AIDS journalist LeRoy Whitfield dies at 36

The community has lost a real hero.

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Tom Musbach, PlanetOut Network
published Wednesday, October 12, 2005

LeRoy Whitfield, a journalist who explored the AIDS epidemic among African Americans and who refused drugs for his own HIV infection, died on Sunday from complications of the virus he fought for 15 years. He was 36 years old and lived in New York City.

Whitfield was a contributor to Vibe magazine and a senior editor at POZ, a magazine about living with HIV.

After being diagnosed with HIV in 1990, Whitfield decided not to take antiretroviral drugs for the infection because of the possible side effects of fatigue, nausea and blurred vision. He attributed his many years of good health to nutrition, exercise and low stress.

He questioned his resolve two months ago, however, writing in HIV Plus magazine: "My T-cell count has plummeted to 40, a dangerously all-time low, and my viral load has spiked to 230,000. I've argued against taking meds for so many years that now, with my numbers stacked against me, I find it hard to stop. I keep weighing potential side effects against the ill alternative -- opportunistic infections -- and I can't decide which is worse to my mind. I just can't decide."

Much of his work addressed the disproportionate toll that HIV/AIDS has taken on African Americans, who have accounted for 40 percent of more than 900,000 estimated AIDS diagnoses in the United States since 1981, as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

"He was unusually committed to exposing the truth about AIDS in the black community, and he was unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom," Keith Boykin, an author and journalist, wrote on his Web site in tribute to Whitfield.

Shana Naomi Krochmal, a former colleague of Whitfield's at POZ magazine, praised his "kind spirit" and "sharp, questioning mind."

"He was never willing to be less than totally himself -- from the careful pronunciation of his name (Le-ROY, not LEE-Roy) to his search for love with men or women to his constant negotiation of his place among black and gay communities," she told the PlanetOut Network via e-mail. "He embodied the notion of speaking truth to power, of using his own unflinching honesty to uncover the difficult and sometimes messy realities of the AIDS epidemic."

A native of Chicago, Whitfield attended the University of Chicago and the city's DePaul University. He worked as an associate editor at Positively Aware, also based in Chicago, before moving to New York in 2000.

According to the Associated Press, family funeral services will be held Saturday in Chicago, followed by a memorial service in New York on Oct. 20.