He is an inspiration for being the first openly gay professional rugby player, yet Gareth Thomas and his family still face hate because he is living with HIV. The former Wales rugby union captain revealed to the Sunday Mirror in 2019 that he had been diagnosed with the virus. Nearly six years on, Gareth, 50, says there is still a stigma around HIV, revealing he and his husband of nine years, Stephen Williams-Thomas, have been shunned. Gareth says: “In a way, sadly, [my family] are sometimes guilty by association with me. You know, my husband sometimes has difficulties at work or difficulties in society because he’s married to me. My husband is HIV negative, but because I’m HIV positive people assume that he’s bound to be HIV positive because they don’t understand treatment. They don’t understand that, on effective treatment, I can’t transmit through sexual contact.” Since opening up about living with HIV, Gareth has become an advocate for people diagnosed as positive and leads the Tackle HIV campaign. But he feels there’s still a long way to go to educate people. He says: “When you walk into a restaurant, people will leave. People don’t want to share the same glass as you or use the same cutlery. They don’t want to shake your hand, they don’t want to give you a hug. They don’t want to give you a kiss. So many people, as well as myself, have had these stigmatised lived experiences when there’s no need to. Science and medicine is so advanced now, you know. I live with HIV and I take one tablet a day. I live a normal, happy, healthy life.” Gareth praises Keir Starmer for recently becoming the first prime minister to publicly take an HIV test. He says: “I think it is a positive thing. Anybody with a public platform who can grab attention to testing and the ease of testing is good. I think by him doing something like this so publicly will help in the amount of tests being done and also eradicate the stigma around testing. Hopefully it eradicates that and gives people the confidence to be able to test.” Almost two decades have passed since Gareth came out as gay – and yet he remains one of the few openly gay sportsmen globally. And even a seemingly modern society in 2025 has yet to achieve equality, he says, adding: “Where is the defence argument to say that we’ve come a long way since 2019? As much as we’d like to say as a society, we’ve moved on, we’re accepting, we’re equal and we’re diverse, well, within sport, you can’t name me five openly gay male participants out of millions and millions of people. Then, really, is that equality? There’s definitely a long way to go and sometimes the reason we’re not moving forward is because we think we move forward.” This year the star is working with Tackle HIV on its Challenging Stigma Garden to be exhibited at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in May – in the hopes he will reach and be able to educate a new audience. He says: “The garden is a great way for us to be able to deliver the same message against stigma that we’ve been delivering for the five years the campaign has been going, but in a really unique way that can captivate an audience of a diverse nature that outside of the garden show we might not be able to grasp.” The Tackle HIV Challenging Stigma Garden will feature at the Chelsea Flower Show 2025, designed by Manoj Malde. Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs onTikTok,Snapchat,Instagram,Twitter,Facebook,YouTubeandThreads.