Black LGBTQ Kiki Ballroom Leaders Drive HIV Prevention Strategy at Morehouse CORE Summit Ahead of National Youth HIV Awareness Day

At Morehouse College, young leaders from the kiki ballroom scene are transforming HIV prevention into a community-rooted, youth-led ecosystem grounded in trust, culture and care just days before National Youth HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.

On a campus long associated with Black intellectual life and political imagination, a different kind of blueprint took shape this weekend, one written not in policy briefs or institutional mandates, but in the language of chosen family and survival.

On April 4, the Southern Legal Center for Youth (SLCY), in partnership with Morehouse ADODI, convened the CORE Youth Summit at Morehouse College, bringing together young LGBTQIA+ leaders from across Atlanta, the Carolinas, and Florida. Many participants came from the kiki ballroom scene, a youth-centered cultural network that has, in practice, become one of the most effective public health ecosystems in the region.

The one-day gathering arrives just ahead of National Youth HIV/AIDS Awareness Day on April 10, placing young people not as subjects of intervention but as architects of prevention itself.

In a region where structural inequities continue to shape health outcomes, the urgency is clear. In the United States, young people ages 13–24 accounted for nearly one in five new HIV diagnoses in 2021, with Black LGBTQIA+ youth disproportionately impacted across the South. The summit did not treat those numbers as distant data points, but as lived realities already being answered in real time by the communities most affected.

“Young people are not just the future of HIV prevention—they are leading it right now,” said Princess Jauan Durbin, vice president of community health and partnerships at SLCY and founder of the Southern Kiki Leaders Collective. “Investing in youth-led solutions is essential to ending the epidemic in our lifetime.”

Across the South, that leadership is already visible. It lives in peer-led PrEP navigation, in conversations that move through group chats and ballroom rehearsals, and in the quiet accountability of house structures that function as kinship networks. The CORE Youth Summit was designed to strengthen and scale what is already working.

Sessions throughout the day focused on emerging prevention tools, including long-acting injectable PrEP options such as Apretude, alongside workshops on sexual health education, healthcare navigation, housing access, and legal rights. But beyond technical knowledge, the summit centered on something more difficult to quantify and more essential to sustain—trust.

As the summit unfolded, Gaye Magazine was granted exclusive access to speak with Princess Jauan Durbin, vice president of community health and partnerships at the Southern Legal Center for Youth and founder of the Southern Kiki Leaders Collective. In a conversation that moved between strategy and spirit, Durbin offered a clear-eyed articulation of what is shifting across the South and what it will take to sustain it.

Gaye Magazine: How does the kiki ballroom scene operate as a public health ecosystem, not just a cultural space?

Princess Jauan Durbin: For me, the Kiki ballroom scene is set up perfectly to foster a positive public health ecosystem because it already has the core components of prevention built into community life: regular gatherings, trusted peer leadership, and a youth-led structure that allows information to move quickly and to stick. The Kiki scene, which originated in New York City, was designed as a more accessible, youth-focused version of ballroom, led by young people in collaboration with community-based organizations and service providers. That matters because it means HIV prevention and treatment information and services can be delivered in the same place where young people are already building identity, safety, and belonging, rather than in spaces that feel clinical, surveilled, or conditional.

Gaye Magazine: What are traditional public health systems missing when it comes to trust, access, and delivery?

Princess Jauan Durbin: Traditional systems often deliver services, but they don’t always deliver belonging, and belonging is a prevention tool. In my research on house and ballroom communities, leaders have described strained relationships with providers, researchers, and even some community-based organizations that only engage the ballroom community for testing numbers, citing fear of unwanted disclosure and a sense of being used. That leads people to disengage even when they technically have access. Youth also face structural inequities that show up in the data. Young people ages 13–24 accounted for 19 percent of new HIV diagnoses in 2021, and only a small share of high school students report ever having had an HIV test. So what public health misses is not just messaging or education, it is the relational infrastructure that makes someone take the test, return for results, start PrEP, or stay in care.

Gaye Magazine: Why are peer-led PrEP navigation and house-based education proving effective?

Princess Jauan Durbin: Peer-led navigation works because it reduces friction at the exact moments people fall off due to fear, cost, logistics, stigma and mistrust. The CDC defines PrEP navigation as identifying people who need PrEP, linking them to care, troubleshooting insurance and payment barriers, tailoring education and supporting retention. That level of hands-on, culturally responsive support is exactly what young people are uniquely positioned to provide to their peers. Through the Southern Kiki Leaders Collective, we are not just implementing this model, we are evolving it to fit the needs in the South. We meet young people where they are by investing directly in ballroom leaders and houses as trusted messengers and community anchors. House-based education works because that is how information already moves within the community. Houses are families. They are accountability systems and leadership pipelines. When you equip them with tools, funding and support, engagement is already built in.

Gaye Magazine: What does it mean to build care models grounded in chosen family rather than formal institutions?

Princess Jauan Durbin: Chosen-family care means we stop pretending health decisions happen in isolation and start designing for how people actually survive, in community. Within the ballroom scene, houses function as real kinship systems. House parents, leaders and icons do more than mentor, they set norms, shape tradition and hold their members and the scene accountable in ways traditional institutions often cannot. What we see in practice is simple. People move when their people move. Conversations about testing, prevention and care do not start in clinics. They start in group chats, at voguing sessions, in living rooms and within houses. Trust is already there. Influence is already there. The infrastructure already exists. Our model focuses on investing directly in house-based leadership as community health infrastructure. When you equip leaders with resources and support, you are not building something new, you are strengthening what is already working.

Gaye Magazine: How do you define success in this work, and what does “keeping people alive” look like in practice?

Princess Jauan Durbin: I define success as a set of outcomes you can both see and feel. On the measurable side, it is more youth testing, more PrEP starts and for people living with HIV, viral suppression and retention in care, especially among young LGBTQIA+ people and Black communities where disparities persist. On the human side, keeping people alive means fewer young people facing prevention alone, elimination of stigma and more safety and stability in housing, mental health and legal protection. Those social determinants of health are HIV outcomes too. When we host a youth-led summit and ball that brings resources, care and leadership into the same room, without shame and with low barriers, we are not just practicing equity, we are building the conditions for survival.

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