conference carrying fake coffins.
Johnson, who helped organize the protest, said that “the Trump administration has eviscerated global aid … and the fears that many of us are just talking about hypothetically for ourselves at the moment are already happening [internationally]. And so we wanted to place that front and center at this conference.”
The attacks on funding for HIV research and outreach come at a complicated time for the movement to end the AIDS epidemic. While options for prevention and treatment have never been more accessible, such as PrEP and antiretroviral therapy, there have been some concerning upticks in infections, particularly among communities of color.
Southern states account for the majority of new HIV infections in the country, despite making up only 38 percent of the population. And these infections impact disproportionately Black and Latino communities. According to the CDC, even as overall HIV infections decreased from 2018 to 2022, diagnoses of HIV among Latinos grew by 17 percent, with a majority of this increase happening in the South.
Stigma is still the biggest barrier for people seeking out HIV treatment, said Guillermo Chacón, president of the Latino Commission on AIDS.
“The progress that we [made] in the past two years has been demolished,” he said.
Chacón blames the federal government for stigmatizing HIV treatment by using harmful rhetoric about queer people.
“The level of homophobia and transphobia right now is even higher because it has been used as a political message to create fear and division in our country,” he said.
Chacón believes that research and outreach must be done to reverse the rising HIV infections among Latinos. However, this is exactly the type of research that the Trump-Vance administration is targeting most intensely. Research into “health disparities” — why some health problems impact certain communities more than others — has been heavily criticized by the White House, along with other research that it considers “woke” and claims is not supported by science.
Impact felt at conference
The opening plenary for the conference addressed some of the funding challenges the movement was facing but tried to shift the focus to the victories the movement has seen over the years. Speakers highlighted historic successful activist campaigns like ACT UP, and recent improvements in medical care and access to treatment.
Randevyn Pierre, head of U.S. external affairs at ViiV Healthcare, the sponsor of the plenary, took the stage to celebrate the success of the U = U campaign (undetectable viral load =
untransmittable HIV virus), and ViiV’s investment of $33 million in HIV community organizations across the U.S. This comes as the Trump-Vance administration has made moves to end direct funding of community-based organizations, opting to give the funding to state healthcare agencies.
The speakers at the conference discussed reducing stigma for those living with HIV and the joy of living authentically. They also emphasized the diverse groups of people that are impacted by HIV and how they can come together to fight for a cure. Longtime AIDS activist Rae Lewis Thorton exclaimed, “When they tell me there’s a cure to HIV, I’m gonna take off my 4-inch heels and put on gold slippers,” to applause from the audience.
The opening plenary also featured song and dance from a variety of artists, many of whom spoke about how HIV has impacted their own lives and how advocacy has uplifted their spirits. However, the joyous atmosphere at the conference would not last.
On the final day of USCHA, Geri Donenberg, the associate director of AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health, took the stage to address the conference.
As she spoke, phones began to buzz around the room with breaking news: the Trump-Vance administration was drafting an executive order to create an external board to oversee NIH grants and screen them for political content. NMAC CEO Harold Philips took the stage after Donenberg to address the crowd. “It’s up to us,” Philips said, “to hold NIH accountable.” He added that HIV advocates “have supporters inside NIH who are struggling and working to do the right thing. We have to have their back.”
Chants of “stand up, fight back, fight AIDS” erupted from the crowd as Philips spoke. “We do have to fight back. We do have to continue to fight,” Philips replied.
Caleb Kaufman is a California Local News Fellow placed with the Los Angeles Blade. The California Local News Fellowship is a state-funded initiative to support and strengthen local news reporting. Learn more about it at fellowships.journalism.berkeley.edu/cafellows.
Health
AIDS Healthcare Foundation announces 3 million people globally in its care
Los Angeles-based group lauded ‘historic milestone’
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit group founded in 1987 that has become the world’s largest HIV/AIDS organization, has announced it has three million people in care around the world.
In a statement released on May 26, the organization, known worldwide as AHF, said the latest accomplishment reflects its global commitment to HIV prevention, care, and treatment. It says the accomplishment comes at a time when AHF marks the 25th anniversary of its first global programs launched in South Africa and Uganda in early 2001.
The statement says the three million people in care milestone also comes while the group approaches the 40th anniversary of its founding in 1987.
“Today, AHF provides lifesaving services in 50 countries across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, supporting millions of people living with HIV through a network of 1,056 global clinics, 79 healthcare centers in the U.S., 67 pharmacies, 96 wellness centers, 26 Out of the Closet thrift stores, outreach programs, and community partnerships,” the statement says.
