| 30 September 2009
As is customary in Peru, Julio Maldonado slid next to the taxi driver and told him where to go.
Maldonado had a lot on his mind. His thoughts drifted to Raul, a friend who had recently died of complications of tuberculosis as a result of AIDS. He couldn't help but think how his new job as Executive Director at the Miraflores, Peru, branch of AID FOR AIDS International — the New York City-based nonprofit that provides services such as medication recycling programs to people living with HIV/AIDS and their caregivers — may have saved his friend.
Suddenly, Maldonado's thoughts jerked to the road ahead. “Why are you going this way?” Maldonado asked, realizing the driver was heading in the wrong direction.
“Shut up, f***ing fag,” the driver growled and snatched Maldonado's knapsack from his lap.
Maldonado drops his light brown eyes to the coffee cup before him as he remembers the incident and sighs. “It's hard trying to remember because I'm still trying to forget,” he says apologetically, smoothing his grey tweed vest. “You have to understand that in Peru there's a lot of homophobia and gay discrimination. Being a gay community activist, people all over Lima knew who I was."
He rubs his brown neck where colorful identical Egyptian birds said to lift people to the afterlife are tattooed on either side. “The cab driver knew who I was,” he says quietly. “He drove to the beach and raped me. And then threatened to kill me if I told anyone.”
For years, Maldonado kept quiet. After suffering three years of continued threats and attacks, Maldonado fled his homeland for New York City, leaving his mother behind. “I almost didn't escape from Peru alive,” he says.
With the help of his friend, Jesus Aguais, founder and Executive Director of the AID FOR AIDS International (AFAI) in New York City, and Maldonado's attorney, Victoria Nielsen, he petitioned for and obtained asylum in the United States.
During the asylum proceedings, Maldonado became involved with the African AIDS Program — a medication recycling program much like AFAI's geared towards reaching immigrants living with HIV — and became its program coordinator.
“Who better to educate a population of immigrants than an immigrant himself?” says Aguais, the man who gave Maldonado his first job as a volunteer at AFAI. “Clients still love him and talk about him — he really left a footprint in New York's immigrant community.”
Aside from working alongside Nielsen and another attorney, Heather Betz, on over 24 asylum cases — which he proudly boasts they won — Maldonado founded Empowering Communities, the first brown bag support group of its kind for straight, gay, bisexual and transgendered people living with HIV in New York.
“Julio never got any formal training in social work, yet he managed to develop this strong peer counseling group,” Aguais says. “Someone who can get outside of himself and connect with people like that is remarkable.”
But then came Sept. 11, and Maldonado decided to end his 13-year love affair with the Big Apple. At first, he thought about moving to the West Coast, but while visiting California for a conference, he was so scared when an earthquake struck that he had a change of heart. So, he set his heart on Chicago.
During his first year in the Windy City, Maldonado spent his time making the rounds in the Intensive Treatment Unit at the Chicago Lakeshore Hospital and building support groups for patients with bipolar disorder and drug and alcohol addiction.
But after a year, he made the difficult decision to leave the hospital to join the Howard Brown Health Center in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood as its Latino Health Specialist. “I felt I had to do things I really loved,” Maldonado says about joining Howard Brown. “And I felt like this was me and [it was] how I was going to feel alive.”
And now, thanks to Maldonado, Erika Estrada says she's still alive. Aside from providing immense psychological help through Maldonado's support group at Howard Brown, Estrada says he's been her rock throughout her transition from a male to a female.
“Julio's my angel and the most important person there could be,” Estrada says. “He lets us [transgendered people] know we have rights and are a part of this society — not some aliens from another planet.”
Aside from providing a Latino support group for people like Estrada, part of Maldonado's motivation for his work stems from dispelling myths, educating people and providing a better quality of life for Latinos.
“People still think HIV is a gay disease, or that if someone is infected it's because they're promiscuous — but it just means that you were [probably] involved in risky behavior,” he says. “You have no idea how many calls I get from Latinos asking for help who are living on the DL ("Down Low," keeping a homosexual lifestyle hidden from others) with [sexually transmitted diseases], or others who don't know how to tell their parents they have HIV.”
And to get the right information out there about HIV, Maldonado says peer education is the best kind of education. As he puts it, since nobody wants to hear the 32 year-old guy talk about safe sex, training people in one support group so they may help educate people in the next is the most successful way to inform.
“The more [participants] feel like it's their group, the more they learn and teach others,” Maldonado says. “One little drop of knowledge in an ocean of questions will eventually lead to more drops until the mentality about HIV/AIDS changes to create an awareness that these people are still human beings.”
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