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December 1 is the day of the international fight against AIDS. This epidemic kills 700,000 people around the world every year. The treatments are more and more effective. An HIV-positive person tells about their daily life and their stubborn prejudices.
Flavie Mamy Vitre has been living with HIV for 35 years. Thanks to the treatment, the virus is no longer detectable in her body and she is no longer contagious. “I take one treatment per day, no side effects, easy”, she explains. A normal life, or almost. One thing has not changed since his diagnosis: the eyes of others. “I was afraid of others, I was hugging the walls.” Supported by her family but let go by her friends, she is forced to leave her theater school. She hides her situation and becomes deputy director of a recreation center, but in 1999, a colleague reveals her illness. “I have to quit my job, because I’m being put through hell. It doesn’t have to be known.”
Forced to live on the margins in a society that rejects her, discrimination is directly invited to her. After a year of work, Sandrine Guibert, Flavie’s housekeeper, is summoned by her management. “Flavie has AIDS, take care of yourself”, reports Sandrine Guibert. Shocked, Flavie makes an appointment with the person behind this decision. “In his office, the person says to me ‘People like you must know how to protect themselves against them'”, remembers Flavie Mamy Vitre. “It is no longer possible to hear this sentence today”. At 57, she decided to show off. “It’s not HIV but prejudices that prevent me from living”, concludes the fifty-year-old. In France, around 200,000 people are believed to be living with the virus.