How Jurnee Smollett-Bell and Hydeia Broadbent Went From Childhood Friends to AIDS Activists

Nadya Wasylko

By all accounts Hydeia Broadbent should have died before she ever met Jurnee Smollett-Bell. Born crack-­addicted in Las Vegas, she was taken in by a social worker and, at age three, diagnosed with HIV, contracted in the womb. At age five she was told she had full-blown AIDS.

This was 1989; the drug therapy that would lead to curbing the disease in thousands of patients had not yet been discovered, and doctors did not expect Broadbent to live. But she did, and quickly became one of the country’s youngest AIDS activists. As the nation became swept up in acute paranoia and misinformation over the disease, Broadbent—who still remembers a teacher spraying her with bleach when she sneezed—began appearing on TV shows like Maury Povich, Jerry Springer, and Oprah to beg for understanding for children like herself. “I want people to know that we’re just normal people,” she famously said in a TV special with Magic Johnson—a tiny, tearful girl who sobbed as the 6'9" HIV-positive basketball player comforted her.

Around the same time, Smollett-Bell was fast becoming a child star in Los Angeles, playing roles in sitcoms like Full House, Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper, and On Our Own. One day when she was six, she watched a TV talk show featuring a mock wedding with a girl who had AIDS. That girl was Broadbent. (“I wanted to get married before I died,” she explains of the show, which tried to fulfill that wish, though it may seem a little tasteless now.) “She was my first image of HIV/AIDS,” says Smollett-Bell. “And I was like, ‘Wait, she looks like me.’ This is something that could happen to me or my siblings. And also she was just so raw; she exposed her heart. Even though I didn’t know her, I had this instant love for her.”

Motivated, Smollett-Bell became involved in HIV/AIDS work, at first helping a group of artists trying to stop the epidemic in South Africa and the United States. Then when she was 13, the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles asked her to present its first Heroes in the Struggle award. The honoree? None other than Broadbent. As ­Smollett-Bell took the stage, she spotted the girl she’d been so struck by years earlier and broke down in tears. Says Broadbent, now 32: “I remember looking at her like, ‘Why is she crying? Who is this girl?’ ” The two laugh as they recall that day. “It was incredibly inspiring,” says ­Smollett-Bell, 29. “She’d had such a mighty struggle, and yet was so bold and audacious when the stigma was at an all-time high. It was ground zero.”

Despite living nearly 300 miles apart and leading such different lives, they became best friends. The two supported each other during rough patches (“in high school the kids were scared of me,” says Broadbent, “and Jurnee kept me centered—she poured life into me”), and rejoiced together when Smollett-Bell’s career snowballed (she’s in WGN America’s Underground and will appear this month with Robert De Niro in Hands of Stone). And over the years, AIDS treatments dramatically improved. “I still have complications,” says Broadbent. “But I went from taking, like, 100 pills a day to, now, only five.”

Today both women remain as dedicated as ever to fighting AIDS. They visit schools to educate kids about prevention, and team up for screening drives in a mobile medical center. Their latest focus is raising awareness about new medications that can stop transmission. They feel they have to keep fighting: “We’ve spoken to students who thought you could get AIDS from a toilet, or from sleeping in the same bed, or from tears,” Smollett-Bell says. “What allows this disease to spread is our silence. That, and women’s lack of self-worth, because even now we’re often the last to protect ourselves. We need to rethink that. We need to take our power in relationships to say, ‘I own my sexuality and my future.’ ”

Source: http://www.glamour.com/story/our-friendshipand-our-fight-for-change