In this month's feature interview, we speak with Marlon Wallen a public speaker and advocate for those with HIV/AIDS and other marginalized populations in the US and globally. Read some highlights and find the full version here.

Could you share a bit of your experiences moving around the world and the country?

Well, yes, I was born on the island of Trinidad in May, 1969. I moved to The States and ended up in New York City in April of 1988, when I was 17. I was there for about two years and during that time I became infected with HIV, sometime in early spring of 1990, at the age of 19. At the time, NYC was the epicenter of the AIDS virus, as most cosmopolitan cities were, and just like with COVID, the death rate was astronomically high. In the 1990s there were no medications to treat HIV, and here I was at the epicenter. When things go wrong like this, or with COVID, NYC gets hit really hard. So at that point, people were dying in large numbers, but it was just that outsiders could not see how bad it really was. I thought to myself that this place is going to kill me and I’m not going to let it have its day! At the time, my father was living in New Hampshire, so I headed there. It was not as bad yet at the time in New Hampshire. But, here I show up in very white, very rural New Hampshire and the people there did not really know what to do with me [laughs]. At that point, for example, paperwork in New Hampshire only gave you the options of black, white or Mexican, as far as race. I lived in New Hampshire for 10 years, from 1990 till about 2000 or so, and then Boston after that. But, it was while living in New Hampshire that I found my voice in activism, which led me to serve on the Title One Planning Council, a state run and funded group through the Department of Public Health, serving as what was labeled as "a consumer", or someone who uses the HIV/AIDS services on offer from the department. I continued doing this after moving to Boston as well. 

When did you start finding yourself really observing the American healthcare systems? Something that you have developed quite a bit of expertise in at this point.

So that would be when I started my activism in the 1990s in New Hampshire, after I took the training to become a public speaker and educator. Eventually I was asked to sit on The EMA (Eastern Metropolitan Area) Title One Planning Council, which covered only up to Manchester NH, where I lived at the time. This was New Hampshire’s first planning council and was associated with Boston Title One planning. So there, we got to be representatives of our area. Eventually I moved to Boston and was part of the planning council here and got to see more of where the money was going. 

Are there any interesting observations in health settings of late that have stood out to you?

A hospital wanted me to sit in with some patients in a new geriatric unit they have established. I fall into that category now, being in my fifties. Their goal is to create a holistic approach to care, including social workers and several other offerings beyond just doctors. It’s about 1,000 patients, some are HIV positive, some struggle with alcohol and drug addictions, some are trans, some are gay. The staff there, in the course of their day, are doing back-to-back visits between these various populations. In the visits that I sit in on, they ask me to point out some of the needs that they might be overlooking. Oftentimes people will come in and talk about a broad range of topics, like walking the dog and other things [that aren’t plainly clinically significant]. I pointed out to the staff there that they may have missed an aspect of that particular person’s issues, in that they are probably just really lonely. Between the blood-work and the physicals [and these types of fundamental things] a clinician can miss out on the fact that a patient might just have nowhere to direct some of their energy [or socializing needs]. So the solution becomes finding that person an outlet to socialize, to play Scrabble, dominoes, cards, whatever they enjoy. This particular person was still sexually active as well, so, like, find a place where he can maybe flirt or meet someone. Sometimes it can feel like these kinds of things can be over the head of healthcare workers who have very repetitious days on the job where it's hard to filter out the important parts from the white noise. If this filtering from noise doesn't happen, connections to comprehensive health care may be missed.