Like Townsend—who works as an HIV Prevention Manager and is a Philadelphia transplant—Edmond, a Gary, Indiana native and an HIV Peer Support Specialist at THRIVE SS relocated to Atlanta in 2015 in search of community, which he found through Undetectables Atlanta (UA); a private Facebook group that provides support and brotherhood for Black queer men living with HIV. It was through the THRIVE SS/UA network that the duo soon became a trio.

Enter Thaddeus Works, 56, a retired law enforcement professional whose routine visits to the THRIVE SS headquarters in Southwest Atlanta where he’d often see Edmond, wave hello, and then continue with his day, all of a sudden became less routine.

“I met Darriyhan three years ago. He was working with THRIVE [SS] and I used to come into the office and throw my hands up [in a gesture to say hello],” Works said. “And then one day I was talking to Larry [Walker, Executive Director of THRIVE SS]. I was trying to give Larry a hug, and I opened my arms and Darriyhan came up and hugged me. So that's how that happened,” he said.

It was 30 years ago, on November 7, that basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. announced he’d acquired HIV. No other HIV disclosure has had such a reverberating impact before or since. From the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles, where he achieved era-defining success with the LA Lakers, the cherub-faced icon held a press conference where he revealed he was living with HIV and would immediately retire from basketball. The magnitude of this event was due not only to his popularity as a sports hero; he was a 32-year-old heterosexual Black man who appeared to be perfectly healthy and still in his athletic prime.

Unlike other celebrities with HIV whose disclosure and/or death made mainstream (Rock Hudson, Liberace) and LGBTQ (Sylvester) headlines, Magic was not gay, nor did he use intravenous drugs. He was heterosexual, which meant he was "just like anybody else" and not like those dispensable others. Those others made up a besieged minority who did not need to be convinced that AIDS was real. Among them were Black gay men.

In 1989, Malcolm Reid, 63, had gone to so many funerals that he lost count. He remembers being so emotionally exhausted from burying friends he decided during those early days to stop attending funerals altogether. The clock was ticking towards his demise, or so he thought.

“Well, I'm next,” Reid recalls thinking. “And when the next person died, I was like, I'm next. And that never happened. And I remember asking myself, why did they die and I'm still here?”

It would be another eight years, in 1997, before Reid would learn that he acquired HIV. But his story would not mirror those of his friends whom he laid to rest, instead, it would become the impetus he needed to co-create The Silver Lining Project, a group that would impact his life and the lives of Black gay men living with HIV, particularly those over 50 who are often rendered invisible in the broader Black gay community.