I remember the first time I saw something about it. I started working at CNN in the summer of 1983, around the same time that the mainstream media began its dangerously maladroit reporting on the epidemic. When I eventually got around to telling my siblings, my sister, a nurse and college professor, said, 'I love you please don't shut me out of your life over this.' My brother's only comment on the matter was, 'Man, I always thought you were smarter than this.' Well, so did I.Įven though HIV has been inside me for two decades, I've lived with it much longer - three freakin' decades.

But many times I'm relieved they never had to witness the toll HIV has taken on my body, my career and my mental health. If they had lived longer and known I was positive, I have no reason to believe they would have been anything but supportive. My mother succumbed to lung cancer a year and half later.

My father died of esophageal cancer barely two weeks after I seroconverted.