Overcoming Dark Obstacles and Being HIV-Positive

Like any minority group, being gay can make you feel like an outcast in society. For people of color in the gay community, that marginalization is profoundly layered.

Without support from parents or loved ones, coming out can isolate you and make you feel unloved. Walking through the world anew—certain about how you see yourself, uncertain how others might—it’s not uncommon to find temporary satisfaction in dark, underground circles where your health is compromised.

It’s in these circles that many gay folks contract HIV, and it’s in these circles where gay folks stay after they’re diagnosed. Here, while they’re met by unsafe activity, they find little judgment around being HIV-positive, and even less around sexual preferences. It’s in these circles where addictions to sex or drugs are formed to assuage feelings of helplessness, loneliness, and a lack of self-worth.

But, when it comes to addiction, the consequences ultimately outweigh the short-term pleasures.

In the next episode of Living y Ready, we continue on through the stories of an array of HIV-positive individuals, who unveil some of the deeper challenges they faced and how they found their way out of the dark.

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“2011 was the lowest period of my life with crystal meth,” Dale Roberson says on the episode. “I had become homeless; I had lost all my support from friends and family. I burned every bridge possible.”

Roberson, still living in Chicago at the time, wasn’t seriously considering suicide, but he started to understand why people might take their own lives. He was all alone, sleeping in motel rooms or in the houses of drug dealers.

Scared of himself and the environment around him, he decided he needed to turn his life around.

“[I found a] social service agency that provided services to those who are living with HIV,” Roberson says, “and I was able to get admitted to that supportive living program, and that’s where I started my journey of sobriety.”

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Looking back at his journey, Jose Ramos thinks that he found solace and a surface-level sense of understanding from individuals he met at sex parties where no one talked about HIV or diagnoses.

“It’s so hard to be intimate that [when] you find a space where you don’t have to disclose [your status], or if you disclose, nobody cares, you go for it,” says Jose Ramos, “and it was really unhealthy.”

What Jose Ramos was looking for wasn’t necessarily sex and drugs. He was looking for intimacy, for connection, to be seen. But, so often, individuals living with HIV are turned down my romantic partners when they disclose their status. The stigma is real; the fear of contraction exists, even when you’re HIV-positive and undetectable.

Ramos found his way. He pulled himself up.

“When I think of the Jose HIV-Negative running around and the Jose HIV-Positive running around, I feel so much more empowered as the Jose, Gay, HIV-Positive running around. I feel [stronger],” Ramos says. “Going through that adversity gives you courage.”

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Ceaser Corona slowly stopped coming to weddings, to baptisms and funerals. Eventually, his friends thought he sort of disappeared.

What his friends didn’t know was that he had been incarcerated. That is, until one friend, Jerry Rodriguez, a case worker in the LA County jails, found him there.

“We—the case workers—would go into the jails to work with clients who were either newly diagnosed or have been living already with HIV or AIDS,” Rodriguez says. “I remember seeing Ceaser, and Ceaser has a very unique last name, so when I saw that, my heart just dropped.”

Life has a funny way of helping you, even if you don’t realize it until much later. While Corona was incarcerated, he got sober; he learned about HIV and how to live with it; he gathered the resources he needed to start a new chapter when he was released.

“It’s very full circle,” Corona says. “The program that saved my life, I now run; I now run that program.”

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Check out the third episode of Living y Ready, Vol. III, where you will hear the full stories from Dale, Jose, and Ceaser themselves.

Daniel G. Garza also returns to the series in this episode with his partner, Christian Ramirez. They open up about the challenges of navigating HIV in the early months of their long-term relationship. Don’t miss it.