This Is Ben. This Is His Story.

“I never imagined HIV would become part of my life, not at 18, not when everything was just beginning.”

When Ben reflects on the moment his life changed, he speaks with a calm honesty shaped by his remarkable resilience. At the time, he had just walked away from a university course that didn’t feel right. He was floating, caught between late nights, drinking, and trying to figure out what came next. Living at home in Manchester, he felt untethered and uncertain. And then, one night, everything changed.

He ended up at a hotel with someone he barely knew. He’d been drinking heavily. The next morning, he woke up alone, disoriented, with the hotel cleaner knocking on the door. “Something didn’t feel right,” he remembers. “But I couldn’t name it.”

About a week later, he got sick. What he assumed was Freshers’ flu kept him in bed. His mum, a nurse, cared for him, unaware as was he that something far more serious was happening.

Weeks passed. On a whim, Ben accompanied a friend to a sexual health clinic and decided to get tested for the first time. Days later, the clinic kept calling. He ignored the calls, having just started a new job and not thinking it was urgent. Eventually, he answered. The nurse told him over the phone: “You’ve tested positive for HIV.”

“I was standing in the bathroom,” Ben says quietly. “I remember the cold tiles under my feet and the weight of the words sinking in.” That evening, he went to the clinic with his best friend. His mum waited in the car. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her until they got home.

When he finally did, she went upstairs and shut the door. The sound of her crying, raw and unrelenting, is something Ben will never forget. “She kept saying, ‘I feel like I failed to protect you.’”

That night, lying in bed, everything shifted. “I felt like a stranger in my own body. Everything I believed about myself being young, full of potential, worthy of love, just vanished.” For two and a half years, Ben didn’t start treatment. “I didn’t think I deserved it.”

Eventually, he reached out. A new consultant encouraged him to begin treatment and suggested transferring his care to the Heather Sage Centre in Manchester. “That was a turning point,” Ben says. “But what I needed was someone to say, You’re still you. And you’re going to be okay.”

He was referred to a local support group, but it didn’t feel right. “It was a cold, dim room filled with older men who had been living with HIV for decades. They were kind, but I felt completely out of place. I needed someone who understood what it meant to be young and newly diagnosed. Someone like me.”

It wasn’t until the isolation of lockdown that Ben fully confronted how he had contracted HIV. He reached out to We Are Survivors, a Manchester-based charity supporting men affected by sexual violence. “They offered trauma therapy and helped me report the assault. That changed everything. It was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever done for myself, and maybe for others too.”

Then, walking through Canal Street, Ben saw a banner from George House Trust: “Want to become a peer mentor?” He stopped in his tracks. “That’s what I needed back then. Maybe I can be that for someone else.”

He trained as a volunteer and later joined George House Trust full-time. Today, Ben is a peer navigator and team leader, supporting people newly diagnosed with HIV across Manchester and Liverpool. He meets people in clinics, community spaces, and at hospital bedsides.

“People are still being diagnosed far too late,” he says. “Still being missed by GPs, still turned away from A&E. And it’s 2025. It shouldn’t be happening, but it is.”

Ben is now married. He and his husband recently celebrated their second wedding anniversary. They have a four-and-a-half-year-old son named Albie, and they hope to grow their family through adoption.

“I never thought I’d be a parent,” he says. “I never thought I’d be loved like this. But HIV didn’t stop me from having a family. It didn’t stop me from being loved. It didn’t stop my life.”

Ben is also a qualified counsellor and, without what happened to him, may not have decided to work in mental health and help people who are experiencing difficulty. He authors a blog for the NHS on patient care and long-term conditions, using his own experience to connect with others. “When I speak to someone newly diagnosed, I always tell them I’m a patient too. I’ve lived this. You’re not alone.”
He still remembers the cold bathroom tiles. He still hears his mum crying behind that closed door. But now, when he meets someone at the very start of their HIV journey, he offers something different:

“This is not the end. This is the beginning of a different kind of strength.”

And that changes everything.