Twenty years ago this past spring, Mathew Kennealy marked his 24th birthday by going to the Sudbury health unit office and getting tested for HIV.
A gay man, and with HIV disproportionately affecting this population, he figured he’d do the responsible thing. “I need to know,” he said. “I'm gonna be a good gay guy and go get my HIV test.”
Much to his surprise, he tested positive, and he had to tell his family and the intimate partners he’d had to date. Kennealy has no idea where he got HIV.
Already experiencing symptoms of mental illness, what followed was the catastrophic unravelling of his life.
“The story’s not good,” Kennealy said. “The story is homelessness and prison and mental unwellness.”
It’s a contrast from Kennealy’s high school years in the 1990s, when he was a go-getter, high-achiever and athlete at Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School, grabbing every opportunity that came his way.
“Not quite the story you’d expect from the student council president,” he tells us in an email.
In a stable place in his life now, 44-year-old Kennealy has agreed to tell his story to Sudbury.com in honour of World AIDS Day, which is marked Dec. 1.
‘It was my ongoing horror’
Following high school, Kennealy entered theatre arts and drama studies at the University of Toronto, but earned poor marks, and returned home to Sudbury.
He started dating someone, and lived with his boyfriend in an apartment downtown. It seemed like life was picking up again.
But then, as Kennealy puts it, “I started losing time. Things started going south for me. I was convinced my boyfriend was a clone. I lost my housing. I lost my boyfriend, I ended up in jail. I tested positive (for HIV), and then when I got out of jail, I was basically homeless and bounced between the Salvation Army, couches and rooming houses in the city.
“People tried to help, but there was a fundamental big problem that needed to be dealt with that was going unmanaged and unmonitored.”
Upon his HIV diagnosis, Kennealy “freaked out” and ran away to Toronto, a person in crisis seeking solace with old friends. But “one thing led to another,” and he ended up being charged with aggravated assault related to HIV non-disclosure.
“It was just they thought something different was going on than they had in their mind, that I was a good time and that I was there for fun and what have you, and I wasn't entirely capable of having the discussion that was necessary at that point,” Kennealy said.
Also during that time period, Kennealy had interactions with the law after twice breaking into his grandmother’s house. “I think I wanted a hot meal,” he said.
He ended up in jail.
On top of his HIV diagnosis, Kennealy lives with schizophrenia. His specific diagnosis is schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type.
He said he went seven years from the time the first symptoms of his mental illness emerged when he was 23 until he received treatment when he was 30.
It was actually thanks to a friend doing her residency at the old Sudbury General Hospital who had been on the yearbook committee with him in his Lo-Ellen days that he finally got a schizophrenia diagnosis at the age of 28.
“She was like, ‘Mathew, what the hell?’ And I was like, ‘I'm lost in daydreams.’ I don't know why I was lucid enough to get that point across. She was like, ‘Oh, Mathew, oh, I know what's going on,’ and gave me my diagnosis,” he said.
“People who saw what my life was like during my time being underhoused and unwell in Sudbury, witnessed horror,” Kennealy said. “It was my ongoing horror.”
He said that he has gaps in his memory from the worst of his mental illness, not knowing what he was doing for months at a time.
During his time in prison, he thought he was on a submarine, and that if he pressed the number nine on the jail’s phone system, it would release a torpedo, which made it difficult to call home to his parents.
“Oh, my God, it was so weird, so weird, but I was so unwell that I was sheltered from how bad things had gotten,” he said.
Kennealy said his family did try to help, but found they could do nothing. “They felt helpless, I think,” he told us. “Part of the problem was that I was fiercely independent. They would try to help and I wouldn't be making any sense.”
Moving to the big city
Seeing no path forward in Sudbury, in 2010, aged 30 years old, Kennealy bought a bus ticket and moved to Toronto. He had only the clothes on his back and a backpack.
With no connections to social services, other than receiving ODSP, those first months in the big city were some of the darkest in his life. At least in Sudbury, even if he was homeless, he still felt he was in his own backyard.
