Our April 2020 Shero of the Month is Davina Conner, better known as Pozitively Dee, of Denver, Colorado. Davina is a mother and grandmother as well as a twin sister. Since she was diagnosed, Davina has been vocal about the injustices that people living with HIV face. She has been a huge advocate for de-stigmatizing HIV. Tiommi Luckett, PWN-USA communications and training assistant, said, “Dee consistently brings love and compassion wherever she is. In my time with Dee, I’ve appreciated that she is slow to express anger and quick to admit what she does not fully understand about the experiences of others living with HIV.”Davina is the host of a podcast, Pozitively Dee–a platform she uses to combat the stigma associated with HIV. She began with internet radio on BlogTalkRadio.com. The show is now streamed live on social media, and she envisions the podcast growing to the point of having live, on-set interviews. She said, “As long as I can keep reaching people, I will not stop the show because educating others is all that matters.”
Dee recently took on a huge undertaking in her campaign to de-stigmatize HIV. She and PWN Virginia State Lead Deirdre Johnson went on a five-state road trip to talk about the Undetectable=Untransmittable (U=U) campaign in Southern states, because “the U.S. is having such a hard time talking about it.” The idea came to her in a dream. She had hoped to travel a distance of 6,000 miles covering 15 states, discussing the science with as many people as possible. She said, “I knew if I put magnets on the car that it would grab other drivers’ attention while on the road. I truly wanted to get communities and individuals to understand how prevalent HIV is in their state and bring awareness to the alarming statistics of HIV in women of color and women of trans experience.” Though they did not reach their goal of traveling through 15 states, Davina said she and Deirdre did educate everyone with whom they crossed paths. She is sure that the next Driving Out Stigma road trip will cover the other 10 states that were originally scheduled. Dee is a founding steering committee member, ambassador, and Board member for the Prevention Access Campaign (U=U). She has faced a number of challenges within the community when talking about U=U. She said, “I thought the HIV community would have been happy to know this amazing news. I believed in it so strongly because I knew how others were feeling when they heard about the message.”
As a woman of color, Dee was compelled to share the U=U message with marginalized communities. She felt strongly that these communities have so many barriers preventing them from attaining viral suppression, but she was told she was lying when she presented the facts to various communities of people living with HIV. She said there were also those who would not share the message of U=U because they thought some communities of people living with HIV would never achieve viral suppression. In other discussions, the reason for not sharing the campaign was more associated with the founder being a cisgender, white male, and she was told the campaign is for white people. For Dee, the campaign is much more than that. It is one of hope. She said, “It’s eliminating the internalized stigma people living with HIV face. It is letting us know that having a family is possible. If this information was shared years ago, I know women who could have had children.” Davina also advocates ending HIV criminalization.
Despite the fact that much of the HIV community opposes HIV criminalization, Davina points out that far too few have advocated for Nushawn Williams, considering the injustices he has faced. She said, “He was forgotten about, and when folks heard me speak his name, they went to look him up.” Media reports about Nushawn’s arrest for statutory rape had already demonized him in defamatory and stigmatizing language, as he was a black teenager who had sex with white teenage girls. Nushawn served his time, but instead of being released to his wife, who had been waiting for him, he was remanded to civil confinement in a psychiatric facility. He has suffered even more hardships inside the facility. He has gone without access to his medication.
Davina asks, “Where is the love for this human being that was expressed for others who faced the possibility of or actual incarceration?”
There may be hope yet for Nushawn to one day be released from civil confinement. For now, the Center for HIV Law & Policy (CHLP) has found attorneys who are willing to work on Nushawn’s case pro bono and fight to have him moved closer to his family. Davina said several of Nushawn’s family members have not seen him for a number of years. She urges the HIV community to remember that Nushawn has completed his sentence, but a 2007 law “allows the state attorney general, with the support of the NY Office of Mental Health (OMH), to seek a court order to have anyone considered a particularly dangerous sex offender with a ‘mental abnormality’ who still poses a danger to society, in the opinion of the OMH, to be civilly committed, potentially indefinitely.”