To help celebrate World AIDS Day, Illinois State will feature the presentation Shawn and Gwenn: A boy. A girl. A virus. At 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 30, in the Bone Student Center Prairie Room.
Shawn and Gwenn are a couple who live with the everyday effects of being HIV positive. Shawn has HIV; Gwenn doesn’t. Since 2000, Shawn and Gwenn have been educating together, using their relationship as a way to talk about the issues of sexual health. By combining humor and candor, they’ve successfully engaged over 50,000 college students and have shared their story with millions of people through Cosmopolitan Magazine, MTV, BBC and HBO films.
Shawn discusses his many years of living with HIV, having been infected as a child, and the two explain how Gwenn remains HIV negative in their relationship. He has authored a memoir, My Pet Virus: The True Story of a Rebel Without a Cure. Infected with HIV as a child through the contaminated blood products used to treat his hemophilia, Shawn learned early in life about discrimination. Within a month of testing positive for the virus, he was kicked out of the 6th grade. By all accounts, Shawn wasn’t expected to live five years. After beating the odds and graduating from high school, Shawn opened up about his life, creating one of the first “poz blogs,” describing his life as a 20-year-old dating with HIV. He wrote a column for Poz Magazine, Positoid.
As an undergraduate at Wittenberg University, a young woman with HIV spoke at Gwenn’s sorority house. Inspired, Gwenn began to speak with her friends about sexual health and then took a class on HIV/AIDS. While attending James Madison University’s graduate program, Gwenn volunteered for an AIDS Service Organization and obtained her master’s degree, with her thesis examining the likelihood of condom usage in long- and short-term relationships among college-aged women.
The event is sponsored by Diversity Advocacy, Health Promotion and Wellness and Student Counseling Services.
