Charles Sanchez is very busy being good at a lot of things, especially being gay. A Chicano writer, actor, singer, and advocate, he's a contributing editor for TheBody.com. His writing has been featured in POZ Magazine, Them.us, PositivelyAware, and more. In the fall of 2024, his article “Health Insurance Obstacles Can Disrupt Your HIV Care, but It’s Important To Keep Advocating for Your Health” (TheBody, 2024) was honored with a Gold Digital Health Media Award. For four years, he hosted the Instagram Live broadcast for TheBody, “At Home With,” featuring interviews with celebrities and prominent members of the HIV and LGBTQ+ communities. Sanchez's groundbreaking web series, Merce – a musical comedy about a person living with HIV who isn’t sick, sad, or dying – won “Best Actor in a Web Series” at the Official Latino Short Film Festival and “Best HIV Content” at America’s Rainbow Film Festival. Sanchez collaborated with composer and lyricist Joel B. New to create the HIV public service campaign on YouTube, “The More You Can Ho.” He was tapped by the World Health Organization (WHO) to lend his humor and honesty to their global social media campaign that brings awareness to the MPox epidemic. His lifelong dedication to the arts and activism has been recognized on Healthline.com's List of HIV Honors: The Most Influential Voices and POZ magazine's POZ 100, as well as being featured on the cover of People En Español Salud (Winter, 2024).
Current news stories regarding HIV are bleak. The Trump administration has made major cuts to HIV/AIDS funding internationally and domestically, including education and prevention campaigns, care for those living with the virus, and scientific study for new treatments and possible cure.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my ripple: actions that I take, big or small, that affect others. Like a pebble dropped into a calm lake, the action of dropping that pebble creates ripples of waves that spread energy further than either the pebble or the lake could have imagined.
Every year around mid-October, a particular heaviness plagues me. The feeling creeps in before I know it. And although it’s an annual occurrence, it catches me by surprise.
“Geez, it’s a helluva time to be sober, huh?” I said this jokingly to a friend of mine recently, a fellow addict living with HIV. We both snickered, but we know the truth: there’s no drug or booze that could make any situation, even the hell of what we all are living through in Orange Cheeto’s America, better.
When I woke up in a Little Rock, Ark. hospital in 2003, I didn’t know where I was, or why.
What is a person worth? Who is worthy? Of help, of love, of existence?