30 Years of Strength and an Ongoing Fight

Thirty years after Rae Lewis-Thornton became the face of HIV, the disease remains a major threat to Black women. The activist, along with public health experts, explores what fuels the epidemic

- Victoria Uwumarogie

Rae Lewis-Thornton was diagnosed with HIV when she was 24. The year was 1987, a time when the epidemic was accelerating at an alarming rate. Two years prior, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had found that 51 percent of adults and 59 percent of children whose HIV had progressed to AIDS were dying of the illness, often within 15 months after learning that they had the disease.

In 1994, 32-year-old Lewis-Thornton appeared, stoically, on ESSENCE's groundbreaking December cover—boldly declaring that she was "Facing AIDS." In her interview with Teresa Wiltz, she shared how an attempt to donate blood led to discovering she had HIV, which by 1992 had become full-blown AIDS. An educated, accomplished Black professional from Chicago who had survived an abusive childhood and seemed the picture of health, she stated simply, "I am dying." She seemed serene about and settled into her presumed fate, yet she resolved to keep living fully. And more than 30 years after she put a Black woman's face to the HIV crisis, Rae Lewis-Thornton is not in a grave. She's living, happily, in the small town of Alton, Illinois.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lewis-Thornton decided, I am buying a house, where I can have my morning tea and listen to the birds chirp. She was done with doubt, fear and apartment-living in Chicago. Today, the walls of her beloved cottage house—more than four hours Southwest of the city—are covered with watercolors, acrylics, religious imagery, florals and portraits she's been collecting for three decades. At every turn, she sees something beautiful that helps her stay on an even keel, emotionally, while living with AIDS at 63. "I've never been more at peace in my entire life," she says, "than I am now."

No longer married to the man she introduced in her ESSENCE story—"I ain't seen that Negro walking on the street, literally, in twenty-something years"—she embraces her solitude.