AIDS
Who's Positive?

As a young man, Tom Donohue didn’t face the facts about HIV. “I knew it was out there,” he says, “but I never thought it could happen to me.”

When Tom was 24, he went for an annual physical. He asked his doctor to test him for HIV.

The doctor called a few days later. He asked Tom to come to the office to get the results. “That was sort of a heads up for me,” Tom says.

Tom waited in the doctor’s office nervously. “All I remember is the white coat coming in,” he says. “I don’t even remember what his face looked like. He looked at me and told me I’d tested positive.”

Tom knew that HIV was a disease, but he knew little about it. He just thought he was going to die.

Six weeks later, the AIDS Quilt was exhibited at a nearby university. Tom went to see the patchwork tribute to people who had died from complications of AIDS.

He wondered what someone would put on a piece of the quilt dedicated to him. “It made me realize that I wanted to be able to say that I’d made a difference in the fight against AIDS,” Tom says.

He decided to start Who’s Positive. Through this organization, Tom and six other people living with HIV travel to high schools and colleges across the country to teach young adults about AIDS. They encourage them to get tested, to know if they are carriers of the virus.

Tom’s organization has been featured on CNN and NBC and in the New York Times. His Web site www.whospositive.org offers journals of young adults living with HIV. “I am convinced that if we can humanize HIV – put a face on it – we can make AIDS real,” Tom says. “We can help young adults think, ‘What would it be like if I had to tell my mom I had AIDS?’ We can help others make better choices than I did.”