Andréa Mestre
Young, female and HIV positive
Four years after moving to France to pursue a law degree, Andréa Mestre was diagnosed with HIV.
“When you don't feel concerned, that's when you take risks,” she says.
“I became aware of HIV when I was in school. But the woman who came to raise awareness was in her thirties. I was in 10th grade. I didn’t feel concerned. We didn't come from the same background.”
Continue to scroll
Originally from Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, Andréa left for Lyon at 18. Getting diagnosed with HIV at a young age felt catastrophic.
“I really thought I was going to die. I didn't know that there were treatments that made it possible to live and that I could have a normal life. Every night I cried by myself because no one could understand what I was going through,” she says.
What she felt most was the stigma that, even 10 years later, HIV still carries.
“I did not want to belong to [a group of] people who were stigmatized and rejected by society.”
“I did not want to belong to [a group of] people who were stigmatized and rejected by society. For me, I had become an outcast. It affected the whole way I saw myself as a woman. Because when you are a woman and you are HIV positive, there is all this saying, ‘Oh yes, it's because you had several partners,’ ‘You had an unrestrained sex life,’ etc. It changed how I felt about myself — as a woman, as a human being. I lost all self-esteem, all self-confidence. My total identity was erased,” she says.
Andréa took an overdose and ended up in the hospital. But that became a turning point for her. Soon afterward, she met the man who is now her husband and who, to her amazement, accepted her as she was. And that helped shape her into the activist she is today.
“I said to him that I’m HIV positive. He looked at me, and said, ‘That’s it?’ ”
“He was the first person who saw me as a woman, as a person,” she says. “That was when my reconstruction began.”
She and her husband went on to have three children together — Eliah, who is now 8, Amalia, 5, and Sandra,3. And, in 2020, she made the decision to come out publicly as HIV positive to inspire others living with the virus.
“It was on December 1st. I will never forget it,” she says. “I went on Instagram and told my story. I wasn't expecting it, but I received a wave of love, of compassion, of support. And I received messages from people with HIV who told me their story in turn. I felt I had been released. Because at first you think you’re the only 22-year-old who has HIV. And then I realized that, no, there are many people out there. There are 50-year-old women, there are men of that age, there are young girls, 17-year-old girls. Wow! And at that moment I realized that there were so many people who needed to talk, who needed to be heard.”
Andréa set up an organization, Mouvement contre la sérophobie, or Movement against HIV-phobia.
“My call was — and still is — for a new way of looking at people living with HIV,” says Andréa, now 32. “We have the treatments. We have many tools to eliminate HIV. But the problem is that we don't yet have the tools to erase and break the prejudice and stigma that still exist.”
In particular, she hopes to shed light on communities that are often overlooked in the HIV crisis.
“Men have long been put in the spotlight, same with the LGBTQ+ community, especially in the West. In reality women make up more than half of people living with HIV in the world.”
She supports wider access to PReP (drugs that prevent people from contracting HIV) for women and more HIV awareness programs in schools, particularly with declining condom use among youth.
And this is why she is making her own life so visible: as a proud Black woman, a mother involved with her community and, soon, a French citizen — who happens to be living with HIV.
“After I had a second child, when I was pregnant with the third, I said to myself, ‘Look, you have a life like the others. HIV didn't destroy everything you thought it was going to destroy. Isn’t it time to stop hiding?’”