British actor Nathaniel Hall has shared his own story of learning he was HIV positive, at 34 years of age he’s been living with the virus now for half of his life.
Speaking to the BBC radio program Life Hacks earlier this month Hall shared that he was just a few weeks short of his seventeenth birthday when he was first diagnosed. He caught the virus the very first time he had sex.
“I didn’t tell anyone, I didn’t tell my family. I lived with all that shame and all that stigma weighing down very heavy on me,” he recalled.
Today HIV is a manageable chronic illness, treated with daily medication people living with HIV live normal lives, and with an undetectable viral load they are not able to pass the virus on to others.
Hall’s latest role is in the acclaimed British series It’s a Sin, which is set in the 1980’s at a time when there was huge fear about the pandemic, slow government action, and massive amount of misinformation and stigma and discrimination for those living with the virus.
In the series Hall plays Ritchie’s boyfriend Donald Bassett, appearing alongside Olly Alexander from pop band Years & Years.
Speaking to the radio program Hall recounted that while he was still in high school he started seeing an older man, something which at the time he thought was rebellious.
“I think we all have something that’s our act of rebellion and I started seeing this guy who was older than me and as a result I got that diagnosis just after I’d started college.
“It was like a slap in the face, it was like a wake-up call. All of a sudden I was like a child in an adult’s world.”
Now Hall is happily sharing his experience, but his HIV status was something he kept a secret for a long time, only sharing it publicly within the last few years. He created a one-man play called First Time to help other people understand the challenges that many people still face.
Television writer Russell T Davies wrote the It’s a Sin based on his own experiences and those of his friends who were living in London in the early 1980s. Davies previous work includes the popular series Queer as Folk.
It’s a Sin is available in Australia on the streaming service Stan.
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