After being open about his sexuality and his gender, Jonathan Van Ness is coming out in another way.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, the Queer Eye star revealed that he is HIV positive.
The deeply personal revelation comes only days before JVN’s memoir Over the Top is set to be released. The book, which comes out on September 24th, delves into not only the grooming guru’s HIV status, but the self-destructive spiral he went on that led to that point, starting with sexual abuse he went through as a child.
“For a lot of people who are survivors of sexual assault at a young age, we have a lot of compounded trauma,” he said.
Van Ness says that trauma resulted in heavy drug use and advertising sex for money online to pay for his drug habit as a young adult. Eventually, a fainting spell resulted in a trip to Planned Parenthood, where he discovered he was HIV positive.
“When ‘Queer Eye’ came out, it was really difficult because 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,’” he said.
Before the show started, JVN was able to finally get clean from drugs, and while this is undoubtedly a difficult series of things to talk about publicly, he felt it was time.
“It’s hard for me to be as open as I want to be when there are certain things I haven’t shared publicly,” he said. “These are issues that need to be talked about.”
