The Switch is a video series sharing positive lifestyles and health routines to help you thrive while living with HIV. Listen to our guests living with HIV talk candidly about the positive switches they have made in their daily lives, including their approach to HIV treatment. Watch more episodes here.
It was a cold January morning when DéShaun Armbrister walked into the Hetrick-Martin Institute for a routine HIV test. The room felt casual — until it didn’t. The counselor’s tone shifted. The energy changed.
“I had a delayed reaction,” he recalled. “At first I thought, ‘OK. I’ll be fine.’ But as soon as I left the room, I broke down. I cried.”
He was 20. The year was 2010. HIV-positive.
“I thought, what am I going to do with the rest of my life?” he said. “But my doctor told me immediately — HIV is not a death sentence.”
That moment didn’t end his life — it redirected it. Today, Armbrister is better known as Dey Phoenix: a pole dancer, instructor and HIV advocate based in New York City. He has been undetectable for more than 15 years, thriving not in spite of his diagnosis but alongside it.
“Nothing’s really changed except the weather and me taking one pill a day,” he said, laughing.
Armbrister kept his diagnosis private at first, confiding only in a few friends and a then-partner. One of the most pivotal voices in his life was his best friend Maya, a Black trans woman, who gave him advice he still lives by: “Don’t let HIV get you down. Let it off on the dance floor.”
Dance had long been part of Armbrister’s life, but after his diagnosis, it became something deeper — something necessary.
“When I don’t know what to say, dance is how I express myself,” he said. “Especially sensual dance. So much of HIV is talked about in clinical terms — meds, labs, viral loads. But we’re still sensual beings. We deserve to feel sexy.”
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Armbrister quit his day job to become a full-time dancer.
“I had to ask myself, am I going to be miserable doing something that isn’t me? Or broke but happy, waking up with purpose?” he said. “I chose purpose.”
While movement grounds his identity, Armbrister also draws strength from spirituality. He practices hoodoo, meditates and reads tarot cards. To those newly diagnosed, his advice is simple and honest.
“Let yourself feel it. It’s a kind of grief,” he said. “But don’t stay stuck. Talk to someone. Get a therapist if you can. And find the one thing that brings you joy — that gets you out of bed. For me, that’s dance.”
What Armbrister hopes to leave behind isn’t just choreography, but a legacy of radical authenticity.
“You can’t be someone else,” he said. “You can only be you.”
