Published in The Plain Dealer (front page of the Metro section). Print version (PDF) PAGE 1 and PAGE 2.
Also published on Cleveland.com: http://www.cleveland.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2012/07/cxxstallworth.html
By Casey Capachi
WASHINGTON, D.C. — At the opening session of the International AIDS Conference last Monday morning, 20-year-old Lawrence Stallworth II of East Cleveland sat listening to his story being told to the thousands of attendees.
“Lawrence Stallworth is in the audience today. He was 17-years-old when he found out he was HIV-positive. It only took one mistake for the virus to become a personal reality,” said Phill Wilson, founder and executive director of the Black AIDS Institute, as he looked out at the crowd packed into the vast auditorium in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.
Stallworth is one of 3,522 individuals in Cuyahoga County living with HIV/AIDS as of 2009. It’s the highest number in Ohio, according to a AIDS United report.
“I was speechless,” said Stallworth, now a student at Cuyahoga Community College, of being mentioned in Wilson’s speech, which garnered a standing ovation. “Phill has been such a great mentor to me.”
Stallworth said the series of events leading up to his first International AIDS Conference, and the first one to be held in the U.S. in 22 years following President Obama’s lifting of the travel ban on HIV-positive people entering the country, was a “whirlwind.”
Since speaking publicly about his HIV-positive status in local schools only a couple of months after his diagnosis, Stallworth has shared his story at the United Nations on World AIDS Day, at the United States Conference on AIDS, and last September was one of the first young people to speak before the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.
During the conference last week, Stallworth called on the President, Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the HIV/AIDS community to create a National Youth HIV & AIDS Awareness Day. Stallworth said this would give youth a “day every year to know that they need to stand up for this issue until we have no new cases of HIV infection.”
Four out of every 10 new HIV infections occur in people younger than 30, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We have this golden opportunity to actually end the HIV and AIDS epidemic,” said Stallworth, who works as a community educator and outreach coordinator at the AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland.
“We do ourselves a disservice by standing on the wayside and not being involved,” said Stallworth. “We do ourselves a disservice by not holding our legislators accountable for policies and actions that affect us directly.”
At the conference, Stallworth sat on the panel, “Young People Leading the Fight Against HIV: US and Global Perspectives on How to Make a Difference.” He spoke forcefully into the microphone as he told the audience about being diagnosed with HIV in 2009.
Stallworth said he became incredibly sick one night and over the next few weeks lost 20 pounds. He went to the emergency room, where he was tested for Hepatitis C, given an IV and discharged. When he returned for a follow-up appointment, the doctor looked at him and said, “Why did they let you out of the hospital?”
It was not always easy to be open about his HIV-positive status. Stallworth recalls the difficulty he had telling his family, especially his father.
“My mom sat there and she comforted me and my dad — I could tell he was hurt because he had already said some things prior to that that he probably regretted in the moment,” said Stallworth.
A little while later his father came back and said, “Lawrence, if there was a way I could take this away from you, you know I would.”
As a gay black male, Stallworth knew he was at a high risk of contracting HIV and went to get tested every few months.
A Fenway Institute study presented at the conference reported that young black men who have sex with men, those 30 years of age and younger, contracted HIV at a rate of nearly 6 percent per year, about three times the rate as their white counterparts.
Stallworth’s cautious behavior, he says, was not enough to protect him. “Black gay men — we don’t have high-risk sexual behaviors in general but the reason why we’re at risk is that there’s already so much HIV in the community. It only takes one slip up,” said Stallworth. “We have to have more access to testing. We need to remove the stigma so people feel comfortable about getting their HIV test.”
“If we want to move forward, we have to become a society where it’s OK for young kids to talk about who they are and come out to their parents and say ‘Mom and Dad, I’m gay’ and ‘Mom and Dad, I’m having sex,’ and for them to be accepting of that and to actually say ‘OK, son or daughter, that’s fine but here’s the things you need to do to make sure that you’re safe, and here’s some organizations I know that could help you with that.’ ”
Stallworth said there are organizations in Cleveland, such as the AIDS Taskforce, that address the needs of HIV prevention at the “ground level” but funding, he said, is always a concern. The Taskforce’s youth center, for example, once open five days a week, is now open three.
In the face of adversity, Stallworth frequently quotes a line from one of his favorite films, “The Shawshank Redemption,” a movie about a man who, based on circumstantial evidence, is sent to prison for murdering his wife and her lover.
“Morgan Freeman says you can either get busy living or get busy dying,” said Stallworth. “I made the decision to dedicate my life to fighting HIV/AIDS. It didn’t stop me from graduating from high school, it didn’t stop me from going to college for nursing and I just made the Dean’s List this semester.”
Stallworth said his dream is to become an infectious disease nurse and work at the Cleveland Clinic. It is his homage he said to his aunt, “his rock,” a nurse, who helped him seek medical attention in the first place.
Stallworth also said he has “political aspirations.”
“I want to change my city and really my country for the better — the world if I can,” he said, laughing. “I know I dream big but I was always taught to.”
Stallworth said the day he was diagnosed HIV-positive his life changed.
Not for the worse, but for the better.