There Was Love Here

About this episode

In this final episode, we turn to people living with HIV today — longtime survivors of a plague who, despite their pain, frustrations and desires to just be done with it, realize they can’t be done with it. These are people like Kia LaBeija, an artist born HIV-positive, who turned to photography at 16, a couple years after her mother died, to help make sense of her story. And they are people like Phill Wilson, an activist who still bears the scars of his decades fighting in the HIV and AIDS trenches; Valerie Reyes-Jimenez, the proudly positive woman we met in the first episode, who talks about what it’s like to age as a HIV-positive woman; Victor Reyes, one of the children who went through Harlem Hospital and lived long enough to grow up and start a family of his own; and Lizzette Rivera, who lost her mother to AIDS in 1984 and spent decades trying to find her mother’s burial spot so that she could properly mourn and honor her. Together, these five remind us that the HIV and AIDS epidemic is not over — and there is still so much we need to do to bring it out of the shadows. Voices in this episode include: • Kia LaBeija, a former mother of the House of LaBeija, is an image-maker a