Q, a 26-year-old entertainer from Kansas City, Missouri on RuPaul’s Drag Race, has revealed she was diagnosed as HIV-positive two years ago.
“I am doing something very sentimental for the runway today,” she said before Friday’s show. “It’s inspired by the generation of gay people that we lost to the AIDS epidemic in the ’80s. So it’s really, really special to me.”
Q had to go through a mental process of coming to grips with the dianosis, initially struggling.
“When I first got my diagnosis I felt like really lost and I felt, like, super alone,” she said. “I tested positive when I was 24. I was mostly scared about how I was going to be treated by family and people around me who don’t understand it, because it is so stigmatized.”
Some didn’t take the news well.
“You know, people have said really awful and nasty things to me and almost de-humanizing me,” she recalled.
“It’s crazy how much people with HIV have to deal with. I’ve been treated differently by like, health care providers,” added Q. “I think it’s so important to have queer people in health care. You really feel that difference in care between those providers.”