Emil Canita Let Them Know: Why and How to Share Your HIV Story

Let Them Know: Why and How to Share Your HIV Story was developed in response to a long-standing gap in how HIV disclosure is supported in Australia and globally. While HIV treatment has transformed what it means to live with HIV, guidance around disclosure has often remained limited, legalistic, or disconnected from lived experience. Let Them Know brings together peer leadership and lived experience in ways not previously available in Australia.

This project grew out of peer-led HIV disclosure workshops that began during COVID-19, a period of heightened isolation and uncertainty. Across these conversations, people living with HIV expressed a need for a resource that reflected the complexity of their lives, shaped by culture, migration, sexuality, gender, family, faith, work, and care. While legal clarity remains essential, Let Them Know centres the emotional, relational, and non-linear nature of disclosure, recognising that it is not a single moment but a process that unfolds differently for everyone.

The photographic works presented here reflect that same approach. Shot in domestic, intimate, and everyday settings, the images foreground moments of closeness, trust, and vulnerability rather than spectacle or disclosure as event. The people pictured come from diverse cultural backgrounds and life experiences, reflecting the multicultural reality of people living with HIV in Australia today. Each image is paired with a verbatim quote drawn from the participant’s own story. These fragments do not attempt to explain a life in full. Instead, they function as partial disclosures, gestures that invite curiosity, recognition, and care. The full stories sit beyond the frame, and can be read in the Let Them Know guide, where participants speak in their own words about when, how, and why they choose to share their HIV status.

Developed by and for people living with HIV, this national campaign reflects voices from across the country and across the serodivide. It reframes disclosure not as something driven by fear or obligation, but as a gift. Knowing someone’s HIV status is a privilege. The works presented here form part of a national poster campaign distributed through clinics and community organisations across Australia.

Emil Cañita (he/she/they) is a Filipino-Australian artist, writer, and community organiser living and working on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung Country in Naarm/Melbourne. Working across photography, installation, performance, sound, and social practice, her work explores intimacy, migration, HIV, sex work, family, and queer and trans life.Drawing from personal archives, collaborative processes, and lived experience, Cañita examines how bodies carry histories of desire, stigma, care, and belonging. Quotation is central to his practice, often drawing on and reworking the visual and conceptual languages of artists whose work emerged from the HIV epidemic, including Félix González-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, Nan Goldin, William Yang, Keith Haring, and others. Through diaristic image-making and participatory projects, they create spaces where personal stories become collective encounters, positioning vulnerability not as confession but as a site of connection, resistance, and possibility.

Developed by: Living Positive Victoria

Led by: Emil Cañita

Photography: Emil Cañita & Henry Small

Graphic Designer: Marky Makes