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It felt like, of course he was talking to me. Saying I love you no matter what. And I do believe

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that words with God because I was telling myself, during that time and I feel like the moments that I did. It changed me. It really changed me because I felt like

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he knew. Through those tears, I was crying. I was like, nearly. When he's crying, we're not trying to like, you know, being a little baby.

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Crying in a fetal position on the staircase. Arbus spoke us. And I just knew I knew the right. I was okay, I was normal, I was, I was loved.

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I felt love. I felt spiritually loved. And from that moment going forward, I accepted myself. And I accept myself for pride.

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And that's why I encourage you so much, everyone. I think currently my my. Whole motivation behind religion now is my practice for religion

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is I do not know. So at that moment I didn't know how to accept myself. I don't know myself today. I do not know how we're going to save our community.

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I know I cannot do it all on my own. And what brought me back to God and know it's exciting, the fact that we don't need divine help. To really make a difference in our world.

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To make sure that the fact that this is potentially a common problem, and that we're all connected to some of these. And in order for me to really channel that and to embrace that, I have to embrace God.

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So this is similar to love for myself the first time. And now it's like more so than for. My parties,

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I've always been focused on changing the and so my experience that would be to summarize it in a quick synopsis, is I focus less on the academics and more on changing the environment to be better for

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people of color. And what surprised me about reading was it gave me everything I wanted for me to be okay. Everything. I got so much liberation there.

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I've never been so set free ever before in my life, and also never experienced as much racism as I experienced every it was. So I prayed.

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And you know, I have to be very honest, I. You're not taught any value of blackness. You don't understand how your heritage and culture is rich. You don't understand how it contributed to who we are as a country.

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You're not taught that. None of us are taught that. In Howard, I was taught that we should not only be proud of my skin color, not for the fact is not different than being white, but

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because of how much our culture and heritage has contributed to the greatness of this country and who we are as Americans. Black people get that. And that's something to be proud.

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And what I have to say, what really, truly, I am always in search of, I would I would say that for me, I never felt like a complete person any at the time in any area I was in, in Europe, as we discussed earlier, Reed College was amazing in terms

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of my sexual orientation, but my blackness was, not accepted, not tolerated, not in totality, not beyond the grades, the statistics. They were able to get off of it. I, I could

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be I was at Howard, but, you know, we still struggle to come to, income inequality and black community, and they still struggle when it comes to sexual orientation or black community. I never felt completely whole in any other spaces that experience

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to the, today, to that at that moment and down to the scene, like a group or a community of people who can accept us holistically for everything who we are. And that was a beautiful attraction, a beautiful connection. But what shocked me about

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the application was its beginning in the first couple. It says restarting this leadership development program because all of our black gay leaders, I'm paraphrasing, died from the HIV Aids epidemic.

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And, you know, I don't know if I make this clear before, but at this time, I was already HIV positive, but I wasn't nearly to the degree as confident about my own status, nor would I even remotely public about it to to automatically connect

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with the purpose of being an HIV Aids advocate. But to think about something that I am battling currently, both with my self esteem and just like physically caused the death of a whole generation of leaders to the point where we don't have

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leaders today or not enough, kind of woke something up inside of me. And even though at the time I cannot communicate it this way, I would argue that it expressed

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the need for me to address my own status. I continuously described the program as transformative for me, because not only did it force me to address my own sort of insecurities around my status,

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it helped me connect with other people who were positive, and it also connected me to the importance of doing to work. I could be an advocate. I'm knowledgeable about the issues I communicate, the issues.

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I can even issue talking points on Facebook. As an advocate who loved him to help raise awareness. Are they willing to protest outside of the city of Houston for being very competent, for addressing HIV Aids in the city?

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I don't have it. It would go that far. But an activist work and I was ready to protest. And I'm still ready to protest the city of Houston.

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If it wasn't for my parent job as a contractor to sit in peace and I'll be outside the city of Houston right now. But now I see myself as a community mobilizer, because I recognize

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that you can be an activist all day long, but no one's hearing you, no one's like with you, and you're just a crazy person holding up a sign. You can be an advocate all day long, but no one's listening either more to the community or to the establishment and you just wasting your time as well.

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Ambra, how did I demonstrate strength through HIV? And from my perspective I wasn't. And so I said that needs to be a need of people being publicly unashamed

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of being positive and still trying their best to live the best life they always want to live. And then I realized that you have to do it yourself if you expect other people to do it.

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It's so I went public. I would be completely honest with you and say, I don't know if I would do that today. Because it does change your life.

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But I don't regret doing it at the same time. My concern from that is I as I grow and as I learn, I'm learning the root causes of all of our challenges.

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So the root causes of homelessness, the root causes of HIV, the root causes of transphobic phobia. And I want to position myself and my community to attack root causes.

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So we will not be in a position to where we're jumping from issue to issue, to issue the issue issue and being quite honestly, the model that how can we focus on what's birthing all of our, disproportionate,

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you know, affected issues, whether it's poverty, whether health access, etc.? I fear that by going public with my spouse, that's all who I'm to find that

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when I went to my first appointment, they confirmed the result that, yes, I'm HIV positive, HIV positive. And the very first, being my doctor at the time said was, you're going to be okay if you take care of yourself.

