I think, ‘Oh, she must be having a bad day.’”Īs it turns out, it was Derrazi whose day, whose life, was about to change. “I come back the next week, and I walk in the office, and she’s completely sober, doesn’t even look me in the eye.
“We were joking with each other a little bit, and she said, ‘Let’s just run a whole bunch of tests.’” One of those tests was for HIV. “She was super sweet, super nice,” he said. One day, after an almost 9-hour wait, a doctor at the county hospital finally examined him. Derrazi decided to seek help through a local health provider for low-income people like him, Healthy Way L.A. “So he would just write me scripts and I would take some antibiotics that would heal like my sore throat for a couple of weeks.”īut the healing didn’t last. “His dad was a doctor in another state,” Derrazi told Outsports. His boyfriend did have something that helped, however. This was in 2012, in Hollywood, and like many actors, Derrazi had no health insurance, even with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. “When I was 27 years old, I was in a three and a half year relationship and I was getting sick all the time,” recalled former actor turned champion bodybuilder Raif Derrazi. The words painted on his bare chest say “Living With HIV.” Photo by Kit Karzen provided by Raif Derrazi The bus was sponsored by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. for the World Pride March in New York City on June 30, 2019. Raif Derrazi Raif Derrazi rode on top of a bus through the streets of Manhattan, N.Y. All three have shared their stories to help fight the stigma of HIV/AIDS. Air Force, who told us he was infected by his cheating (now ex-) husband And then there’s the man you know, Olympic icon Greg Louganis.