Telling Family About Being HIV-Positive

When it comes to telling your family about your HIV diagnosis, every person has a different approach. Some, like Dorian Klemensine, told his parents right away and leaned on them for support while processing the diagnosis. Others, like Dale Roberson, still hasn’t told his family, over twenty years later.

In the second video chapter of Living y Ready, Volume III, we continue on through the personal accounts of HIV-positive individuals Jose Ramos, Marilynn Ramos, Ceaser Corona, Dale Roberson, and Dorian Klemensine. This episode explores how they told their families.

“I was really afraid to tell my mom,” Jose Ramos says on the show. “I was afraid that she would no longer be proud of me.”

The youngest of eight children in a religious Mexican family, Jose didn’t want to disappoint his loved ones with the news of his diagnosis. So, he waited many years before opening up, especially with his mother.

When he did tell her, it was in Jerusalem. She had always wanted to go, so Jose decided to take her. They stood, mother and son, before the Western Wall, and he admitted to her that he was HIV-positive. She cried out in emotional pain, and he held space for her grief.

“I’m healthy,” he told her. “I work in this field. I’m not going to die.”

And as you do in Jerusalem, Jose and his mother wrote prayers on pieces of paper, rolled them up, and tucked them into the fractures of the ancient stone.

Marilynn Ramos had the most trouble telling her eldest daughter.

“She’s a teen and has a lot of emotions,” Marilynn says on this episode.

Marilynn’s daughter—with whom she was pregnant when diagnosed with HIV almost two decades before—discovered Biktarvy in the medicine cabinet. Unaware, she guessed that her mom was bipolar.

“Biktarvy is not for bipolar,” Marilynn told her daughter when she found out.

Then what’s it for? her daughter asked.

“That’s when I was like, oh I need to tell her, she needs to know,” Marilynn says. “I just allowed her to process the information I gave her. She had a few questions. ‘What is it like? How did I contract it? Is my dad sick?’ Things like that. After we had a good conversation, I think that opened the doors for my home to be a safe space.”

Dorian Klemensine told his family right away. Without them, he may not have gotten treatment.

His mother, when she found out, said: I support you, and I love you, and whatever you decide to do, I’m going to be with you. That moment re-ignited Dorian’s will to live.

“[My mom] made me stop and think, I can do this, I should do this,” Dorian says on the show. “I should continue living life and seizing my moment and not letting this moment be my out.”

Contrarily, Dale Roberson never told his family, and he doesn’t plan to. He’s been positive for over 20 years and doesn’t feel the need to make that kind of announcement.

“I don’t necessarily know what their level of knowledge of HIV is … particularly with being undetectable and untransmittable, and I don’t really feel like I’m in a place to have to educate them,” Dale says.

For Ceaser Corona, so long as he was actively using meth, being HIV-positive didn’t change anything. Telling his family was postponed until getting medical help, rehabilitation, and proper understanding of the condition for himself.

“I remember looking in the rearview mirror of my car and asking the universe … [to] take me out of my environment and help me, because I couldn’t help myself,” Ceaser says. “And the universe answered in the form of handcuffs.”

He was taken to LA County Jail, where there were programs he took to learn more about HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Here, he got all the right information before telling his mother.

Check out the latest episode of Living y Ready, Volume III, for these full, captivating stories firsthand.