Unraveling the urgent, unspoken struggle for accessible HIV prevention
How healthcare inequities and systemic divides leave vulnerable communities behind in the fight for PrEP access. THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED ON UNCLOSETED MEDIA A NEW INVESTIGATIVE LGBTQIA+ FOCUSSED NEWS PUBLICATION. ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY SPENCER MACNAUGHTON THIS STORY WAS REPORTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH FIERCE HEALTHCARE, A HEALTHCARE-FOCUSED PUBLICATION AT THE INTERSECTION OF BUSINESS AND POLICY. Twenty-year-old Dorian McCuller sat on his porch in Newport News, Virginia, trying to say “HIV” out loud. “It’s really scary.
I feel like if I’m too open about it, people will use it as a target.” Growing up in the South, McCuller felt a lot of stigma about being gay.
When he was 13, he came out to his grandmother. McCuller’s grandmother says she only remembers advising McCuller not to have sex because he was a virgin.
Fast forward to last year, McCuller got the call that he was HIV positive a few days after his 19th birthday. Someone McCuller had hooked up with told him they needed to talk. “I immediately knew it was in the realm of HIV,” he says. “I got tested a few days later.” In the last 30 years, HIV rates have gone down, in large part because of the game-changing prescription drug pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), which reduces the risk of contracting HIV through sex by 99%.
