It's A Sin: HIV diagnosis at 16 was like 'a wake-up call'

Two weeks before his 17th birthday, actor Nathaniel Hall was diagnosed as HIV-positive.

He caught the virus the first time he ever had sex.

"I didn't tell anyone, I didn't tell my family. I lived with all that shame and all that stigma weighing down very heavy on me," he told Radio 1's Life Hacks on Sunday night.

He's now starring in Channel 4's drama It's A Sin, which is about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

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Without treatment, HIV can leads to AIDS - which results in a severely weakened immune system and leave people vulnerable to lots of life-threatening illnesses.

HIV itself is not life-threatening but can be highly infectious unless treated with medicine - like Nathaniel is on now.

This reduces HIV in the blood to the point where someone will neither develop AIDS nor be able to pass HIV on to anyone else.

Nathaniel is 34 now and plays Ritchie's boyfriend Donald Bassett in It's A Sin opposite Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander.

It's A Sin is about a group of gay friends living in London during the 1980s AIDS crisis

"When you're 16, you think you're an adult. You think you know the world," Nathaniel said on Life Hacks.

"I'm from a nice, safe, middle-class background. I was head boy at my school, I was a straight-A student."

He got into a relationship with an older man while he was still in education.

"The world was very different, it was still quite a homophobic place, school was a homophobic place.

"I think we all have something that's our act of rebellion and I started seeing this guy who was older than me and as a result I got that diagnosis just after I'd started college.

"It was like a slap in the face, it was like a wake-up call. All of a sudden I was like a child in an adult's world."

The show, written by Russell T Davies, has been a big hit with critics and viewers

Before appearing in It's A Sin Nathanial wrote and starred in one-man theatre show, First Time, about his HIV diagnosis.

"In 2017 my life hadn't really gone where I wanted it to, my career certainly hadn't. My mental health had taken a dive, I was partying all the time and I was in a bad place," he said.

"I caught myself in the mirror after a big party and thought: I don't know who you are any more. I don't recognise that version of Nathaniel.

"So I did what any self-respecting person would do, I wrote it into a show and decided to play my trauma out for hundreds of people on stage every night."

Undetectable and untransmissable

The first week of February is both the start of LGBTQ+ History Month and National HIV Testing Week in the UK.

And Nathaniel is urging people to get tested at home during lockdown, so they know their own HIV status.

"It's really important, if you're HIV-positive, to access treatment and do it as soon as possible," he says.

"If you don't access treatment what you're potentially doing is putting others at risk because if you're HIV-positive and you don't know, you potentially might be passing it on.

"Now the medications are so good that the level of virus is reduced to what's called undetectable - which means you're untransmissable, so I can't pass my HIV on."

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