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How has your relationship with family changed since you came out to them about being HIV+?

15 | April | 2011
Shawn

Being diagnosed so young- at age 11- I believe my situation really helped to inform my family about the realities of the HIV crisis in the earliest days of the epidemic. I was born with hemophilia, so my family knew what a lifelong medical condition was all about. After HIV, however, there was a change in that I needed to be protected from HIV as well as the stigma attached to it. For instance, I was kicked out of school in the 6th grade, so my family had to learn how to stand up to discrimination. It made us all more compassionate people.

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Infected with HIV as a child through the contaminated blood products used to treat his hemophilia, Shawn learned early in life about discrimination. Within a month of testing positive for the virus, he was kicked out of the 6th grade. By all accounts, he wasn’t expected to live five years. During his freshman year of high school, he met his favorite band, Depeche Mode, through The Make-A-Wish Foundation, and lived to see graduation. At age 20, he opened up about his life with HIV after a decade of silence, creating one of the first "poz blogs" in 1996. After humorously describing his life, he caught the attention of Poz magazine and began writing a column entitled "Positoid", a word he created as a way to describe himself as someone living with HIV.

In 2006, his memoir, My Pet Virus: The True Story of a Rebel Without a Cure, was published by the Penguin Group. Today, Shawn is happily married to his wife partner, Gwenn Barringer, and the two speak together as a couple, educating about how they keep her HIV-free in their safe and healthy relationship. (Hint: condoms.)

In his spare time, Shawn drinks iced mochas and fronts a synthpop duo, Synthetic Division. In 2010, he released a CD to commemorate the twenty-year anniversary of his dying wish to meet Depeche Mode. He lives with Gwenn in Charlottesville, Virginia.