The activist who blunted the stigma of AIDS

Hydeia Broadbent had no choice but to be brave. Diagnosed with HIV at age 3, she wasn’t expected to live past 5, doctors told her adoptive parents. The disease, which soon developed into AIDS, made her vulnerable to life-threatening infections, and in the 1980s the stigma around it was so great that a kindergarten teacher sprayed Broadbent with Clorox when she sneezed. Broadbent—who died last week at age 39—began speaking publicly about the disease at 6 and in 1992 appeared on a Nickelodeon special with basketball star Magic Johnson, who had recently revealed he was HIV-positive. “I want people to know that we’re just normal people,” Broadbent, 7, told Johnson through tears. She soon became one of the most prominent HIV/ AIDS activists, appearing on

, and other talk shows. “I can do anything I put my mind to,” the then–11-yearold said in an address to the 1996 Republican National Convention. “I am the next Maya Angelou. I might even be the first woman president. I am the future and I have AIDS.”

Broadbent was born in Las Vegas to a mother who “was denied custody because of her drug addiction,” said

With her adoptive parents, the young Hydeia made frequent trips to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., where she became one of the first pediatric patients to receive AZT and other pioneering antiretroviral drugs. There, the “vivacious” Hydeia “caught the attention of Elizabeth Glaser, founder of a pediatric AIDS foundation,” said

. Glaser asked Broadbent’s family if they would let Hydeia speak publicly, something the youngster was eager to do. “I started speaking out because a lot of my friends were not public with the fact they had HIV/AIDS,” she said in 2012. “They hid in secrecy.”

As an adult, she “questioned the way she had been thrust into the spotlight,” said

saying her many public appearances meant that she missed out on doing “kid things.” Broadbent’s last few years were hard, as “Covid eliminated many of her speaking opportunities.” But she continued to work tirelessly to thwart the spread of AIDS, urging young people toward abstinence or safe sex. “I feel like I’m really blessed,” she said in 2012. “But at the same time, my life doesn’t have to be their life.”