Editor’s note: For World AIDS Day 2023, Reckon interviewed people from across the U.S. about living with and battling the persistent stigma that people living with HIV/AIDS still confront today. From those deeply personal, wide-ranging interviews, we published profiles of five people about their journey and fight to eradicate stigma.

In July 2020, a 21-year-old Da’Ron Davis-Henderson was diagnosed with HIV. Being a Black gay man, the stigma of being a statistic weighed on him. Davis-Henderson initially felt betrayed because his then-partner wasn’t completely honest about their status and for the way his community alienated him when he disclosed living with HIV.

“That hurt because I thought I had a community that would always be there for me, and only a few were in the end,” he tells Reckon.

Although Davis-Henderson knew a little bit about HIV and that it wasn’t a death sentence with modern treatment options, he soon learned how those three letters could easily become scarlet.

“I thought that my life was over, socially. That type of judgment is not anything that anybody wants to experience. We’re all human at the end of the day and deserve the basic human decency everyone else receives, regardless of our HIV status,” Davis-Henderson says.

Today, a now 25-year-old Davis-Henderson takes pride in being HIV-positive and working in the HIV awareness field, helping his clients realize the disease is not life-ending by destigmatizing their thoughts about their diagnosis.

Working at RAIN, an AIDS service organization in Charlotte, North Carolina, as a peer support navigator is a full-circle moment for Davis-Henderson, who was a client and used the various resources the organization offers HIV-positive people. Through the peer groups provided, he realized he wasn’t navigating his diagnosis alone and other folks with similar demographics were navigating a new reality as well.

“I felt broken when I got diagnosed and I didn’t talk for months. So, coming to RAIN really helped and gave me a sense of community,” Davis-Henderson tells Reckon.

Based on his experience and professional analysis of the stigmas his clients face, the number one stigma surrounding HIV that Davis-Henderson wants society to stop fueling is that a person is either dirty or clean based on their test results. In the age of social media, this stigma has grown as folks post that they’re clean when discussing their STI results, implying that positive people are dirty.

“So, it puts a lot of pressure on people who are diagnosed with HIV. Hearing someone call someone else dirty because of their diagnosis really grinds my gears,” Davis-Henderson says.

This World AIDS Day, Davis-Henderson says the best way others can show up for folks living with HIV, especially in younger demographics, is to speak out against misinformation online and organize campaigns to show solidarity between HIV-positive and negative people.

“If we can do something of that nature, that would be a step in the right direction to destigmatize HIV and help people learn more about prevention and treatment options,” he says.