Co-Founder’s Reflection: Building Sero, Bearing Witness

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Sero was founded in response to harm that was both visible and routinely ignored.

I came to this work not as a policy expert observing injustice from a distance, but as a young Black gay man from the South, living with HIV and navigating a punitive legal system that treated my diagnosis as evidence of danger rather than a health condition. I had witnessed how HIV criminalization operated quietly, how fear and misinformation were written into law, how punishment was framed as prevention, and how people most impacted were excluded from the conversations determining their fate.

Sero emerged to meet that moment.

The organization was created to address a fundamental absence: people living with HIV were rarely centered as leaders, experts, or narrators of our own experiences. Advocacy efforts often spoke about us without accountability to us. Sero insisted on something different: that lived experience mattered, that survival carried knowledge, and that justice could not be achieved without listening to those bearing the greatest harm.

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As the organization grew, Sero became more than a response to a single issue. It became a space for truth-telling, leadership development, and collective resistance. We documented stories that institutions ignored. We challenged laws rooted in fear rather than science. We supported people navigating investigations, prosecutions, and lifelong consequences, often in silence and isolation. This work demanded care, clarity, and courage, especially when the costs of visibility were high.

What I am most proud of is not only what Sero accomplished, but how we did the work. The organization held complexity without erasing pain. It refused simple narratives in favor of honest ones. And it affirmed that people living with HIV, particularly those who are Black, queer, Southern, poor, or criminalized, are not cautionary tales, but leaders shaping the future of justice and public health.

As Sero moves forward, my hope is that it continues to honor this foundation. Movements are strengthened when they remember who was harmed, who resisted, and who carried the weight of progress. I hope the organization remains committed to centering lived experience with integrity, not as something to extract, but as something to protect and cultivate.

Sero was built as both an organization and a record, a refusal to allow silence to stand in for truth. That legacy belongs not only to its founders but to every person whose story helped shape its purpose. May the work continue with care, clarity, and the courage to remember.