Not previously a drug user, Kennealy befriended a drug dealer in Toronto, and started using methamphetamine. “It was an ugly situation, and I’m glad it stopped,” he said, reflecting on the current opioid and drug adulteration crisis.
“Street involved” in Toronto for six months, Kennealy ended up at Seaton House, the largest men’s shelter in the country.
It was a lucky stroke, as the shelter medical staff took him seriously, and started him on meds for both schizophrenia and HIV. He also ceased drug use, and has been sober for 14 years.
Other than his time in jail, Kennealy said he hadn’t had any treatment for his HIV until he got to Seaton House. “I was very lucky,” he said. “I could have gotten pneumonia, and it would have been terrible for me.”
He said his high school friend working at Sudbury General Hospital did him a “solid” by giving him his schizophrenia diagnosis, as he was able to tell the doctors at Seaton House.
While the treatment was aggressive, the schizophrenia meds are “very effective,” he said, without which “I would not be able to have this conversation with you.”
Social service workers from a local AIDS service agency found Kennealy at the shelter and moved him into the community, first into a transitional housing program and later into a group home.
He lived in that group home in Kensington Market for six years as he went through the process of coming off the street and balancing off on meds.
“For like the first 18 months, I basically slept, and my meds kept increasing, because we had to get to a point where I was happy with them,” he said.
The housing provider, Fife House, finally moved him into a scattered-sites unit located, ironically, on Sudbury Street. “I can't go that far from Sudbury, right?” he jokes. In that unit, Kennealy still connects with a case worker weekly.
From the streets to university graduate
As soon as he had the mental wherewithal, Kennealy’s high-achiever self re-emerged.
He enrolled in school in 2015, first attending a general arts and science program at George Brown College, and then transferring into second year at the University of Toronto.
Kennealy graduated with an honours BA in sexual diversity studies this past June, and is now undertaking his MA in criminology and social justice from Toronto Metropolitan University.
He earned high marks in his undergrad and even won the 2019 EJ Pratt Medal in Poetry for his poem “George Street,” about his time on the streets (we have attached his poem below).
Graduating from university was, hands down, his proudest moment.
“If you had asked me 10 or 15 years ago if this is where I’d be, I would have laughed at you,” he said.
But his academic success was shadowed by tragedy, as his boyfriend of six years, Zack, died in June 2023. The two met when Zack was in recovery, but he relapsed, and was found dead in his apartment. “I miss him terribly,” Kennealy said.
‘It took a system’
Asked why he was able to get off the streets and get healthy when that seems impossible for so many, Kennealy points to the levels of support he received, addressing his housing and acute health needs.
He doesn’t think that the involuntary treatment currently vaunted by politicians would have helped, as what he required was wrap-around support.
“It took a system,” Kennealy said. “It took a system where there were social workers embedded in the system where there were links to social service workers and community organizations where there were housing support structures and community organizations reported to housing. It took a lot of people.”
Countering hate and prejudice
On sabbatical due to his graduate studies, Kennealy has worked in housing support and as a peer specialist with people who have HIV and are exiting homelessness.
His ultimate goal is working for a community health centre as part of a homelessness outreach program. “With the experience I have, I think I would be a very productive researcher when it comes to HIV and homelessness,” Kennealy said.
He’s also involved in HIV/AIDS activism, and is currently co-chair of the steering committee of the Toronto HIV/AIDS Network.
This week is HIV Awareness Week, with World AIDS Day coming up Dec. 1.
Marking the 20th anniversary of his HIV diagnosis this past spring, Kennealy is one of 63,000 individuals in Canada currently living with HIV, 14 per cent of whom are unaware of their status.
Since the beginning of the epidemic, 88.4 million people worldwide have been infected with the HIV virus and about 42.3 million people have died of HIV.
Kennealy said he thinks HIV testing should be normalized, a regular blood test people get at their doctor’s office.
Through the miracles of modern medicine, Kennealy’s current HIV treatments are injections he receives every two months, although he points out his drug costs are pretty exorbitant.
