"AIDS was my destiny," said Ida Byther-Smith, founder of Jo-Ray House, a living space for men with HIV located in Chicago's Roseland neighborhood, "but life was my choice."
Byther-Smith found out that she was infected with HIV the same day—Nov. 7, 1991—that basketball player Magic Johnson announced his own infection in a nationally-televised press conference. The result of a routine test Byther-Smith needed for a job, the infection came as a shock. She left the doctor's office "running," she said, after telling the doctor he was a liar.
Throughout the 1990s Byther-Smith struggled with how to cope with her infection. When her husband—who had infected her and left her—showed up at her door in 1996 after being robbed, she told him, "You can have a bedroom." He lived under her care until his death in 1999.
The arc of her relationship with her husband would presage the work that has consumed her for much of the past decade. After a near-death experience on Christmas Day in 2000—when she was rushed to the hospital with a high viral load and virtually no T-cells—she resolved to help other members of her south side community who were struggling with the disease.
Taking from her savings and her 401k—she had been, at various points, a Greyhound bus driver and a dialysis technician—Byther-Smith opened Jo-Ray House in 2004. The name of the house is an amalgamation of her mother's name, Josephine, and her brother's, Ray Paul. Both died of heart attacks at a young age.
