Why I Partner With MISTR: Representation, PrEP, and a Full-Circle Moment

“Damn, MISTR must be paying you the big bucks for doing so many ads for them.”

That’s something I hear pretty often. And while yes, I am paid when I partner with MISTR, I also have to add that this is for the younger version of me too. And I don't care if that sounds cliché because it's true and I'll die on that hill.

Listen, I’ve been having sex since I was 16, with my boyfriend at the time, who was also in the same grade. We didn’t know anything about sex. It was never spoken about inside or outside of school. I honestly don’t even know how we knew what to do, but we did.

By the time 18 my father found out I was gay, he threatened and attempted to kill me. TWICE. I decided to leave and figure it out because I would be damned if I gave him the satisfaction. I was sleeping on my best friend’s living room floor, while putting myself through school and working. Earlier that year, someone had mentioned that I should watch Queer as Folk and Thank God they did, because that show ended up teaching me about gay life, HIV, its impact, and safe sex, things no adult, school, or system ever explained to me.

It wasn’t until I was 18 that I learned I was living in one of the three highest HIV-rate cities in the country (Fort Lauderdale in 2011.) And yet, outside of Queer as Folk, I still saw almost nothing that talked about safe sex for gay couples in a real or accessible way. (That show is also why I started gogo dancing haha, but thats a different story)

While working at the club (then called Johnny’s, now LeBoy), I began making friends in the gay community. Over the next two years, I heard more and more stories of friends being diagnosed with HIV or living with it. Yet all the advertisements I saw for HIV medication or prevention only featured white men. If you looked at the statistics, young, black, low income, drug sex and party environments, I was suppose to become a statistic. Even if I didn't use drugs or drink, I was around it every day. I'm only negative by chance and luck because the friends who did contract HIV contracted it from people they trusted, people they loved. However, we didn't see ourselves in those ad's so I guess in the back of our minds, we didn't feel we had access to the same things they did.

I didn’t fully realize the impact of that at the time. But when I moved to Chicago and entered a larger gay community, it became clearer. So much of gay media centered white men, and the Black men I met often had mostly white friends not because of proximity, but because that’s where value, visibility, and desirability were placed in media.

Growing up around Black people and other people of color, I always felt like I had value. Even though that value wasn’t reflected back to me in media, I felt it within myself and saw it in my friendships.

So shortly after moving to Chicago (2013), and meeting other black men who only had white friends becuase that's where value as a black person on the north side of Chicago was based on, (sorry, not sorry) I decided I would market my own value and confidence to people who looked like me and wanted to see it. I started teaching myself how to photograph my own body and how to highlight the parts of myself I loved and show the confidence I already felt.

I decided I would be the change I wanted to see.

Because of that, when I moved to Costa Rica, the local gay community pulled me in to represent dark-skinned men for their Pride magazine. Later, when I was living in Guadalajara during the winters, someone I was dating connected me with MISTR. That partnership wasn’t about tokenism it was about real representation to a group of the community they couldn't reach.

When I became an official MISTR model in 2024, something powerful happened. So many Black men reached out to tell me that seeing me helped them start PrEP. I also had many non-Black people reach out congratulating me and expressing that they admired the work and wished they knew how to support their own communities in the same way. Statistically, a dark skin, hairy man with long locs and an athletic frame, is the complete opposite of the typical hyper fetishized muscular dom black man or light skin/racially ambiguous mixed black man that was more commonly shown in media during the early 2000's.

I guess all of this is to say: while MISTR does pay me when we partner (and yes, that matters because your boy has to eat), it’s not just about the money for me. It’s a deeply personal, full-circle moment.

It’s knowing that I can now be representation for an 18-year-old who needs to learn about safe sex and HIV prevention without shame or fear (because I definitely had a lot from 18-24) . MISTR helped create an avenue through me, that actively prevents diagnoses, especially in Black and Brown communities. Now my goal is to continue expanding into other partnership and opportunities so the younger generation that is coming into their own while our administration is pulling and making lgbtq+ education and healthcare more of a challenge, can still have access no matter where they look. If you need discrete STI testing and treatment, heres a link you can use even WITHOUT insurance. HERE