Hooking Up with Dr. B & Rasheed
Oct 8, 2026 · 39 min · 13 segments
Dr. B and Rasheed swap coming-out stories and the wild ride of scariness, joy, sometimes hurt, love, and community that comes with the journey. They also talk about the similarities and differences…
Rasheed GongaHost
Adele Schwartz BenzakenHostI remember right now when you were speaking about in the beginning of the HIV pandemic, you can imagine I was very well-known in a small city.
So I had a friend of mine from school that already had HIV, but he opened with AIDS.
And at the same time, my friend had to open not only being a gay, but also to have HIV at the same time.
I asked him if he wants some help and he called me after he opened to his dad and I was in his house.
and uh but i think at the time parents knowing that the child will die because it was a a dead sentence at the time they were more um more care or more open to to accept too
yeah i i definitely think um being queer being gay being lesbian being trans being any part of the lgbt LGBTQIA+, alphabet soup, coming out is hard, and then adding to that, coming out about your HIV status just compounds that pressure, because not only do you have to come out once about your identity or your sexuality or who you are, essentially, coming out now about living with a long-term illness is hard.
That part for me took me not as long as coming out as gay, but I think it was harder for me to do that one than coming out.
Like the courage that I felt in telling my mom that that was my boyfriend in the other room, I didn't have that same courage to do it because most of my family and my friends didn't find out until I had gotten to a point where I felt like, do you know the book, The Scarlet Letter? No, it's a novel that was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and it's written in the pilgrims' time period with the Puritans and how they basically shamed a society, right? And there was this woman who had a child out of wedlock and she was banished from the town and she was forced to wear, whenever she was in the town, a scarlet letter red.
You wear the red letter A on your chest and that's a badge of shame, right? And for me, I carried my HIV status for a long time as a badge of shame.
I remember right now when you were speaking about in the beginning of the HIV pandemic, you can imagine I was very well-known in a small city.
So I had a friend of mine from school that already had HIV, but he opened with AIDS.
And at the same time, my friend had to open not only being a gay, but also to have HIV at the same time.
I asked him if he wants some help and he called me after he opened to his dad and I was in his house.
and uh but i think at the time parents knowing that the child will die because it was a a dead sentence at the time they were more um more care or more open to to accept too
yeah i i definitely think um being queer being gay being lesbian being trans being any part of the lgbt LGBTQIA+, alphabet soup, coming out is hard, and then adding to that, coming out about your HIV status just compounds that pressure, because not only do you have to come out once about your identity or your sexuality or who you are, essentially, coming out now about living with a long-term illness is hard.
That part for me took me not as long as coming out as gay, but I think it was harder for me to do that one than coming out.
Like the courage that I felt in telling my mom that that was my boyfriend in the other room, I didn't have that same courage to do it because most of my family and my friends didn't find out until I had gotten to a point where I felt like, do you know the book, The Scarlet Letter? No, it's a novel that was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and it's written in the pilgrims' time period with the Puritans and how they basically shamed a society, right? And there was this woman who had a child out of wedlock and she was banished from the town and she was forced to wear, whenever she was in the town, a scarlet letter red.
You wear the red letter A on your chest and that's a badge of shame, right? And for me, I carried my HIV status for a long time as a badge of shame.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