Receiving psychiatric treatment at Mount Sinai Hospital in a clinic for those with HIV, Kennealy said he receives “gold star” care.
“I'm very fortunate, but that's not the reality of care for everyone around the world,” he said.
While there’s more understanding of HIV/AIDS than there was in the past, given more robust medications to treat it, Kennealy said there’s still a lot of hate and stigma.
For this reason, Kennealy is glad to share his story, and hopes it serves to raise awareness. And after the ordeal of his earlier life, he’s looking to the future.
“I was very lucky,” he said. “That’s the truth. I met good people, and they did me a solid in the biggest way possible and got me my life back. I’m 44. I’m excited for what this next chapter brings.”
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She wants to thank her high school friend Mat Kennealy for entrusting her to tell his story.
George Street
I never agreed to sleep in a room with an old man
Who read and drank and went to jail
And a strange man named Xiao
Who cooked soft shelled blue crabs
With red claws
In a rice cooker that was against fire codes
Asbestos ceiling stained from when the men used to smoke inside
Now to roam the halls like stagnant ghosts
And drink sweet orange coloured drinks
I did not agree to anything
I was busy talking to the spectres
And the purple and grey feathered pigeons who told me stories of war
I was trying to find some way to prove my love
To the Superhero I believed ran the nuclear facility in Leslieville
He defended the city from a dragon who lived in a Bay street tower
But I had been evicted
By the blond woman who owned the bar downstairs
I found myself wandering down George Street
And into the largest men’s shelter in the city
Having stayed at the Anglican church for a few nights first\
My first few nights in the city
My t-shirt a testament
That I was way more fucked up than the rest of these souls
No one knew I believed that I had joined a seminary
There was a balcony with a metal fence
Blocking the view of the Grand Hotel neon sign
I thought this was how the upper-class pass through life
Without anything
Free to wander in imagination
And ruminate on hate
A man in a wheelchair would sell cigarettes for fifty cents each
I remember that he would go as far as the sidewalk in front of the monastery
To smoke crack
With a man
Whom I called a sociopath
To his face
Who would drink himself into a deep lethargy
Then fall out of his chair watching television
People watched old movies on channel 5
Or twenty-six
The doctor visited twice a week
She took interest in my quest
She had a solution
Not a cure but a solution to the problem that I didn’t understand
I did not understand my life
It was dark
The solution was a shot in the arm every two weeks
I had been somewhere between confused and delusional
For ten years
Mom thought I was on drugs
She would call the police when I tried to visit
I was invited for Christmas
But they called a taxi
When I started crying about the Great War
Because I knew that it had never stopped
The dead were being paved into roads
They filled the graves and sewers
And the mortuary that had been built by Diefenbaker
Under Yonge street
From King to Bloor
I fell in love with Steve
The squeegee on his belt and the dirty pants
Red hair and a sexy pose
When we looked at each other
And were alone
Even if everyone around us was complaining about the world
I talked to my demons and recited scripture
And he got drunk on cooking wine
Steve spit on people he didn’t like
And I loved him
I wanted us to lock ourselves in the tower
Where the dragon lived
And practice spells for the hero of this story
Who worked at the nuclear power plant in Leslieville
I made a friend
She worked in the building
I made an enemy who worked in the building too
He was a complicated brown-haired boy who had graduated with Honours
And wore great jeans and a button-down shirt
Into the pit of filth
I’m sure he went home and took long showers
My friend mentioned me to another friend and that friend
Came to visit twice
She gave me an Ottawa Senators t shirt
And although the meds had stopped the panic
I thought I had joined the Senate
And now worked for the Registrar General
My second friend decided to move me into the parish
And away from the house of prayer and sacraments
I gathered my backpack
The leather jacket I had bought for Fall
My new shirt
And quietly left
This gentleman of letters and mortuaries
Has stained my body in tattoos and scars
And nicotine yellow teeth
I wish everyone would do the same
And believe in God
To such an incredible extent
I miss Steve very much
I hope he will not be cold this winter
~By Mathew Kennealy
