“HIV Lives with Me; I Don’t Live with HIV”: Resilient Narratives of Aging HIV-Positive Same-Gender Loving Black Men in U.S. South

This study explores the lived experiences of aging HIV-positive same-gender-loving Black men (SGLBM) over the age of 45. Grounded in Mohan Dutta's culture-centered approach to health communication, the research examines how participants navigate the intersecting challenges of race, sexuality, age, class, and HIV status across healthcare, community, and relational contexts. Drawing on focus group conversations, the study highlights the culturally grounded and communicatively constituted strategies such as assertive communication, humor, reframing through language, and collective care that participants use to cultivate resilience and confront stigma. These narratives reveal how aging SGLBM resist dehumanization and marginalization by building community, asserting agency, and creating new frameworks for survival and well-being. By centering their voices and lived realities, this study contributes to more inclusive understandings of resilience and calls for public health strategies and policy reforms that are culturally responsive, intersectional, and equity driven.