Jay Ellis Quotes

HIV is not a death sentence. It doesn't mean life's over. It means that life's going to be different, but you still get to have those moments that people who don't have HIV experience.

Ghana is one of the countries in Western Africa that still has quite a few of their slave castles still standing.

If you have HIV, I don't think there's anything to be ashamed of. Get treatment and don't think that you're out of options or resources because you're not.

As a young, Black man in America, I look out and (realize) that our community is the most affected by HIV.

You have to believe in yourself and you have to take risks. You know how people say 30 is new 20 and 40 is new 30? Well I think essentially what that's telling us is there are so many opportunities out there, you don't have to rush into something.

You can try your passion for a while and see if it works and if it doesn't, at least you tried. I think that's why I quit my job and went back to acting. I said this is what I'm going to dedicate my life to doing because I didn't want to look up and say, "Man I wish I would have been an actor. I wish I would have tried."

Every artist is a walking business. Your marketing tools are your headshots and your reel. That's what people see that's what your out there pushing trying to get a rep and that isn't easy.

At the end of the day, we're people and we should fight for each other and we should make sure the well-being of each one of us is taken care of.

Knowing your HIV status is such an easy thing to do, but again, we've created this stigma around even going to get tested.

I quit my job and for almost two years I didn't tell anyone, not even my family or friends. And for those two years I enrolled in acting classes. I acted in some capacity every single day.

When you go out and audition, you're going to hear a lot of 'No's.' As weird as it may sound, you almost have to love hearing 'no' because you're going to hear it way more than you hear 'yes'.

We think that if we get tested, that means you have to have HIV. Or we think that just by knowing someone with HIV, we're going to get HIV or because he's gay or she's a lesbian or whatever. This false information has been put out there and it's created this stigma that stops us from going to find out if we're infected. The truth is it doesn't matter who you are, if you're having sex, you need to be getting tested, plain and simple.

Once I got my business degree I realized I didn't want to do business anymore. My passion started to kick in and say, "Are you really sure this is what you want to do with the rest of your life? Are you 100% positive?"

I try to be as realistic as possible.

We [African-Americans] are nearly half of all of the new cases of HIV every year, but we only represent 13 percent of the [U.S.] population. So, this is something that's literally bombarding our community, non-stop. We're such a small part of the nation [and] those numbers are alarming. We're putting ourselves in danger, we don't talk about getting tested and we don't talk about knowing [your status].

As long as you're consistently working on your craft, your heart is in the right place, and you pair that with being smart on how you present yourself to people, opportunities will appear.