Theodore looks like a high fashion model. Tall, dark with a fashionable beard, sharp eyes, taut body with smooth lines and a hint of sensitive masculinity. In fact, he gave modelling a go when he was younger but abandoned it quickly.

“It’s just wasn’t for me,” he says dismissively, and I wonder if it was one of the choices he made as a teenager to mask his pain. And there is a lot of that in Theodore’s story.

He is only 25 years old but he’s been battling sexuality issues, bullying, sex abuse, drug addiction and HIV. Add to the mix the fact that he is the younger son of a Greek migrant family and the pain indicator sky rockets.

Theodore Tsipiras grew up in a typical Greek family in a middle-class Sydney suburb. He was the spoiled younger son in a family of two boys and hard-working parents who aspired to give the best to their children.

“Just a typical Greek family, with lamb on the spit at Easter and lots of eating and drinking and dancing,” he says.

But with adolescence came sexual awareness, which confused Theodore. “Walking down the street I caught myself checking out men and women,” he says. “I thought to myself ‘no-one else is talking about that’.”

He explains calmly about the silence and the secrecy which surrounded homosexuality issues when he was growing up. He felt as though he was alone. “I took it all on by myself… and I had a lot of issues with that,” he says with obvious hurt.

Theodore as a young boy with his family.

But homosexuality wasn’t the only issue that baffled the mind of the teenager. Though his upbringing sounds normal enough, it was in the protective environment of his home that the molestation started at the age of 10 and continued until he was 14. That period gave rise to ghosts and in the following adolescent years, Theodore found out that ghosts and darkness have a cunning ability to multiply.

Growing up in an environment that made him feel inadequate, keeping secrets was something Theodore mastered. In the game of survival you become good at whatever keeps you going, whatever helps you to cope.

“In the Greek culture we dance zeibekiko, a man’s dance. We are all pallikaria – a mangas – a man’s man. It’s really frustrating to see that as an adolescent and look down upon yourself because you think you are not a man,” he says, indicating that anything that seems to deviate from that notion of manhood is not acceptable.

Theodore’s self-hate led him to rebellion which manifested into drug taking and spiralled into drug abuse.

“I held onto a lot of anger,” says Theodore, “anger towards my parents.

“[I did] a whole lot of drug taking by the age of 15. I did everything mum tells you not to do.”

Rebellion became Theodore’s way of coping, a way of keeping the ghosts at bay. After all, isn’t that what men do? Put on a brave face. He blamed his parents for not protecting him when he was under their care. Deep down though, he was a scared little boy devoid of any feelings of self-worth, who wanted to run to his parents and confide in them.

He escaped the narrow Greek Australian family environment and entered the gay scene. Masking his pain with drugs and armed with his good looks, Theodore quickly became popular. Finally he had gained the acceptance he was after. But his ghosts were multiplying.

He contracted HIV when he was 21 while in a serodiscordant relationship (mixed HIV status relationship).

“Our agreement was, when we were in an open relationship that we only played with other positive guys who were undetectable. The reason why we chose that was because the chances of me contracting it were far lower than hooking up with a person that was (seemingly) negative,” he explains.
Ironically it wasn’t his positive partner that infected him but a “guy around his age”, despite the couple conducting a check on his status.

“He answered them all completely fine,” he says almost naively, “but a week later I started getting sick”.

When the reality of HIV sank in, Theodore went to confront him.

“He actually stopped me right there, because he would rather not know about his status. Because if he knew about it he would have to disclose his status to his sexual partners; I guess he wasn’t comfortable with that,” he continues with a degree of acceptance.

The reality of having to deal with an incurable illness forced him to reassess his life. However, his biggest challenge was yet to come. Being gay wasn’t his only secret. Drug addiction, molestation and HIV were added to his list.

Theodore had spoken to his friends about his trails but not to his parents. Jailed by his pain and secrets, what he couldn’t do in front of two people he did in front of millions: he shared his past on national television via SBS’ Insight on the episode ‘Keeping secrets’. With the show tape on his hands, freed from his secrets, he was able to share his feelings and his life with his parents. He could finally be himself.

Theodore discovered that he was far more loved and accepted than he thought.

“We’re really close,” he says of his relationship with his family. “Now that I’ve moved to Melbourne I talk to my mother once a day, non-negotiable. I feel like I can talk honestly to my parents and family. Thankfully we’re all on the same page and [they’ve said] how proud they have been of the path I’ve taken to liberate myself from my past.”

Theodore now works as a project officer for Living Positive Victoria, a not-for-profit, community-based organisation representing people living with HIV in Victoria.

I ask him if he would do it differently, if he could do it all over again.

“If I could have sat there and talked to myself when I was 17 and say to myself: ‘you don’t have to do meth to deal with this. It actually happens a lot more than you think; it’s just that no-one talks about it’. I could have saved myself a lot of difficult work,” he says with a smile, almost giving me the impression he feels cheated by life, only to quickly reaffirm it.

“It’s just how life is. Things go wrong, things go right. You have to be nice to yourself.”

*Kyriakos Gold is a producer with The Greek Program of SBS Radio