This article was written in honor of World AIDS Day 2026.
1.1 million Americans live with HIV. More than half are now 50 or older. Roughly half of new diagnoses are recorded in the Southern U.S. Meanwhile, the federal safety net is crumbling. Washington cut $600 million in HIV and STD prevention grants this year alone. States and cities are following the trend.
That’s only a snapshot of today’s story about HIV. But where does that story feel represented in today’s pop culture? I don’t see it.
Angels in America opens in 1985. Dallas Buyers Club begins in 1985. It’s a Sin covers 1981 to 1991. Pose runs from 1987 and ends its final season in 1998, just after the advanced medications arrived. They are some of the best motion pictures of the last thirty years. And they all take us back to the same place: before 1996, and before the medical interventions that turned a death sentence into a chronic condition.
I understand why we’re stuck before 1996.
But first, let me be clear: those years before 1996 deserve their monuments. The plague years came with a story already built for what Hollywood knows how to handle. A diagnosis, a decline, a death, a funeral, a fight. Grief and rage gave writers a shape, and death gave them a clear ending.
The present doesn’t hand you an arc like that. Today the drama of HIV is quieter. It’s a pill every morning, an injection every few months, or walking into a clinic only for them to tell you they have reduced services because of funding cuts. It’s wincing when you have to list your daily medications, wondering if the healthcare professional is judging you. It’s a pharmacy call about a prior authorization that makes you have to wait a few more days for medication you needed yesterday. It’s the moment you decide whether to tell a date. It’s a 2 a.m. scroll through an app and seeing someone’s profile that lists “clean only.”
Beyond 1996, there are rich, beautiful, and deeply moving stories still wanting to be told.
Show me love under U=U. A person living with HIV who takes treatment and keeps an undetectable viral load cannot pass the virus to a partner through sex. The science is settled. The culture hasn’t caught up. I want to see that couple. Two people falling in love, one positive and one negative, where the question isn’t whether they’ll survive. It’s whether they can build something.
Show me what aging with HIV looks like. Nearly half of adults with HIV had been living with a diagnosis for more than 15 years. And the people who made it through the plague years are now in their sixties and seventies. These are people who buried their friends, then were told they are next, then didn’t. Think about where the characters of It’s a Sin would be today, if they had lived. That’s the sequel I want. Not a memorial, but a portrait.
Show me stories from the South. New York, San Francisco, and London have held the spotlight.
Now, eight of the ten states with the highest diagnosis rates are Southern states. My home state of South Carolina ranks among them. Black gay and bisexual men carry the heaviest burden, and Black women account for about two-thirds of new diagnoses among Southern women.
Throughout the South, awareness is lower. People go longer without being diagnosed, unaware that they are living with HIV. Why? The hour-long drive to the nearest clinic. The pastor who preaches against you on Sunday and runs the food pantry on Monday. The prevention pill, and now the long-acting shot, that exist in theory and stay out of reach in practice because of insurance, distance, or a doctor who never brings it up. I want to see this story.
Not a memorial, but a portrait.
If one pop figure never stopped talking about HIV, it’s Madonna. Her best friend and roommate, Martin Burgoyne, died of AIDS in 1986 at 23. In 1989 she tucked safe-sex information into the Like a Prayer album. In 1992 she wrote “In This Life” for friends she had lost. On her 2006 Confessions Tour, she sang “Live to Tell” in front of statistics about the epidemic.
What stands out over four decades isn’t any single tribute. It’s what she kept insisting on: that people survive through community, through refusing to be ashamed, and through having a place where they belong. The dance floor, the chosen family, the ballroom. That’s the survival infrastructure.
And yet even Madonna’s most recent statement looks back. On the 2023–24 Celebration Tour, “Live to Tell” became a memorial: a growing wall of faces lost to AIDS, from Burgoyne to Keith Haring to Freddie Mercury. It was devastating and right. It was also one more work that places HIV in the past tense.
That’s not a criticism of her. It’s the clearest sign of the gap. If the artist who never stopped talking about HIV still reaches for the memorial, who is writing the story of today?
Charles Orgbon III (he/him) is an environmental sustainability consultant by day, and freelance writer by night. When it comes to writing, Charles has done a variety of creative projects, from personal essays to news journalism to even comics and songwriting. In 2020, for example, he released his first EP, “A Survivor’s Reward.” He loves writing about identity, culture, and sexuality.