There’s a Juneteenth lesson for ending the HIV epidemic
Freedom from slavery didn’t arrive on June 19, 1885 because news finally traveled; it arrived because Gordon Granger finally showed up with enough troops to impose emancipation. And even that wasn’t the legal end. Nationwide abolition came only with the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified that December.
I keep thinking about that this Juneteenth because it is the same pattern that’s so easily identifiable for those who’ve fought for justice: we hold what would solve a problem, yet somewhere, somehow there’s a systemic force holding back the answer. I could be talking about so many challenges, but here’s one I’m going to throw into the public sphere: The HIV epidemic.
Last June, almost to the day, the FDA approved a drug called lenacapavir. Two injections a year. It’s the drug my queer friends have been awaiting. In its trials more than ninety-nine percent of the people who received it remained free of HIV. And researchers call it the closest thing to a vaccine we have. Imagine that: a world free of HIV. The epidemic could end. Not be managed. End.
But a proclamation frees no one. It rarely has, at least. It only names what becomes possible once someone with power decides to carry it the last mile. And in the same year we were handed the tool, the current administration began dismantling the machinery built to deliver it. The CDC’s domestic HIV prevention division? Many offices eliminated. Overseas, PEPFAR, which has kept tens of millions of people alive for two decades? Hollow.
By last October, 2.5 million people who had been protecting themselves with PrEP in 2024 could no longer reach it. It’s not because the science failed, but because the funding was withdrawn. Testing collapsed alongside it; in a single year, nearly five million fewer people were tested for HIV. The help exists. The arms are waiting. We are recalling the troops before they reach Galveston.
And Juneteenth teaches the rest of it—the part that won’t read so well in the history books. Freedom did not arrive late everywhere at once. It arrived last where the people held were furthest from power, in the place enslavers had chosen precisely because help could not reach it. The delay was not an accident of distance. It was a decision about whose freedom could wait.
The same is true now. HIV in this country has never fallen evenly. It concentrates on Black Americans, on Black gay and trans people in the South, on the poor, on the uninsured. It’s really the very communities whose ancestors waited longest for the first emancipation to be made real. Globally it falls hardest on the countries we are cutting loose. Tell me that is a coincidence and I will tell you to read the budget again. The freedom is real. The question, as it was in 1865, is whose delivery will we fund.
I actually celebrate two freedoms this month. Juneteenth and Pride fill June, trying to compete for similar attention. But this time, I tried not to let them compete, but find what the first has to teach the second.
Both of them, when you strip the parades away, are holidays about deliverance that was declared and then withheld, and that had to be taken anyway. Neither was a gift. Both were seized, by people who refused to wait the extra two years, or twenty, that someone with power had budgeted for them.
What remains is the oldest American question about freedom, the one Galveston asked and Stonewall asked and we are being asked again: who do we decide can wait?
