Gareth Thomas, one of the first
professional athletes in the UK to publicly come out gay, is leading
Tackle HIV, a new campaign to combat the stigma and misunderstanding
surrounding HIV.
Last year, Thomas announced that he's
HIV positive and that blackmailers had threatened to expose him. The
revelation was followed by the BBC Wales documentary Gareth
Thomas: HIV and Me.
Speaking with UK glossy Attitude,
Thomas said that he assumed his HIV diagnosis was a death sentence.
“I thought I was going to die when I
was diagnosed with HIV,” Thomas said. “The first thing I
considered was how long I had left to live and I was going to be able
to tell my parents. I had a whole learning process in front of me and
it took me some time, because for a while during my hospital visits I
wasn’t listening to what they were saying because I didn’t want
to be in the hospital, I didn’t want to be seen in the hospital, I
just wanted to get in and out. It was a long, long process for me to
finally listen and be educated.”
When asked whether he's faced stigma
over his status, Thomas answered: “I feel there’s a lot of
stigmatized language actually within the gay community. A friend of
mine found a lot of the negativity was coming from the gay community
and people shunning him and asking whether he’s ‘clean’. That
has such a negative connotation and in a community where people are
at high risk of having HIV, they should understand the power of
derogatory language more than anyone else. It’s embedded in the
community and we’ve allowed that to become the way we ask the
question. That’s one thing I want to try and get people to change:
if you want to know whether someone is living with HIV, ask them if
they’re living with HIV. Don’t ask them if they’re ‘clean.'”
Thomas, 46, also criticized people who
consider HIV to be a “deal-breaker” in a partner.
“If you have the knowledge you’d
realize that if somebody is living with HIV and on effective
treatment, there is no risk of that person transmitting HIV,”
Thomas said. “The fact that people might not want to have a
relationship with someone who has HIV and is on effective treatment
doesn’t make sense. All it says to me is that they either don’t
know the facts or don’t believe them.”
“My husband is HIV-negative and we
have an active sex life,” he
added.