Processing Your HIV Diagnosis, Understanding and Navigating the News

It’s hard to forget the day you got diagnosed with HIV. No matter who you are, the news instantly starts a new chapter in the story of your life. How you process the diagnosis, however, depends on your environment and the resources you have access to.

In the first episode of Living y Ready Volume III, we meet five HIV-positive individuals who take us back to those early days, those first feelings post-diagnosis.

Dorian Klemensine, 27, is the youngest person on the show this year. He’s a Southern California native who works in entertainment. When he found out had had HIV three years ago, he thought to himself: ‘this is my way out.’

It was a dark time, and he needed his family’s support and guidance to help him find his light again.

“In that moment, it feels like your world is coming to an end, like everything’s going to be over,” Klemensine says on the show. “It feels like a rebirth of yourself, like you are a whole new person in this one moment because now you have something that can potentially change your life in a very drastic way.”

When José Ramos found out he was HIV-positive, he got upset.

Ramos had been seeing someone monogamously, so they stopped using condoms in the bedroom. What José didn’t know was that this partner had been struggling with an addiction to meth. When the truth surfaced, Ramos was already 35 pounds lighter and nearly dying of AIDS.

“I was very angry,” Ramos says, “angry at me for letting it happen to me, angry at him for infecting me with HIV, and lastly I was disappointed, and I was ashamed.”

Even Ramos, who had been working in the HIV community for decades, decided to keep quiet about his status. He sat with himself for a long time, coming to terms with the truth of the situation.

Chicagoland native Dale Roberson also processed his diagnosis solo. This was back in 2001: a decade after the AIDS epidemic practically destroyed the gay community, and a decade before HIV-treatment was compacted into a single daily pill.

“I wasn’t surprised when I got the diagnosis,” Roberson admits on the show.

Things got worse before they got better. Roberson, a Black man who had already struggled to come out as gay, who had been struggling with a meth addiction, decided not to tell anyone about his status for a long time. To this day, many of his loved ones don’t know.

Meth addiction is also a piece of Ceasar Corona’s story, who went to the doctor one day because of an infection that wasn’t going away. After they ran tests, the doctor came back with antibiotics for the infection—and additional news: Corona was HIV-positive.

“Because I was in the middle of active addiction, I really didn’t care what they had to say about my diagnosis,” Ceasar says on camera. “It was basically something I phased out and pretended not to hear, and I continued on my path of destruction.”

For Marilynn Ramos, a mother of five from the San Fernando Valley, the diagnosis came as a wild surprise.

She had just buried her father, and she was getting calls from the doctor. Call after call, she ignored them. And she was getting frustrated. What could they possibly want?

Finally, she picked up. Angrily, she asked, “What’s going on? Do I have AIDS?”

The nurse on the phone said, “Yes, you do.”

“Where I grew up, in a Hispanic low-income community, it was always the street workers who got HIV, the drug users, the gay men, that’s what HIV looked like,” Ramos says on the show. “So, when I was diagnosed, we were just like—what happened?”

Dorian, José, Dale, Ceaser, and Marilynn have very different lives, very different experiences. In this premiere episode of Living y Ready, they each introduce us to HIV the way they experienced getting diagnosed.

And over the course of this LatiNation Original year-long series, we will watch and understand how being positive unites them and offers nuanced perspective on what it means to be living with HIV today.

Don’t miss it.