by Jennifer Porter Gore

Rae Lewis-Thornton still remembers the moment she found out she had HIV. She was 23, healthy, and working in her dream career as a political strategist. But after donating blood at a drive she had organized, she received a letter in the mail telling her something was wrong.

The subsequent meeting at her local Red Cross office, where she learned she was HIV positive, lasted all of five minutes.

She left that meeting “in quasi-denial and in secret,” she recently told attendees at the National Minority AIDS Council’s U.S. Conference on HIV/AIDS. ”On that first day, I told three people that I had HIV—and it took me five years to tell three more people.”

That was four decades ago. Today, Lewis-Thornton is 63 and believed to be one of the longest surviving women with

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