During the crisis years of the ’80s and early ’90s, humour and advocacy were the two things that carried me through.

A native Winnipegger, I began volunteering and working at various AIDS service organizations in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario following my diagnosis. In response to overt stigma and discrimination, I went public to the media in 1988 and sought out speaking engagements in order to put a real face on HIV.

After years of front-line advocacy, I took a long break in the late ’90s, becoming a makeup artist and still volunteering behind the scenes. For example, I coordinated makeup for DQ97, a fundraiser for Casey House, a Toronto home for palliative care.

In 2005, I came back on the scene as a Canadian Treatment Action Council (CTAC) board member. I sit on that council as the representative for gay men and, over the course of my tenure with CTAC, I’ve had the experiences of a lifetime.

During the 2006 International AIDS Conference in Toronto, I was only three weeks into a grueling anti-retroviral regime but, with the help of my co-op, I organized and staged the successful pillow-case demonstration against federal health minister Tony Clement during the conference’s opening ceremonies.

This successful protest was recorded in the Ontario HIV Treatment Network’s documentary, Positive Voices: Leading Together, where I am one of five conference attendees followed throughout the Toronto 2006 conference. Leading Together photos are by Jake Peters.

But it was my experiences working in Rwanda that were truly pivotal and transformative. No one has ever touched my life as much as the women, children and men of Rwanda. Their story inspired my Toronto co-op to raise over $5000 for the We-Act Microcredit project, which employs disenfranchised HIV-positive survivors of the genocide and gives them back a meaningful life. As a result, we received the Jim MacDonald Award for Social Change from the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada.

My personal photo album

After travelling across Canada and then the world, I finally went multimedia on the World Wide Web last year, as I and my esteemed colleagues (including one PositiveLite.com blogger) joined the HIV stigma campaign’s website: www.hivstigma.com in 2009, and my long standing blog Acid Reflux, created in 2005. 

My original blog Acid Reflux has been moved to Positivelite.com. Additionally I continue to be a regular contributor to Toronto’s gay lifestyle bi-monthly fab magazine, and MyGayToronto.com

 

I was diagnosed with HIV in 1993, much to my surprise, while working for one of the major Canadian banks, which made disclosure at the time all the more complicated.   (I’ve made up for it since.) Starting in 1994, I’ve held volunteer positions throughout the HIV community. I’m a past chair of PARN (Peterborough AIDS Resource Network) where I still maintain links. I’ve also been an executive board member of both the OHTN (Ontario HIV Treatment Network) and CAS (Canadian AIDS Society).  Along the way, I’ve been on more committees than you can shake a stick at.  Perhaps the highlight of my volunteer career, though, was being  inducted to the  honour roll of the OAN (Ontario AIDS Network) for service to the community.

Along with Brian Finch, I was a blogger/spokesperson for Ontario’s HIVStigma.com campaign in 2009-2010.  But I’ve blogged about HIV since2003 prolifically, first on Live Journal and more recently on PositiveLite.com where my Green Acres column has appeared since the site’s inception.

I lived my early life in the UK.  I moved to Toronto in 1971 where I lived until 1995 before moving to the country. I now live outside a little village that nobody has heard of called Warkworth, Ontario (pop. 700) with my partner of thirty years and three beloved dogs.

John McCullagh is the publisher of PositiveLite.com. He's an HIV-positive gay man who has been active in Toronto's LGBTQ community since immigrating to Canada from his native Britain in 1975. A social worker by profession, he's worked in government and the not-for-profit sector in both front-line and management positions. His experience includes research, policy analysis, strategic planning, program development, project management, and communications. Much of John's work has focused on the needs of young people, including queer youth. 

John was one of the founders of the Toronto Counselling Centre for Lesbians and Gays (now known as David Kelley Services), which, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, was one of the first organizations in Toronto to offer professional counselling to those infected with and affected by HIV. John regularly contributes articles to PositiveLite.com about his personal experiences of living with HIV, about issues relevant to Canada's HIV and LGBTQ communities and about Toronto's arts and culture scene.

The Vision

Most HIV-related websites dedicated to the needs of those who are HIV-positive tend to be serious  - and frankly a bit of a downer - as we read about health issues, treatment problems, stigma, legal issues, etc., and little else

For the founder (Brian Finch), a sense of humour is what has got him through the last 23 years of living with HIV. There is no need for debate about the role of humour and its relationship to positive health outcomes  There needs to be something different out there that celebrates having fun.

PositiveLite.com is a Canadian-driven website for both those of us who are HIV-positive and our friends and supporters, irrespective of sexual orientation, gender or nationality. We tackle important issues while maintaining a "lifestyles magazine" format. 

HIV-positive people in Canada are labeled with many acronyms, including PHA, PLWHIV, PWA, etc. All of these are variations of "people living with HIV or people with AIDS" and all of these define us through disease.  The goal  of PositiveLite.com is for readers to see themselves as whole and complete people whose lives are much more than a positive HIV diagnosis, all in plain language, featuring grass-roots personal perspectives from and for people that may not have a voice in traditional organizations.  PositiveLite.com also serves as a point-of-entry for people living with HIV who are not connected, either by location or sense of comfortability. We foster and nurture participation and build capacity for people living with HIV within a  modern social media context.

In Canada, and perhaps elsewhere, there is no other social media platform that brings all Canadians and others fitting our profile together in one place. Our goal is a lofty one. However our successes in reaching out to an ever-growing cricle of people are showing that our platform is not only needed, but works.

Volunteer Driven

PositiveLite.com is a privately funded website. On a small scale we do receive some revenue through advertising for site overheads. However this is truly a labour of love, and is 100% volunteer driven  - from those responsible for interviews, the contributors, the editing, video editing and so forth. 

If you are a business or an AIDS service organization that appreciates the work we do we ask for your support by advertising on our website.

The Serious Side

As a community, we need to support each other when it seems like life is getting far too heavy. Thus we tackle ALL issues affecting people living with HIV. This is the serious side to PositiveLite.com. Living with HIV is not as easy as everyone might think these days. It takes a lot of work and time management. Eating well, exercising, balancing a work schedule with doctors' appointments, starting new medications and maintaining a fulfilling lifestyle can be very challenging.  So included in our mix are articles about these more serious subjects.  For example, aging and HIV have become the new frontier. We promote the advancement of research and advocacy for those coping with the next 'great unknown'– living past middle age and well into our twilight years—taking into account the long-term effects of the virus and medications.

This is our reality. PositiveLite.com features updates and information important to us as a community, striving to both inform and entertain, while always showing that celebrating the lighter side of life—with fun, satire and laughter—can be the best medicine of all.