Morris Singletary’s HIV diagnosis didn’t stop him from educating others. Instead, he created PoZitive2PoSitive, a nonprofit that gets important messaging surrounding HIV to communities of color, whether the topic is about prevention, medication, or stigmas.
Singletary spoke with rolling out about finding a trusted professional while living with HIV and why people should trust the science surrounding treatment for HIV.
How can someone living with HIV find a trusted care professional who’s right for them?
First of all, we got to back up and stop using the Tuskegee experiment as the end all be all. I’m not saying that it was irrelevant, I’m not saying that it wasn’t true, and I’m not saying that [I] hope that we don’t remember [it], because when you remember, you know how to move forward. We have some amazing new techniques and we have new ways of testing and moving forward… If we’re not involved in treatment care, and the studies go forth [without us], they’re gonna be like, “We don’t know how it works on Black folks,” and they’re not lying. [Like me,] I need people to be a part of studies that are coming up. They are testing cures right now, as we speak. They’re looking for new transmissions of how to administer PrEP and PEP. They are not injectables, which means you get a shot in each cheek. The way that you know about it is to stay informed. I’m gonna keep you informed but when new medicines are coming down the pipeline, we need people of color to be in that space. That’s what we need.
Why should people living with HIV trust the science and medications doctors are prescribing?
I’ll start with myself and how science works. I was taking 23 pills and I had 90 days to live when I was diagnosed. That was 18 years ago in June. If you’ve never seen how science works, this right here is proof. I trust scientists more than I trust people because men lie, women lie, but science doesn’t. That’s a fact. I am proof. People ask me, “Morris, have you always been undetectable?” No, I’m regular. When I say regular, I don’t like medicine. It took me six hours to take an Advil, so imagine when I first started having to take 23 pills. Then having to remember if I took a pill or not. Now that I’ve been doing this for 18 years, have I become disappointed in everything else? Yeah, I became resistant, which means my body would never respond to recovery because I missed a certain amount of doses of medicines. I’m regular. All I’m doing is sharing my story so that you make no dummy mistakes.
