While his brother keeps busy producing and stewarding a series of flawless offspring, Prince Harry has turned his efforts to the cause of HIV prevention and care. On July 14, Harry visited a London sexual-health clinic to take an HIV test and broadcast the whole thing on Facebook Live.
More than 2.3 million people watched the video, in which the prince explains that people should get tested even if they’re not considered at-risk. “It’s completely normal for me—even if I’m not from this part of London, or, ah, the, you know, being the person that I am and the people that I end up being around, I’m still, I’m still sitting, I’m sitting here and I’m still nervous,” he stutters. It’s great fun to watch him try to talk around what he’s actually saying: that he’s a prince who only sleeps with prince-adjacent people, and no one would expect princely or prince-adjacent people to contract HIV.
Yet there he is taking the test anyway, ears turning red, hands getting “quite cold” according to the man administering the test, assuring the camera with a nervous giggle that the finger prick “didn’t even hurt.”
The whole thing is a nice bit of talk-show theater; Harry engages the practitioner in edifying chatter for the benefit of the camera while they perform the test. On fears of a protracted exam: “Once you’ve got people through the door, that’s the hardest bit out the way?” On privacy concerns: “It would just be me and you?” On waiting for the result: “It’s amazing how quick it is!” Surely it’s no spoiler to reveal that his test was nonreactive. But even if it were, Harry confirms in the video, and even if a subsequent blood test showed that he did have HIV, he’d have to take a pill a day for the rest of his life but could “continue to have a partner” who would likely not be infected.
Harry’s reassuring banter seems to have done its work. The Telegraph reports that the Terrence Higgins Trust, a nonprofit that’s launching a pilot program of at-home HIV self-testing kits, saw a fivefold increase in orders—up to 150 orders a day—in the days after Harry’s livestream. Seeing a prince get tested in a health clinic, risking poor lighting and an unflattering camera angle, is a pretty powerful suggestion that anyone can contract the virus. “So whether you’re a man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, whatever—even ginger,” he says in the video, pointing to his own head, “why wouldn’t you come have a test?”
In 2006, the prince founded an organization called Sentebale with his brofriend and fellow royal Prince Seeiso of Lesotho to support children living with HIV in the southern African nation. Harry has said that he inherited his commitment to HIV activism from his mother, Princess Diana, who was well-known for her own work to destigmatize the virus. Diana famously hugged and shook the hands of people living with HIV and AIDS at a time when much of the world still portrayed them as lepers. Were Facebook Live around when Diana was alive, she might have gotten pricked on camera before Harry ever got the chance.
Harry’s act of medical discovery may have been corny and staged, but it marks a welcome departure from the carefully coiffed photo ops for which royals too often settle. If you’re going to be a leech on British society in an outmoded post with lingering traces of colonialism, this is the way to do it.
