Stephen Gendin (February 20, 1966 – July 19, 2000) was an American AIDS activist in the late 1980s and the 1990s, whose advocacy is credited with having promoted changes in government policy that improved the lives of HIV positive people. He was involved with the ACT UP, ActUp/RI, Sex Panic!, the Community Prescription Service, POZ Magazine and the Radical Faeries. HIV positive himself, he dedicated the last fifteen years of his life to helping care for those also living with HIV/AIDS. He was a founder and the chief executive of the Community Prescription Service, an organization that distributes information designed to help people with HIV and AIDS as well as supplying medication via mail order. Early life Gendin was raised in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He was Valedictorian of his high school and then attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he learned that he was HIV positive as a first-year student in 1985. He aggressively experimented with new medications for HIV and maintained a healthy and active lifestyle for many years until his death. AIDS Activism Gendin was a recognized genius who was offered membership of Mensa. After learning at the age of 19 that he was infected with HIV, he quickly became at least as well informed about the latest HIV medical research as many leading HIV specialists, and remained so until his death, despite his lack of a formal medical education. He understood (as few others do to this day) that HIV diagnostic tests detect not the HIV virus but HIV's human antibodies, which do not exist in sufficient quantity to generate a positive HIV test result until between two and twenty-four weeks after HIV infection. During this immensely variable window period, people infected with HIV test negative because they have very few antibodies fighting the virus, as a direct consequence of which they also have very high levels of HIV in their bodies. These recently infected persons are usually unaware that they are infected at all, and firmly though wrongly believe that recent HIV negative test results prove that they are not infected and cannot infect others. During his lifetime, Gendin was largely ignored in warning about the high risk of transmission from persons testing negative during the window period. Medical science has since confirmed that those recently infected with HIV who still test HIV negative are dangerously contagious for HIV, because of their much higher HIV