East Meadow native named MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’

Gregg Gonsalves honored for fighting HIV/AIDS

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The AIDS epidemic had reached its “darkest days” in the early 1980s in the United States when Gregg Gonsalves, who had recently dropped out of college, learned that his boyfriend at the time was HIV- positive. But, he said, he wouldn’t let the news interfere with their relationship.

Instead, the now 54-year-old East Meadow native began researching the disease, and discovered that little was being done on a national level to curb the epidemic — paving the way for his three decades of political activism. Now a Yale epidemiologist, Gonsalves was recently recognized as a “genius” by the MacArthur Foundation for his advocacy and research into HIV/AIDS.

“I’m still a little bit in shock,” Gonsalves said of receiving the honor and a $625,000 award that he will receive over five years. The foundation, which supports the growth of nonprofits, grants the “genius” award to 1,000 activists who are making significant impacts in their fields. “Nobody knows who gets nominated for this, and nobody knows who nominates,” he added. “It’s a very secretive process.”

A statement from the foundation reads that Gonsalves’s “efforts to connect the HIV/AIDS community with top-tier researchers and scientists were a critical catalyst to fundamental advances in scientific knowledge of the disease.”

When Gonsalves graduated from East Meadow High School in 1981, he was accustomed to keeping his sexual orientation hidden. While many of his friends knew he was gay, he didn’t come out to his parents until he had graduated from high school and had begun his college education at Tufts.

“While [my parents] were shocked and angry, all of my partners have come home for Christmas,” he said. “If there’s a little bit of friction at the start, Norma has opened her house and heart to all of them.”

He was referring to his mother, Norma Gonsalves, an East Meadow community activist who recently retired as a Nassau County legislator representing the 13th District.

“We may have been on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but we were on the same side as far as activism is concerned,” she said. “I’m extremely proud of my son.”

Before Gregg began championing the fight against AIDS, he had lost interest in his studies at Tufts and left the university. He was waiting tables when he found out that his then-boyfriend was HIV-positive. “There wasn’t that much information out there on” HIV/AIDS, he said, explaining that most people only saw it as a death sentence.

Gonsalves began working with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which pressured the United States government to prioritize AIDS research and medical treatment. In 1992, he moved to Manhattan to continue his involvement with ACT UP, and co-founded the Treatment Action Group. “I was a college dropout going down to Capitol Hill to argue in favor of AIDS research,” he said.

Gonsalves learned that his cousin had AIDS roughly three years later, and shortly into treatment, he died. The fight hit close to home twice that year. “It was a very strange time,” he said. “I was helping my family take care of my cousin, and in the midst of everything that was happening, I found out that I was HIV-positive.”

In 1996, however, the first HIV-fighting drugs were introduced, and Gonsalves followed a regimen that changed his status from positive to undetectable — meaning that the virus no longer appeared in his blood. “Unfortunately, my cousin was on one side of history,” he said, “and I was on the other.”

Norma said that her son became even more involved in the fight to eradicate HIV/AIDS after his cousin died. “It got him working as hard as possible to bring education and awareness to the problem,” she said.

Gonsalves eventually shifted his attention to the global epidemic, and in 2006, he moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where he worked with the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa.

He returned to school in 2008, earning a bachelor’s degree from Yale. Nine years later, he received his doctorate there. This year, he joined the faculty as an epidemiologist.

Today, Gonsalves is training a new generation of researchers and activists with an interdisciplinary group that he started at Yale called the Global Health Justice Partnership.

Despite the progress that the world has made in the fight against AIDS, Gonsalves said that there is more to be done. “I think there’s a lot of stigma around HIV status and shunning of HIV positive men by young people,” he said. “And I think that’s unfortunate because the disease is entirely treatable and entirely preventable now when it wasn’t in the past.”