A federal court reopened the military to recruits living with HIV. For these men, it's personal

For a few weeks this spring, the door Isaiah Wilkins had been pushing on for years finally cracked open.

In late May and early June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit did two things few expected. First, it agreed to rehear Wilkins v. Hegseth, the case challenging the military’s ban on enlisting people living with HIV, before the full court. Then it clarified that, in doing so, it had lifted a stay that the Pentagon had been using to keep the ban in force. The practical effect was immediate: people with well-managed HIV could once again walk into a recruiting office and try to enlist while the case moves forward.

“It just continues to show that there’s hope in the fight,” Wilkins, the lead plaintiff, told The Advocate. “Things were looking bleak after our oral arguments in Virginia. ... I think it just demonstrates that science can prevail.”

Related: Two military members denied promotions for having HIV just won their lawsuit

The military career he was supposed to have

For Wilkins, 27, the stakes are the life he was supposed to have.

Wilkins, who is gay, grew up steeped in service. Most of his mother’s side of the family had worn the uniform, including his mother. He enlisted in the Georgia Army National Guard at 17 while attending Georgia Military College. Instructors there encouraged him to apply to West Point, and he was accepted to the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School. He imagined a 20-year military career, possibly in aviation, flying medical evacuation aircraft.

“You’re really there on the worst day of somebody’s life to help get them the help that they need,” he said.

Then, during a summer training event at West Point, he was pulled away from his squad, ushered through back hallways to a colonel’s office, and told that routine entrance bloodwork had come back positive for HIV. His first question was whether HIV would kill him. His second question was whether he could stay in the military.

The answer to the second question, delivered over the following weeks, was no.

“They just kind of gave me the boot, for lack of a better word,” he said.

What followed were some of the darkest days of his life, a rejection he describes as not only painful but unscientific. He leaned on what he calls his safety net: a best friend he met working a 911 dispatch job, a fellow first responder, a West Point staffer who took him under her wing and turned weekly board game nights into a kind of therapy. His family, conservative and religious, surprised him with their support.

He channeled the same drive into law enforcement and is now a Georgia state trooper, a job, like the military career he wanted, that puts him at the scene of people’s worst days.

“There’s something about being part of an organization that’s greater than yourself and having the opportunity to help people,” he said.

His medical reality, he points out, is almost mundane. “One pill a day,” he said. “That’s pretty simple.”

He also notes that the military already allows people who acquire HIV while serving to remain in uniform if they are medically fit.

“We’re only talking about should people be allowed to join with HIV, not should people be allowed to serve in the military with HIV, because that question’s already been answered,” Wilkins said.

Related: Military Ban on People Living With HIV Faces Legal Challenge

A long-shot legal victory

The legal road to this moment has been anything but simple, said Scott Schoettes, a longtime HIV rights attorney who is co-counsel on the case alongside attorney Peter Perkowski. Schoettes, who is living with HIV, has spent years challenging military policies that he says remain rooted in stigma rather than science.

In August 2024, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia struck down the enlistment ban, calling it “irrational, arbitrary, and capricious.” The government appealed. In February, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit sided with the Defense Department and reinstated the ban. The plaintiffs then filed what Schoettes described as a long-shot petition asking the full court to rehear the case.

The Fourth Circuit granted it. Then came the second surprise: The court clarified that the panel’s stay had dissolved along with the vacated opinion, meaning Brinkema’s injunction was back in force.

For people living with HIV, Schoettes said, the impact is immediate.

“Go into the recruiting center, and if they are turned away or told that they can’t, then we’d like to hear from them,” he said.

Related: Federal appeals court unexpectedly reverses itself, reviving challenge to Pentagon HIV policy

The government tries to close the door again

The government is still trying to close that door. In an update after his interview, Schoettes said the Justice Department filed a motion on June 1 to reinstate the stay, and the plaintiffs filed their opposition on June 11.

“The DOJ didn’t explain why they bypassed the district court and went straight to the Fourth Circuit,” Schoettes said in a follow-up message. “We think they were trying to avoid an adverse ruling and to hurry things along.”

