Diversity Rules Magazine

5 Diversity Rules Magazine April 2018 My academic and professional interest had always been in psychology, yet I could not understand why psychology was training me to sit in an office all day while so much grief, trauma, and stress persisted in the real world. It seemed incumbent on me that if I was serious about helping and healing that I get involved in activism and education. I would get out, stand up, fight back and teach to ensure I was doing everything I could to be part of ending the HIV epidemic. For most of the next 20 years I would do trainings, intern- ships, job placements, and work related to something HIV or prevention focused. And during these two decades, new HIV rates in the U.S. didn't drop once - they stayed around 50,000 new diagnosed infections per year. By 2010, I was trying to build a private psychotherapy practice in New York City in the middle of the worst re- cession of our lifetime. I had the great fortunate to get a part-time position doing education/recruitment for an HIV vaccine trial during this time, where I would get to run around New York City in the middle of the night, talk to people about sex, and hopefully get them interested and inspired to be part of an HIV vaccine trial. It was through this job that I heard about the results of the iPrex trial at the end of 2010. is was the first trial to show how well a pill called Truvada could work for pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. When I first learned about PrEP I honestly didn't give it much thought. But over the next few months I learned more and decided this daily pill would be the best way for me to remain HIV negative. I began tak- ing it July 19, 2011 and have used it consistently ever since. e only "side effects" I've experienced are much more energy and euphoria now that I can finally have sex without fear of HIV. e weight of that trauma going back to Rock Hudson in 1985 began to lift - I finally felt I was in control of my body, in control of my sexual health, that I could experience a man inside me and not worry about paying the price for that with my life. After the FDA approval in 2012, I thought for sure that people were going to learn about this drug. But for the most part it was ignored by the media, the agencies, and the organizations that were set up to help people. Furthermore, the only information on the Internet available was coming from a certain HIV organization that was stating inaccurate and misleading facts about PrEP in order to dissuade people wanting to use it. In Summer 2013 I lost my job working on the vaccine trial, as the vaccine we had been testing for four years proved to have zero efficacy. And then it was around the same time that a friend of mine became newly HIV positive, having had no knowledge that PrEP existed. And I thought, "Okay, this is getting weird. We have an FDA approved drug that reduces the possibility of get- ting HIV by more than 99%. Yet no one knows about it. How can this be?" And a voice answered back, "If no one will talk about it, then YOU talk about it. is isn't the 90s anymore, you don't need an organization or money to get your message out. You just need a wifi connection and a really big cup of coffee." And with that I created the Facebook group on July 1, 2013 in my living room in Brooklyn in my boxers. It was the first, and is still the largest, group devoted to discussing Facts about PrEP, dispelling myths, sharing resources, supporting backlash, creating community, pushing back against the barriers to access. Much to my surprise this thing got media coverage rather quickly in e New York Times, was mentioned in the World Health Organization's PrEP Guidelines in 2015, and now has more than 20,000 international members.

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