Disclosure of HIV status and mental health among latino men who have sex with men

Abstract

Early in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, I had two personal experiences that made me acutely aware of the difficulty of disclosing seropositive status, which at the time was very highly stigmatized, to other people?even friends and relatives. The first experience was 2 years after I had left Bogota to come to the University of Maryland at College Park. My best friend, who still lived in Bogota, died of AIDS without having disclosed to anyone, not even his partner, that he was infected. At that time, in 1987, there had been few cases of HIV/AIDS in Colombia. To this day, I wonder what consequences of disclosing he feared, and it saddens me that he did not feel it was safe to tell anyone, despite his being openly gay.