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And that kind of like that changed my perspective on that. That really change sort of how I was internalizing my new status, because this whole time

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I think I was really subscribing to a stereotype of being positive. But her words said, and how I took it was you pretty much rent control. All of this.

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And I start seeing from that moment on, HIV is just another challenge of life. And I'm already familiar with challenges. You know, I'm I'm job searching.

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I'm finding a home. I live in a one parent house. I grew up out of poverty. These are normal life challenges, but I'm out of the people.

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And I managed to either work to overcome them or overcame them. And so HIV is nothing different than those normal, systemic and personal and medical challenges that we all have to go through. Be prepared for

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ignorance and to decide for yourself, at what degree are you going to attack that ignorance? I decided for myself, I'm going to attack it systematically and cultural from a very broad perspective,

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from a very awareness perspective. I'm not just me person. I'm not necessarily interested in having private, one on one conversation with someone who is rooted in their ignorance.

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I am willing to help people grow or evolve, but even then, I don't do that in my personal life anymore. But my personal life and it's the boundary I set a personal life.

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I am surrounded by people who are either very much aware or smart enough to become aware on their own, and that sort of forced me to in pretty much bring my job home. But that's the boundaries I set for myself.

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I think it's really important for people, anyone who who is positive, who is contemplating disclosure to set their own level of boundaries. I recognize the need that one. I don't know the community as a whole.

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And I mean, all of our community is fully aware of each other's issue. Even for black gay men. We're so silent and scared and intimidated, and we're dealing with so many other systemic issues

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or includes racism, homophobia within our own community. The church freaking can't get on board with anything. That innovation discriminates against that. We're so innovative with all these challenges

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that it's hard for us, especially for son and a mother, to recognize a need for us to mobilize and be organized against an epidemic that's killing us to the degree that it was killing white folks in the 80s and 90s. And I have yet to figure out how can we as good, how do we

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get our heart and our essence and our core good people fall victim to these social norms and

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systems that definitely don't empower us as black people? But I would even say to some extent encourages

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the development or lack of development in our lives, especially for underserved communities and and so now I try my best to make our all our communities aware, organize us in a way that we can take even small steps towards actions

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against a system that can come up as a passive, and unintentionally or intentionally lazy towards addressing these issues. And so that's where I see my role now.

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I don't, no, I have nothing. I don't, I wouldn't, I would be out there was supportive, but would I organize a protest right now? I don't think so.

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I don't think we have a community that would back that. But I want to empower a community that is able to organize our protest if necessary. I feel confident that

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through organizations like Legacy in Houston, we are going to begin to see a reduction in infection rates, especially for the hardest hit communities. I think we're going to see through programs like in society, our empowerment.

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We're going to see a more empowered, more bold, more courageous black, gay, bi community than we've ever seen before. So I got more involved, I, I start I also recognize that

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there was a huge lack of diversity with all right old men. And I said, I promised myself I didn't make this really known, that if I was to get more involved, it would be my number one mission to make this the most diverse gay civil rights organization in the South period.

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And we're on track to doing that. And I currently served on the board of the caucus as a on the board of trustees. I also serve as membership chair. We currently have over 300 members now.

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I think when I started, it was like around 67. We've never been more diverse than we currently are. I argue to this day that we need more transgender people, preferably transgender people of color, within our organization.

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And that's sort of my new mission. And I'm also currently serving as a deputy treasurer. I operate under the mentality that. You focus on your circle of employees.

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It helps relieve stress. First of all, it helps me relieve stress when I remind myself, is this something I can actually do something about? If it's not, notated and say, okay, now I need to work on increasing

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my circle so eventually I can actually do something about that. But I don't as a bitch about it. And so once I start developing this, let's look at the influence

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of K from emerging leaders through solid insights as legacy. But that's one of the battle I started gaining was, for instance, it was a lack of diversity in the caucus when I originally joined the caucus. Not much. I can really do about that.

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And so I start increasing my circle of influence. And so I became membership chair, where I got more responsibility of all the membership, including who carries member who currently. And then what's lacking

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increased my involvement in Delta. And so I can use that organization to make the caucus more diverse. And I never I never see one involved disconnected from the other,

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which I guess could get me in trouble one day. But and so me advancing that legacy are me trying to increase my circle and emphasize that legacy I see that has a direct correlation

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or connection with me trying to increase my, influence over the caucus. And that's really connected with me trying to mobilize the black community through Delta and anything else that I'm part of. I never walk into the room with just one hat on.

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I walk into the room and saying, how can these people and these resources have this thing that I'm part of? Or how can we all just build together? I think it's a correlation

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and I'm just a tool in that coalition. Well, I'm working hard on learning is the ability to inspire. I question the effectiveness

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of the whole doomsday method of inspiration. Really. You know, I sat in silence equals death, right? I wanted to sort of advocate talking points that we have. The silence equals death inspire people kind of not right.

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It's like, it's like it's like berating you with negative messaging to get you to act. How can we transform a more positive message, to inspire people to act out of a desire and the kindness of their heart?

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I feel like we all well, maybe the office evil does exist, but most of us have the capability of being compassionate, and I use the word comprehensively capacity.

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That's the challenge and how to inspire that out of all of us. How that inspired out of myself. That's what I'm working on. That's what I'm currently working.