They are the dead who walk again: the Lazarus men. Invisible to most of us, these are the gay males, now in their 30s and 40s, who first contracted the HIV virus 10, 15 and even 20 years ago. Through a combination of raw courage, determination and powerful new drug therapies, they have managed to keep the disease at bay.

Steve Mueller is one of those survivors. He is a warm, articulate 42-year-old with sharp, sculpted features, a halo of black curls and a hacking cough - the legacy of a battle with HIV which is not yet over. We’re sitting in a crowded lunch spot in the heart of Toronto’s Little Italy, straining to hear each other amidst the jangle of crashing cutlery and the hum of animated conversations ricocheting around the room. ‘I could fill these tables with guys who are gone,’ he nods, glancing quickly across the crowded restaurant.

Steve has been through a lot since he discovered he was HIV positive back in the early 1990s. Then he was teaching psychology at a small community college in the city, enjoying life, financially secure, with a partner who was an affluent executive in the advertising business. Life was good, he was living ‘by the rules’.

Then he got sick and his world shattered. He lost his job; his partner, also HIV positive, died within a year. And then Steve contracted meningitis, one of the often deadly ‘opportunistic diseases’ that strike the battered immune systems of people with HIV.

‘The doctors told me in June 1995 that I was unlikely to see Christmas. I’d gone from 180 to 120 lbs and I was still losing weight. Then I started on the AIDS cocktail; it literally pulled me back from the edge. They called guys like me, who were dying and then bounced back, the Lazarus men.’

Steve’s life, and the lives of many other people with HIV/AIDS (PHAs), was turned around by the discovery of effective ‘antiretroviral’ medications (ARVs) a decade ago. These drugs are not a cure for HIV but they can be a way of controlling the virus, enabling many people to work and lead otherwise normal lives again.

But as important as they’ve been in the West, they have made scarcely a dent in those parts of the world where HIV rages unchecked. Soon after HIV was identified in North America it leapt from the homosexual to the heterosexual community, and then from the gay ‘ghettos’ of Seattle and New York to the slums of Port-au-Prince, Bangkok and Mumbai.