25 faces: Leaders fighting HIV/AIDS in Colorado

17 Bill Mead

In 1997, Bill Mead’s partner Ron died of AIDS.

Ron found out he was infected in 1985, Mead said, and “started suffering the consequences in about 1990,” showing the first symptoms of the infection that would take his life. That’s when Mead got involved in the Southern Colorado AIDS Project where Ron had already begun to volunteer. Mead, now 61 and a financial consultant, is the president of the Colorado Aids Project’s board.

Mead has since had another partner who was HIV-positive, but “I’ve remained negative the whole time,” Mead said – which goes to show how HIV can be prevented with the right precautions. Even while Mead stayed negative, though, the disease has still changed him for good.

“When Ron got sick I always thought we’d be here;” finally arriving to a time when HIV is more of a manageable illness – “I treat challenges as a battle and was gonna win, by God,” he said. “But people never heard of some of these things (Ron) had” when it came to painful and debilitating medical conditions while he suffered with AIDS.

“One night he had a fever of 107. We had to ice him,” Mead said. “He hated the ice, because it gave him chills. Going through that, I had to tell people who my partner was, and that I was gay.”

In conservative Colorado Springs, that was a challenge for Mead, who is also the Senior Vice President at Wells Fargo Advisors. At the same time, community education on HIV has been an uphill battle. “It’s ironic that even in our own (LGBT) community, getting people to get tested is so hard – people were thinking that for getting tested their names were gonna get posted on TV or something,” Mead said.

But they’ve won a lot of important allies since then.

Mead has been working on setting up a needle exchange program through SCAP – as a tool to lower HIV infection rates among intravenous drug users by providing clean needles to discourage sharing – a program that’s been shown to be effective against the spread of HIV and made possible by 2010 state law introduced by Denver Sen. Pat Steadman. “We talked to law enforcement, District Attorneys and the Health Department saying here’s what we’re looking at doing by putting in a needle exchange program,” Mead said.

“The police departments were surprisingly open-minded,” Mead said. “They’re concerned about their officers’ safety getting stuck by needles” on the job.

There are ongoing obstacles – despite increased awareness of HIV/AIDS, the rate of new infections among young people is actually now on the rise, Mead said. “So it’s nice to see when we do have young people involved.”

For World AIDS Day, Mead said, a young speaker will discuss his own recent infection with HIV.

“You’ve got 19-20-year-olds speaking about being infected – that’s powerful stuff,” Mead said.

And that kind of message will be vital: 20 years on, despite all advances, HIV is still real and still spreading.

“It hasn’t gone away,” Mead said. “We’re increasing numbers now. It’s gonna be our kids and our grand kids, if we don’t increase support and awareness.”