HIV testing is central to thrift store’s mission
For Out of the Closet, selling goods secondhand is secondary
You can’t miss Out of the Closet thrift store, a new business in the Mills 50 district with striking pinkand-aqua-colored walls. It’s sort of Dr. Seussian, and at first glance looks to be just a consignment shop.
But Out of the Closet is much more. It’s a thrift store, pharmacy and free HIV testing center, run as a nonprofit by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation that started in California. A purchase from the store is a donation to the foundation — 96 cents for every dollar spent — that also helps pay for the health care part of the business.
Like the dozens of other locations across the nation, the new shop at 1349 N. Mills Ave. has one mission: diagnosing and treating HIV/AIDS. As of 2018, there were at least 110,907 Floridians living with the disease, including 8,617 people in Orange County, according to AIDSVu, which maps infection rates.
The added capacity for rapid finger-prick HIV testing is needed in Orlando, which has some of the highest infection rates in the country, along with cities in Louisiana, Georgia and Washington, D.C. In 2019, the Southern AIDS Coalition, an organization addressing stigma and discrimination around HIV, said the disproportionate number of diagnoses had reached “crisis” level.
According to the coalition, 44% of people living with HIV were diagnosed in the South.
The risk of contracting HIV is especially high among gay and bisexual men, although today it’s highly treatable.
The LGBT+ Center Orlando, which helps the foundation with testing efforts, performed 8,694 tests in 2019, on par with the steady increases it’s been seeing over the decade, said Keyna Harris, director of health services there. In 2020, however, only 5,328 were performed, likely because of the pandemic. The Hope & Help Center of Central Florida also offers free testing.
Harris said it’s alarming so many fewer tests reached the people who need them, but what’s also concerning is that the number of reactive tests was the same both years. She thinks that could be attributable to people just recently infected getting tested and some people trying to better prioritize their health after the pandemic began who have been quietly dealing with the disease.
Out of the Closet’s arrival can only help, Harris said.
“There’s still such a stigma related to HIV as a whole. They can be coming in just for shopping and while they’re shopping, quickly get an HIV test and be done with it,” Harris said. “Mills 50 is a very vibrant district, it’s very LGBT affirming. I felt like the bright pink and teal fit right in.”
A safe space for the LGBT community
Tim Kirchner, manager of the new Mills location, said he wants the store to be a safe space for all people, but especially for LGBT residents who haven’t been accepted by society or friends and family.
Kirchner, 55, who’s been with his husband for more than 30 years, knows what that’s like.
He grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, a small town where his father was a Baptist preacher. Kirchner remembers his dad reciting sermons about the “fire and brimstone” that awaited sinners, and when he came out to his parents in a letter at 19, his mother told him he was going to hell. For years she refused to even say his partner’s name.
Then, when he was about 27, Kirchner and his husband were attacked in Oregon while walking to their car from a gay bar.
“Talking about safe spaces — there weren’t any,” he said, sitting on a plush couch in the middle of the store one Friday afternoon.
Andrew Spear pointed to a mural inside the store as a testament to Out of the Closet’s commitment to supporting Orlando’s LGBT community. It’s a recreation of the mural Spear painted shortly after the Pulse nightclub attack in 2016, a well-known piece of local art depicting the 49 people who were killed as a flock of rainbow-colored birds. Next to it he painted the float the foundation made to honor the victims and survivors, also featuring a dove and 49 white stars.
“They’re certainly aware of what happened then and wanting to pay tribute, and this is the perfect place for that,” Spear said.
Since the store opened in February, Kirchner said there’s been an outpouring of community support, donations and job applications. He said there are already regulars and several customers have told him they prefer to donate clothes and shop second-hand there over Goodwill, which has a reputation for paying disabled workers sub-minimum wages, or Salvation Army, which has supported anti-LGBT efforts.
“They’re looking for something with a cause,” Kirchner said. “Donations were insane. There were times we’d get 60 bags of clothes a day. It took us probably three months to go through. It was non-stop.”
Free treatment available
Kirchner, who before he was laid off during the pandemic had always worked in private retail mall stores, said he sees this new job as his way to give back to the community and help in the mission of eradicating HIV/AIDS. When he lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, he was part of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, or ACT UP, an activist group credited with speeding the government response to testing and treating the virus and drawing public attention to the U.S.’s homophobic policies.
By taking daily medication, most people with HIV can lower the amount of the virus in their blood to a point where it’s undetectable on a standard lab test and there’s effectively no risk of transmitting the virus during sex. One medication called PrEP can lower the risk of sexual transmission by 99%.
But without insurance, medical treatment remains out of reach for many. A recent study found that the cost for antiretroviral treatment regimen, the mainstay HIV medicine, is between $36,000 and $48,000 per year. Black residents, who are more likely to live under the poverty line and work in low-wage jobs, are also disproportionately impacted by HIV/AIDS, research has found, representing 42% of new diagnoses in 2018.
“It’d be impossible for most. And that’s just the HIV meds,” said Daniel Odongo, the pharmacist at Orlando’s Out of the Closet location, explaining that there are usually other health complications brought on by HIV that must be treated, including dementia and depression.
Medicaid and the federal Ryan White program help people who don’t have insurance or otherwise can’t afford treatment. There also are co-pay assistance programs, and the AIDS
Healthcare Foundation can connect people with more ways to get free medication and care. Odongo said there have been times the pharmacy has provided people with at least a few days’ worth of medicines for free, something a for-profit pharmacy just can’t do.
“Regardless of your ability to pay, you’re going to get your medications,” he said, adding, “I think there’s a lot we can model from this space in other areas of health care.”
Odongo, who came to the United States when he was 19, said in Kenya where he grew up HIV patients filled entire floors at the local hospital. He and Kirchner remember the disease was essentially “a death sentence” because the government, namely the Reagan administration, ignored the epidemic in the 1980s, bowing to homophobic beliefs that gay and bi men were living immorally.
There was widespread ignorance and hysteria about the virus, for example, that you could be infected if an HIV person sneezed near you or used the same drinking fountain.
Since then, highly effective drugs to treat and manage the disease have been developed and there’s been a concerted effort to break those misconceptions. But to rid the world of HIV/ AIDS, Odongo said the treatments must be accessible to everyone.
“It’s a right,” he said. “If you get sick, you just want to get better. And that’s even more personal when you know the treatment is out there.”