Founder of Let’s Kick ASS – AIDS Survivor Syndrome

Tez Anderson is an award-winning, nationally recognized HIV Long-Term Survivor activist, writer, and speaker who focuses on HIV Long-Term Survivors Aging with HIV. Tez has been living with HIV since 1983. 

He is the founder of Let's Kick ASS—AIDS Survivor Syndrome, the first and largest group in the world focused on improving the lives of HIV long-term survivors and older adults aging with HIV.

He coined AIDS Survivor Syndrome (ASS) to describe the spectrum of sustained trauma survivorship. It’s a psychological state resulting from living through HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Tez created HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day in 2014 to shine a spotlight on those living longest with HIV, who had felt forgotten and invisible as they age with HIV. 

Tez became a gay rights advocate in his hometown Atlanta, Georgia in the early 1980s and has been a national voice fighting for health and social justice.


"For women and men who lived through the Dying Years of the AIDS epidemic filled with fear, frustrations, funerals and unimaginable stigma — surviving became the problem. There was no one talking about the complexities of survivorship."

– Tez Anderson

40 years of stories

We share the important story of AIDS --

the fear, stigma and discrimination. We share the stories of hope, courage, compassion, and love.  And, we bring to light the harsh reality that four decades later, there is no cure and the rates of infection are on the rise, particularly in communities of color.

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Our work helps ensure that the lives of people who died from AIDS are not forgotten and the story of AIDS is known by future generations -
so that never again will a community be harmed because of fear, silence, discrimination, or stigma.
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