Why We Changed the Name of Our Magazine

When HIV Plus magazine was founded in the 1990s, AIDS was at pandemic levels, HIV was a virus that researchers knew little about, and few people with HIV were expecting to live long, healthy lives.

Today, as we publish issue 106, the landscape has changed and so have people living with or affected by HIV. Now the virus is like other manageable chronic conditions that require daily medications, much like diabetes, and people with it are living as long as their HIV-negative peers.

They are often dealing with coinfections, like hepatitis C, and social stigma more troubling than the actual virus.

That’s why it’s time for HIV Plus to rebrand itself as Plus, eliminating the stigmatizing language that leads with the virus, and recognizing and telling our readers we get it: You’re you, plus a little something more. Sometimes that’s HIV, hep C, another viral condition or STI, any one of those comorbidities, all of which you can now read about in Plus without having to worry about whether carrying the magazine on the subway, reading it in your cubicle, or leaving it on your coffee table will automatically get you branded with the term HIV at first glance.

We’ll still emphasize HIV in our content (that’s our primary mission, after all) and our website and mobile app will remain the same. But by losing those three little letters in our magazine’s title, we both open ourselves up for people to feel free to read us anywhere and we invite in readers for whom stigma has directly affected their access to treatment, testing, and overall health care.

We're also issuing an invitation to readers to broaden the conversation around wider health issues, especially among marginalized groups like gay and bi men, transgender individuals, and people of color. In my mind, we’re taking America’s number 1 magazine for people with HIV and supercharging it for 2015. We’re us, plus a little something more.

Diane Anderson-Minshall
editor in chief
Editor@HIVPlusMag.com