HIV-positive D.C. attorney commissioned as officer with U.S. Army National Guard
Gay D.C. attorney Nicholas Harrison, a longtime member of the U.S. Army National Guard, was officially commissioned as a First Lieutenant in the D.C.
Army National Guard at an Aug. 5 ceremony. The ceremony at the D.C. National Guard Armory located next to RFK Stadium took place a little over a year after Harrison, who was diagnosed with HIV in 2012, successfully challenged the military’s longstanding policy of banning soldiers with HIV from becoming commissioned officers in a lawsuit initially filed in 2018.
In what LGBTQ and AIDS activists consider a landmark ruling, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia handed down a decision in April 2022 declaring the military’s HIV restrictions unconstitutional.
The decision ordered the U.S. Department of Defense to discontinue its policy of refusing to deploy and commission as officers members of the military with HIV if they are asymptomatic and otherwise physically capable of serving.
