Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness has come out about being tested positive for HIV, drug abuse and being sexually abused as a child. In an interview with New York Times, the reality TV personality that he is ‘scared to be this vulnerable with people’ as he is soon releasing his memoir Over the Top on 24 September.
Jonathan said that he went to Planned Parenthood to diagnose his flulike symptoms, when he was 25 and tested positive for HIV. “That day was just as devastating as you would think it would be,” he said.
In his profile interview, he talks about his journey of growing up in Quincy, Ill., a small port city along the Mississippi River and becoming his school’s’ first male cheerleader. Describing himself as not ‘exactly popular’ in school, he said, “I was too fat, too femme, too loud and too unlovable.”
While he attended the University of Arizona in Tucson, he admits to having spent his monthly allowance on cocaine. Rather than asking for more money, he turned to Gay.com, to advertise for sex for money. Flunking out of college, he finally decided to enroll in a beautician program, after which he moved to Los Angeles.
Jonathan was just in his 20s when he started smoking methamphetamine, introduced to him by people he met on Grindr, a dating app. Trying to clean up his act, he did go to rehab twice but relapsed.
After testing positive for HIV, he decided to rebuild his identity and says he hasn’t done hard drugs in years. Jonathan adds that his self-destructive behaviour stems from the abuse he experienced as a child. Talking about a particularly painful memory, he said that he was abused by an older boy from church, during what was supposed to be a make-believe play session.
“For a lot of people who are survivors of sexual assault at a young age, we have a lot of compounded trauma.”Jonathan Van Ness
The 32-year-old said he was initially unsure about publicly discussing his HIV positive status when Netflix’s Queer Eye came out.
“I was like, ‘Do I want to talk about my status?’. And then I was like, ‘The Trump administration has done everything they can do to have the stigmatization of the L.G.B.T. community thrive around me.’ So, I do feel the need to talk about this.”
Talking about his book on Instagram, he wrote, “The book speaks to some extremely difficult times but it’s also filled with my humor, joy and voice & I can’t wait to share it with you fully.”
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)