Interview: Donja R. Love Is Empowering People Living With HIV to Tell Their Stories

Award-winning playwright Donja R. Love has been creating stories that celebrate Black and Brown LGBTQ people for nearly 15 years. But for the past five years, their energy has been focused on empowering people living with HIV to tell their own stories. 

That mission happens through Write It Out! ― a 10-week writing workshop that Love launched in 2020. This coming December 2, in celebration of World AIDS Day, the program is presenting 9 short plays created by the 2024 cohort in a staged reading at The LGBT Center in Manhattan. Admission to the showing is free, though audiences are encouraged to RSVP in advance.

As conceived by Love, Write It Out! continues the legacy of Other Countries ― a writing workshop that was established in 1986 to correct the underrepresentation of Black gay narratives in literature. But where Write It Out! differs from Other Countries is that the latter was devoted to the perspectives of Black gay men, while Love's program embraces people of all backgrounds and expressions ― so long as they are living with HIV.

For Love, this open invitation to all people living with HIV is intentional. As they tell BroadwayWorld, “Every person living with HIV has a story to tell. But how many of us are given the opportunity to share it?" Here, Love is referring to the shame and stigma that, even after 40 years, still silences people living with HIV from fully engaging with society. 

Even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that modern HIV medications allow people living with the virus to live long and healthy lives and to stop transmission from even happening in the first place (U=U), Love says the narrative we keep seeing in American media is that HIV is a contagious death sentence. But instead of attacking this misinformation directly, Love is using the power of storytelling to connect with hearts and minds. 

“Whether someone believes it or not,” Love explains, “we all deserve love and softness. Write It Out! helps our writers lean into that fact as well as their own truths to show the world that we are so much more than a virus; and so much more than stigma and misinformation. And I believe that when you talk to people instead of at them, eventually they’ll start to see you for who you really are. But before we can start with changing how the world sees us, we have to change how we see ourselves.” 

That’s another aspect of Love’s writing program: It helps people living with HIV heal their own pains and reject the shame that has been thrown onto them.

Birth of Write It Out!

Write It Out! was born out of the healing power that Love experienced after they started penning their own story. At the time, they were coming up on the 10 year anniversary of their HIV diagnosis. But instead of feeling excited at how far they’d come, Love says they were hit by an overwhelming wave of grief and anxiety. The emotions were so intense that Love says they couldn’t even leave their bed. 

True to their identity as a writer, Love grabbed their iPhone, opened up the Notes app, and started writing out their grief, desires, and complicated joys. Before they realized it, they’d created a first draft of what would become their hit play one in two, which chronicles the misadventures of a Black gay man after he is diagnosed with HIV. But on a deeper level, the play also confronts the devastating statistic released by the CDC in 2016: If current HIV diagnosis rates persist, one in two Black men who have sex with men will be diagnosed with HIV. 

Rather than take that message as prescriptive, Love channelled their feelings into a powerful message for audiences: Things don’t have to be this way. We can change them. And though one in two has been incredibly successful, Love says they don’t expect participants in Write It Out! to challenge the American health system with their stories. 

“The stories our writers create don’t have to be about HIV at all,” Love says. “They could be about anything from going on a coffee date to gay unicorns flying to Jupiter. And trust and believe we’ve definitely had both in Write It Out! All I want is for people living with HIV to be writing and telling their own experiences instead of being told what they are supposed to feel. And if they share those stories with the world, wonderful. And if they choose to never share those stories with anyone but themselves, that’s wonderful too. Because this is about healing and learning that we deserve love.”

And there it is: Love is empowering a marginalized community to love itself and tell its story on its own terms. If that is the only thing that comes out of the program, it will at least have proved that there is more than one narrative around HIV. And even that much has the potential to change the way Americans talk about HIV. We’ve already seen the transformative success of this approach for LGBTQ people. Think back to the 1990s when Ellen Degeneres first came out on her eponymous TV show. Though the show was eventually cancelled, what came out of her disclosure was a renaissance in queer storytelling that continues even today.

Though the journey may look different, Love is using Write It Out! to create liberation and to show the world that there is so much more to HIV than it originally thought. Anyone who’d like to learn more about these possibilities is free to join Love and the 2024 Write It Out! cohort for their Final Sharing at The LGBT Center, on Monday, December 2, at 7:00 PM.