Finding Love and Leadership Amidst the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

In this final episode, we turn to people living with HIV today — longtime survivors of a plague who, despite their pain, frustrations and desires to just be done with it, realize they can’t be done with it. These are people like Kia LaBeija, an artist born HIV-positive, who turned to photography at 16, a couple years after her mother died, to help make sense of her story. And they are people like Phill Wilson, an activist who still bears the scars of his decades fighting in the HIV and AIDS trenches; Valerie Reyes-Jimenez, the proudly positive woman we met in the first episode, who talks about what it’s like to age as a HIV-positive woman; Victor Reyes, one of the children who went through Harlem Hospital and lived long enough to grow up and start a family of his own; and Lizzette Rivera, who lost her mother to AIDS in 1984 and spent decades trying to find her mother’s burial spot so that she could properly mourn and honor her. Together, these five remind us that the HIV and AIDS epidemic is not over — and there is still so much we need to do to bring it out of the shadows.

Voices in this episode include:

• Kia LaBeija, a former mother of the House of LaBeija, is an image-maker and storyteller born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen in the heart of New York City. Her performative self-portraits embody memory and dream-like imagery to narrate complex stories at the intersections of womanhood, sexuality and navigating the world as an Afro Filipina living with HIV.

• Warren Benbow is a drummer who has worked with Nina Simone, James “Blood” Ulmer, Betty Carter and Whitney Houston, among others. He grew up in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and went to the High School of Performing Arts. Warren is Kia’s father.

• Phill Wilson is the founder of the Black AIDS Institute, AIDS policy director for the city of Los Angeles at the height of the epidemic, and a celebrated AIDS activist in both the LGBTQ+ and Black communities since the early 1980s.

• Valerie Reyes-Jimenez is a HIV-positive woman, activist and organizer with Housing Works. She saw the AIDS crisis develop from a nameless monster into a pandemic from her home on New York City’s Lower East Side.

• Victor Reyes was born at Harlem Hospital Center and spent much of his childhood receiving treatment and care at the hospital’s pediatric AIDS unit. He is the director of an after school program at a grade school in Washington, D.C. He also does research at the Global Community Health Lab at Howard University.

• Lizzette Rivera is a data analyst who remains haunted by her mother’s death in 1984. Rivera spent years trying to find the whereabouts of mother’s burial site on Hart Island. She finally succeeded in 2020. She now visits her mother’s grave regularly.

Blindspot is a co-production of The HISTORY® Channel and WNYC Studios, in collaboration with The Nation Magazine.

A companion photography exhibit by Kia LaBeija featuring portraits from the series is on view through March 11 at The Greene Space at WNYC. The photography for Blindspot was supported by a grant from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a nonprofit organization that promotes coverage of social inequality and economic justice.