Donja R. Love. Photo credit: Write It Out! Workshop
Five years in, Donja R. Love’s writing program for people living with HIV is still telling the community to keep dreaming big.
Love is an award-winning playwright devoted to celebrating Black queer love and shining a light on the full experience of what it means to be living with HIV. That includes the clueless, the ratchet, and the bougie. But as Love tells INTO, “We’ve already seen stories about people, ‘cough-cough,’ dying from AIDS. Now it’s time to show the world what living with HIV looks like today instead of the 1980s.”
Love says their mission to reframe the narrative around HIV comes from “struggling with my own HIV diagnosis, love for our poz community, and a desire to surround people like a newly-diagnosed Donja with love and softness. 15 years ago, young Donja didn’t know how they were going to survive.” Thanks to the power of writing, Love says they’ve gone past surviving and moved into thriving. Recognizing that everyone living with HIV deserves to thrive is a major reason why they developed Write It Out! ― a 10-week digital writing program that teaches people living with HIV how to transform their own stories into short plays.
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Each year on or around World AIDS Day, plays written by new Write It Out! participants are given staged readings with professional actors and directors. Since the program was launched during the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown, these performances were initially presented on Zoom. That changed last year, after Love secured funding to fly the 2023 Write It Out! cohort in from all over the country to see their visions brought to life in person at New York’s LGBT Center.
Daring to Dream Big In a World that Stigmatizes You
Though it might seem impossible to transcend the success of last year, as Write It Out! prepares for its December 2nd presentation (again at the LGBT Center), Love tells INTO that the program has undergone a massive restructuring. Write It Out! is now entirely led by people living with HIV, is expanding its programing, and has received a $660,000 Positive Action grant from ViiV Healthcare to fund operations for the next three years.
Before receiving this grant, Write It Out!’s funding came from Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, GLAAD, the Each Other Project, the Terrence McNally Foundation, and individual donors. But while those funds allowed the program to cross the finish line, Love says that ViiV’s grant empowers them to dream bigger and do even more for people living with HIV.
Daring to dream big has become a life-saving mandate for Love, especially in a world that constantly discounts what people living with HIV deserve and need. For example, Love is highly acclaimed for breathing life into the ignored histories and unadulterated extremes that minoritized people have had to endure simply to thrive. But in recent years, Love’s playwriting and television career has been interrupted by people asking them to remove HIV from their storytelling.
“I’m not going to name names,” Love says. “But I have actually been told, ‘We think it would be better if that character maybe didn’t have HIV.’ And for me that was and continues to be a big no.” Another big no for Love came after they decided to create a biennial $5,000 prize for playwrights living with HIV ― the first award of its kind in history. Though their collaborators seemed supportive at first, when push came to shove, Love says they were told that the prize wasn’t a priority.
That’s when Love reminded themself: “Hold up. Aren’t you in charge?” Didn’t I create Write It Out! to stop people living with HIV from being told we should be grateful for scraps?” Following that wake-up call, Love reached out to some of their connections and ended up securing funding for the Write It Out! prize from GLAAD and Billy Porter. The first recipient of the Write It Out! prize for playwrights living with HIV was Dominic Colón, who says that receiving the award and seeing Love’s example inspired him to share his own HIV status with the world.
The point is empowerment, not disclosure
And though the second prize recipient, Matty Mahoski, also shared their name as a proud awardee, Love tells INTO that getting people with HiV to publicly disclose their serostatus is not the goal.
“It’s wonderful if that happens,” they say. “But it’s not required. Actually, we have a rule that applicants to our programs can be entirely anonymous. And even after they are accepted into the program, or even after they win the prize, if they don’t want people to know who they are, we won’t share their information. We also have NDAs for everyone in the program, including me. Because privacy is important and stigma is real.”
When asked why they don’t focus on disclosure, Love explains that: “for me, this work is about empowering our community and showing the world that, a. HIV is not a death sentence, and b. People living with HIV have experienced everything from f*cking joyfully to f*cking sh*t up and getting our whole lives together. Living with HIV doesn’t look like one thing and people living with HIV don’t owe you anything more than what we want to share with you.”
“I’m not going to name names, but I have actually been told, ‘We think it would be better if that character maybe didn’t have HIV.’ And for me that was and continues to be a big no.”
Donja R. Love
Another of Love’s goals is eliminating HIV stigma and helping to expand the community of writers living with HIV. People who attend Write It Out!’s final showing may come away with new understandings of HIV. Beyond that, there’s the possibility that program participants will continue to develop their plays or even go onto pen new ideas. While there is no mandate to do so, Love says they welcome that eventuality. As part of Love’s blue sky dream, they mention a future where Write It Out! alumni are hired into the writing rooms of TV shows, where they’re sorely needed. The 2020 OWN series Greenleaf—to name a recent example—probably could have avoided two episodes of clunky HIV stigma if it had employed a writer living with HIV. Love says they dream of a world where writers with diverse HIV experiences are given the space to develop TV and film characters who are as glamorous, quirky, sexy, or clumsy as anyone else, irrespective of their health condition.
With respect for the wide range of experiences out there, Love designed Write It Out! to be accessible to people of all writing experiences. “I don’t care if you’ve never written anything before filling out the application,” they explain. “The only criteria is that you are living with HIV, have access to the Internet, and want to come write with us. You can even do the whole program and writing assignments on your phone.” That’s exactly how Love wrote their hit play one in two, which was entirely created on the Notes app of their iPhone.
Back then, Love says they could never have imagined how far they’d come. Fifteen years later, and five years into Write It Out!, they say that they realize the only thing that was holding them back was the fear of dreaming that something better could be possible. “But I’m dreaming big now. For me, Write It Out!, and the whole poz community.”
For our part, we can’t wait to see their dreams come true.♦
Write It Out! Final Sharing will take place at The Center (208 W 13th Street, New York, NY 10011) on Monday, December 2, 2024 at 7pm EST
RSVP at the event website or via this form.
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