“This accomplishment is far more than a number — it represents 3 million individuals whose lives have been touched by compassion, commitment, and the belief that healthcare is a human right,” Condessa M. Curley, the AHF board chair, said in a statement. “We extend our deepest gratitude to every member of the AHF team whose dedication made this milestone possible,” Curley said.
The AHF website notes the organization was founded in 1987 in Los Angeles as a network of hospices committed to “fighting for the living and caring for the dying” at a time when there was no effective treatment for HIV/AIDS. A statement on the website says since that time AHF has greatly expanded, converting its hospices into healthcare centers “and building a new paradigm for HIV care both in the United States and around the world.”
The statement adds, “Under the leadership of president and co-founder Michael Weinstein, AHF has grown from a group of friends dedicated to creating dignified hospice care to the largest AIDS organization in the world.” It says Weinstein “has been at the forefront of creating cutting-edge healthcare and advocacy programs and continues to drive the organization forward with the aim of saving more lives around the world.”
The statement announcing the milestone has also come at a time when more than 40 million people worldwide are living with HIV, “while hundreds of thousands continue to die annually from AIDS-related illnesses despite the availability of effective treatment.”
It says AHF’s response has included an expansion of its prevention and public health programs worldwide. In 2025 alone, according to the statement, AHF and its affiliated programs provided nearly five million free HIV tests globally and distributed more than 54 million free condoms, “underscoring the organization’s continued emphasis on both prevention and treatment.”
In D.C. AHF operates health care centers at 1701 K St., N.W., Ste. 400 [202-293-8680], 650 Pennsylvania Ave., S.E., Ste. 310 [202-350-5000], and 1647 Benning Road, N.E., Ste. 300 [202-350-5000].
Cannabis Culture
LGBTQ people, weed, and mental health: what you need to know
Community uses marijuana at much higher rates than general population
Uncloseted Media published this story on May 7.
By SPENCER MACNAUGHTON | In 2025, the global cannabis market size was valued at nearly $103 billion. By 2034, that number is expected to explode by roughly 1,400 percent to more than $1.43 trillion.
In short, as an increasing number of countries legalize marijuana use, everyone is starting to consume a lot more weed. And LGBTQ people tend to use cannabis at much higher rates than the general population. One study found that 55 percent of lesbian and 45 percent of gay young adults use marijuana, compared to about 33 percent and 37 percent, respectively, of their straight counterparts.
As LGBTQ people face a mental health crisis, the mainstream stereotypes that depict weed as an antidote for anxiety, panic and depression aren’t painting the full picture. And that could be exacerbating the mental health struggles so many queer people, and especially youth, face.
Here’s what the research demonstrates about marijuana and its effects on mental health:
- Multiple studies suggest a link between marijuana use and an increased risk of mental health disorders, including schizophrenia, depression and anxiety in individuals who are genetically predisposed.
- One study found that daily marijuana use, especially among younger people, makes some individuals seven times more likely to develop psychosis.
The increase in higher-potency strains of marijuana could pose unknown risks. In 1995, the average content of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in confiscated marijuana was less than 4 percent. In 2022, it was more than 16 percent. Researchers don’t know the full extent of the impact that these higher concentrations can have on mental health and especially on younger people whose brains are still developing.
- A systematic review of studies published between 2013 and 2025 found damning results for the mental health of young cannabis users:
They were 51 percent more likely to experience depression, 58 percent more likely to experience anxiety, between 50 and 65 percent more likely to experience suicidal ideation and 80 to 87 percent more likely to have attempted suicide.
- While the above stats paint a grim picture, there is also some research that suggests benefits of cannabis use:
- A 2025 systematic review found that “medicinal” weed showed some efficacy in relieving withdrawal symptoms of opioid use disorder. THC use has been associated with improvement of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, bipolar symptoms and sleep quality.
- Other studies found that THC administered in a controlled setting was associated with a decrease of symptoms and adverse effects for a range of mental health disorders, including schizophrenia, psychotic symptoms, and anorexia nervosa.
Beyond what we pulled from academia, there is an astounding lack of information about the interplay between weed and mental health. As we dive deeper into Mental Health Awareness Month, I hope advocacy organizations, influencers and news outlets ramp up their coverage of this important topic that affects the countless LGBTQ weed smokers, many of whom are already struggling.
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