Flourishing with HIV: an art showcase of people over 50

[Almost2late]

This is nice.. I love San Francisco, if I could only afford to live there..

Sylvia Britt was lying alone in a hospital bed, exhausted and ill from a long bout of pneumonia, when she learned she was HIV-positive.

Someone from the hospital — she can’t recall who it was — had let the diagnosis slip and Britt was wholly unprepared. Devastated and in tears, she called her family, who rallied around her.

That was July 2003, and Britt assumed that the diagnosis was a death sentence. But more than a decade later, Britt, 51, is thriving.

She’s part of a new “face” of HIV — the 50-plus crowd who are believed to make up the bulk of HIV infections in the United States now, and who are living longer and healthier lives than anyone ever expected. This week, Britt’s story and those of three other Bay Area residents are on display as part of a traveling art exhibit spotlighting their generation.

“It’s important for people to see that people living with HIV are not dying,” said Britt, who lives in San Leandro and works for WORLD, a patient advocacy group for women with HIV based in Oakland. “We’re living healthy, normal, prolonged lives. I have HIV but HIV doesn’t have me.”

The art exhibit — called “Well Beyond HIV” and funded by Walgreens — will be on display at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center Thursday through Saturday. It’s made up of photos and personal testimonials that were curated by two documentarians who have been tracking the global epidemic for years as part of a project called the Graying of AIDS.

The two project leaders said their motivation for profiling older people living with HIV was to educate the public at large, and also to celebrate a generation of men and women who survived a brutal epidemic.

“We need to honor the incredible journeys a lot of these individuals have taken. And we need to educate people who may not realize how far we’ve come,” said Naomi Schegloff, co-director of the Graying of AIDS, who interviewed all the participants in the art exhibit. Her colleague, Katja Heinemann, made photographs of the subjects to go with their profiles.

San Francisco resident Greg Mahusay, 54, decided to join the art project after taking a break from HIV advocacy work. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1989 and managed to stave off symptoms of illness until the first effective treatments came along in the mid-1990s. Around that time, he began speaking out on behalf of HIV and AIDS patients and fighting for better care for them.

But immersing himself in that work, especially when people were still suffering and dying all around him, became overwhelming. Now that he’s in his 50s — an age he never thought he’d see, back when he was diagnosed — he’s getting involved again.

Mahusay joined Positive Pedalers, a group of cyclists with HIV who participate in the AIDS Lifecycle fundraising ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles every year. And he’s “coming out” as HIV-positive all over again.

“What I’m doing is serving the community the best way I can. If I can be a positive public example by talking and sharing my story, as little as that is, it’s a great impact,” Mahusay said. “No one ever believes that I’ve been HIV- positive for as long as I have. This is a really good opportunity to promote that living with HIV is no longer the death sentence that it is.”

The art project is also a good opportunity for him to embrace living again — something he said he struggled with for a long time during and after the worst of the AIDS epidemic.

“For so many years, I was asking myself why I didn’t die with my friends,” Mahusay said. “Now it’s like, let’s live and see what happens.”

http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Flourishing-with-HIV-an-art-showcase-of-people-6217557.php#photo-7856048

[DANIELtakashi]

Encouraging information.
Thank you, ALMOST.

[Almost2late]

Your welcome Daniel

These guys are participating in the Aids lifecycles event the guy pictured above is in..

https://vimeo.com/96177528

Can't believe they do it on fixies, that requires quite a lot of stamina.

[anniebc]

I was honoured to be a part of "The Greying of Aids" when I was at the International Aids Conference in Washington DC.

It's good to see they are continuing to bring attention to us oldies, they are doing a great job.

Aroha
Jan

[DANIELtakashi]

I feel encouraged when I  read a story about a long-term person.   One question I  have.   Did many of those long-term people get one or two OIs or did AZT and DDI work well enough to let them stay hall right until the time of the new medication?