StoreUpcoming Event
Queer, Disabled, & HIV-Positive in Gaza: One Man's Fight to Survive
Millennium Film Workshop
Date:
Friday, November 13, 2026 from 7:30pm–10:00pm
Price: $5-10
Visual AIDS Event
Join Visual AIDS, The Filmmakers’ Cooperative, and Millennium Film Workshop for a documentary screening, fundraiser, and conversation with journalist Afeef Nessouli.
In the documentary, Queer, Disabled, & HIV-Positive in Gaza: One Man's Fight to Survive, Nessouli shares the story of ES, and his daily challenges in Gaza to secure healthcare amidst the ongoing genocide. ES also reflects on his early life, discovering his identity, and living as a queer man in Palestine. The documentary serves as a testament and a rebuttal, challenging media stereotypes of queer Arab life in the region promoted by the Zionist occupation.
The screening at Millennium is also a fundraiser for ES, who is attempting to move to Cairo to attain adequate healthcare. Tickets are $10-15 and go towards ES’s fundraiser. You can also make a larger donation.
More of ES’s story:
Before the genocide, ES was one of about 40 people with HIV in Gaza. As the violence worsened, so too did ES’s health. Now it is as bad as it has ever been.
“My doctor told me that the antiretrovirals have been consumed completely and there is nothing left in store,” ES tells Afeef, using a pseudonym to avoid community stigma and targeting by the Israeli authorities.
ES has needed tenofovir, a common HIV medication, and lopinavir/ritonavir, a much more rarely prescribed one. At times, ES has had so little left that he dangerously began rationing his pills by skipping morning doses. “There are often no more supplies coming in or there hasn’t been any supplies at all coming in to the south or to the north,” he typed in a direct message. While Israel has denied blocking medication, international aid groups like Glia have told Afeef that HIV medication specifically has been blocked from entering the Gaza strip.
Without these medications, ES — who already uses a walker for mobility — would see his health deteriorate rapidly. Within a short span of time, he would begin to move even more slowly, and now he might lose the ability to walk altogether. With soldiers mandating mass displacement and sniping Palestinians as they try to evacuate. ES has lost his house and two cats to a missile that struck his family, and he has lost so much of his inner peace as he navigates being queer, HIV+ and Palestinian in Gaza.
Afeef Nessouli is a journalist for The Intercept and Interval News and host of the interview series With Afeef Nessouli and the podcast Don’t Call Me Habibi. He previously worked for Spotify and The Wall Street Journal's daily news podcast "The Journal," and "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah."
His reporting focuses on politics, the Middle East and queer stories around the world. Afeef lived through the 2006 and 2026 Lebanon wars and went to prison in Beirut for covering Palestine in 2011. In Spring 2025, he spent 9 weeks in Gaza as the only journalist from the United States reporting from the strip for The Intercept while also volunteering as a humanitarian aid worker with Glia International.