A new three-judge panel is expected to decide the motion, and Schoettes said he would not be surprised if the government seeks emergency relief from the Supreme Court if it loses.

A decade-long fight to serve

Kevin Deese is living proof of how long it can take to achieve victory.

Deese was a Naval Academy midshipman in 2014 when, on April 1, the commandant of midshipmen called him in to tell him that follow-up bloodwork had revealed he was living with HIV. He would be allowed to graduate, but not commission as an officer with the rest of his class.

“That was the hardest day of my life for sure,” Deese told The Advocate.

His case, Deese & Doe v. Austin, became one of the foundational legal challenges to the military’s HIV policies. Filed in 2018 by Lambda Legal, the Modern Military Association of America, and Winston & Strawn, it was brought on behalf of Deese, who is gay, and a former Air Force Academy cadet identified by a pseudonym. Both had graduated from their respective service academies but were denied commissions because of their HIV status.

In 2024, the government settled, agreeing to commission both as officers in recognition of the careers they had earned years earlier. Deese now serves in the Navy Reserve. He stressed that he was speaking for himself and that his comments were not endorsed by the Navy or the Defense Department.

“I’m very thankful to have finally gotten the opportunity to serve now in the Navy Reserve,” Deese said. “But it took 10 years of fighting.”

Deese urged Pentagon leaders to weigh the human cost of the remaining ban.

“Consider the disruption also to the lives of those who are ready and able and willing and eager to serve,” he said. “As long as that door is still closed, I’m still going to be knocking on it.”

His message to Wilkins and the other current plaintiffs is the one he wishes he had heard sooner.

“This isn’t over unless you decide it is,” Deese said. “The only outcome you can guarantee is if you decide to stop fighting.”

Related: Let People Living With HIV Enter Armed Forces, Lambda Legal Tells Court

Fighting stigma as much as policy

What makes the fight unusually hard, Schoettes said, is that much of the legal work is basic education.

“It is 95 percent of what we’ve done in the cases,” he said.

The military has raised concerns about access to medication during deployment, blood donation, and battlefield transmission. Schoettes said those arguments rely on outdated assumptions. HIV treatment can be as simple as one pill a day or a shot every few weeks. Blood donation is voluntary, not a requirement of service. And the fear that a person with HIV will transmit the virus by bleeding on a battlefield, he said, is not supported by real-world evidence.

“That’s never been a documented way in which HIV has been transmitted,” he said.

That legal argument is also a cultural one. HIV stigma has always depended, in part, on making people seem more dangerous than they are.

Related: Federal appeals court sides with Pentagon against science, reinstating U.S. military’s HIV enlistment ban

Why Wilkins went public

Wilkins knows that stigma intimately. He has learned to stay out of the comment sections on stories about his own case. He has also changed the way he talks about himself. At one medical appointment, he recalled referring to himself as HIV-positive. A clinician gently corrected him.

“You’re just a person living with HIV,” the clinician told him.

The language stayed with him. So did the loneliness of realizing how little many people still understand about HIV.

“I think one of the big things ... to tackle stigma is, it’s a lack of knowledge,” Wilkins said.

He became a named plaintiff, he said, because others had gone first. He pointed to Nicholas Harrison, an attorney living with HIV who was commissioned in 2023, and other litigants who challenged the military before him.

“I felt like I had a responsibility,” he said, “a responsibility to people who are living with HIV, who are not in a place that they can speak up and voice their opinion and go up against the largest, most powerful, most financially capable organization that the world has seen.”

What comes next

For anyone who decides to test the reopened door, Schoettes offered practical advice. Be honest about your health status, document every interaction with recruiters, and reach out to his team or Minority Veterans of America, an organizational plaintiff in the case.

But for now, the door is open.

Wilkins, who once sat in a colonel’s office wondering if his life and military future were over, can try again. So can others.

If he could speak to the teenager who received that diagnosis at West Point, he knows what he would say.

“Number one, you’re going to be OK,” Wilkins said. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you’re going to be OK.”

And for the future, he said, there is still hope.