A Reemergence of HIV-Positive Characters on Television

Unless you were a fan of this particular show, I bet you couldn’t name the one recurring HIV-positive character on primetime television in 2014. His name was Ted (Adam Brody) and he appeared on two episodes of The League, an FX comedy about fantasy football. 2013? Same answer, two episodes of Ted on The League. In 2012, take away even those two episodes, as there wasn’t a single HIV-positive primetime television character that year.

That’s recently changed for the better after first HBO’s Looking and more recently ABC’s top-rated How to Get Away with Murder have both introduced HIV-positive characters back onto Americans’ television screens. On Looking, Eddie (Daniel Franzese of Mean Girls fame) is a romantic interest for Augustín (Frankie J. Álvarez) as well as working at a shelter for trans youth. He has been living with HIV for some time now. How to Get Away with Murder’s Oliver (Conrad Ricamora), on the other hand, recurred throughout the first season as Connor’s (Jack Falahee) on-again off-again boyfriend before being diagnosed in the season finale.

The record of HIV-positive characters is spotty at best, but it wasn’t always as bad as 2012-2014. One of the best-known actors on television today brought us the first recurring HIV-positive character on primetime back in the 1980s. NCIS’s Mark Harmon played Dr. Robert Caldwell on St. Elsewhere, who contracted the disease from a female prostitute. Sadly (and unsurprisingly given the decade) his diagnosis was part of a downward spiral for the character who left at the end of the season and died off-screen.

Probably the most memorable 1980s HIV-positive character was just a guest spot on Designing Women. Tony Goldwyn (now President Fitz on Scandal) played Kendall Dobbs, a young gay man dying of AIDS who wants Sugarbaker and Associates to design his funeral. Goldwyn does fine with the role, but of course Dixie Carter’s Julia Sugarbaker makes the episode iconic by going off on an awful customer who overhears the situation. 

There’s a reason Designing Women had such a following in the gay community.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s HIV made rare but regular appearances. The last serious storyline involving an HIV-positive character was four years ago on ABC’s Brothers & Sisters, where Saul Holden (Ron Rifkin), uncle to the titular siblings, finds out he had been living asymptomatically with HIV for years.

With HIV now treatable for those that can afford medication or live in a country that helps provide it, HIV has receded from the public consciousness. But with over a million Americans living normal lifespans with HIV it’s more important than ever to portray the lives of HIV-positive men and women in entertainment. This group deserves representation, of course, but these characters can also dispel damaging ideas about HIV that many people still have despite clear medical evidence.

Looking, a show chronicling the lives of gay men in San Francisco, introduced a recurring gay character in the premiere of season two after well-deserved criticism for all but ignoring it in season one. The show deftly tackled the issue of dating serodiscordant(where one person is positive and the other negative), showing Augustín’s irrational fears of getting the disease in ways he knows are impossible and Eddie’s frustration that he may be dating a partner who falsely claimed he could handle his status. The show has also dealt with the fear of even being tested that many gay men have and addressed the ongoing debate about PrEP within the gay community.

How to Get Away With Murder has yet to tackle the realities of living with HIV, as Oliver was just diagnosed in the season finale, but has already made smart storytelling choices. While the show has made it clear that Connor is, in no uncertain terms, a slut, Oliver has seemingly had an average to below average number of sexual partners. We naturally like to think that only someone highly promiscuous who has admitted to risky behaviors would be diagnosed but life doesn’t work that way. As too many people have discovered, it only takes once.

The show is well positioned to tackle living with HIV in its second season. Viewers will see Oliver learn to live with HIV, something already accomplished by Looking’s Eddie. And Connor will have deal with a version of survivor’s guilt, wondering why he wasn’t infected despite repeatedly engaging in risky behavior. Of course there’s a chance that the show could break-up Connor and Oliver but given the couple’s popularity and the showrunner’s stated intention to tackle the HIV storyline, I expect the two of them to deal with this new obstacle together.

Despite these two recent positive examples, there is still a ways to go for HIV-positive characters to be represented on television. For one, I could not find a single recurring HIV-positive African-American character in American television history. This is a disgrace, especially considering African-American communities are the ones hardest hit by HIV accounting for 44% of new HIV infections despite representing just 12% of the population.

GLAAD has recently teamed up with the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation and AIDS United to encourage Hollywood to develop more characters and storylines that accurately portray the HIV/AIDS community. Viewers and advocates should continue to push for greater representation of the hundreds of thousands of people living with HIV in America. Eddie and Oliver represent a significant reengagement of HIV on television and that should be praised, but hopefully it is just the beginning.