A man said he didn’t know HIV was “still around” when he was diagnosed after a one-night stand – and praised EastEnders for highlighting the disease. Jay Hawkridge, 29, thought the disease “was a thing of the past” before he contracted the virus in 2019 after having sex with a guy he had been chatting to.
Jay became seriously unwell a few days later and his body started to break down six days after transition, when he came down with a fever and started feeling nauseous. He took himself to A&E where a blood test came back negative for HIV.
Around a month and a half after the encounter, he went for an STI test, as he had a suspicion he contracted something. He was ‘confused’ and didn’t know what his future would look when he was told he was HIV positive in October 2019.
Eastenders is due to feature a storyline about a character, Zack Hudson, who finds out he is HIV positive in the coming weeks and Jay has praised the “monumental” storyline for educating young people about the virus. Jay, a content creator, from Leeds, West Yorkshire, said: “I barely had any knowledge of HIV before I was diagnosed.
“I was diagnosed back in September 2019, before It's A Sin, before I’d watched Pose, and before a few of the big cultural events that have happened in the last couple of years. I come from a really rural upbringing and I didn’t have many friends in the LGBTQ+ community.
“I had no real reason to believe that HIV was something I needed to be thinking about or protecting myself from. So, when I was diagnosed, it was a massive shock. I thought, ‘wait, what, this is still around?’. I’d never heard anyone in my life mention it so it was really hard for me to grasp at first.”
Speaking about the EastEnders' storyline, he added: “It is important for people living with the condition to feel represented, but also in terms of educating people. There is still more that can be done, but education has skyrocketed in the past couple of years.
“I think it is really nice when I have conversations with people that I meet and I don’t have to explain anymore. I think the new age of media is doing an awful lot of good for representation.”
Jay, who is gay, contracted HIV in 2019 when he had unprotected sex with a man on a one-night stand and found out after being tested. “In all honesty, it was more confusing than it was scary because I was so unequipped to what it was, I had no information as to what it was – especially having been to the hospital,” he said.
"Through lockdown, I was able to take time for myself and research HIV to the point where I understood the facts and the reality of the situation. I was able go back and tell the people in my life about this, in the sense that I had lived through it, and I am able to tell the tale.
“With the Covid pandemic, it was one of those things that became easier to talk about.” Now Jay takes medication to manage his condition and he is unable to transmit the disease to anyone.
He said: “In all honestly, it doesn’t impact my life. It is lovely to know there are no prohibitions to my life. I take two pills a day to manage my condition and I am unable to transmit it to a partner for the rest of my life. I have been in a relationship for the last couple of months, it has been a slow solidly building thing, it has been really nice.
“It is my first relationship since becoming public with my status – my first foray into dating again. It's nice to have that stabilising and love.”
He said before his diagnosis, he had no real knowledge at all of the disease and didn’t feel educated enough about the condition. He said: “I think it is an honourable thing, people try and shy away from things that aren’t family-friendly.
“I think it is a turning point in the discussion about HIV and erasing the stigma. It’s A Sin was monumental; it was an important show for me as it was a really nice resource to point people to, so I wouldn’t have to explain constantly about living with HIV.”
In EastEnders, Zack is set to find out that he too is HIV positive, and the show will show what it is like when you are adjusting to life with HIV. Jay uses his platform and knowledge of the disease to educate others after it took him months to start opening up to people.
He said: “Most of the groundwork that I do at the minute is one-to-one; talking to people online and signposting people to the places where they can get informed. I didn’t feel like I was prepared with the knowledge myself.
"It was intimidating and to let people into an issue I didn’t have much confidence in, was scary. It took me a few months before I opened up to people. I was really vulnerable at the time and it was something new to me. It was daunting and scary.”
