/ Updated By Alexander Kacala 
 
 Seth Owen, 18, said attending college has always been his “life goal,” one he has been working on diligently since elementary school. 
 
 “I was the nerd in fifth grade who walked around recess talking about how I wanted to be an astronaut,” Owen told NBC News. “I was always in a textbook, always in the library, always reading something.” 
 
 Seth Owen, left, and his swimming coach, Kaylee Petik, on graduation day Courtesy Seth Owen 
 
 With a 4.61 GPA and an acceptance letter from Georgetown University, it seemed like the high school valedictorian’s dream would become a reality. But when he received his financial aid package from the prestigious school, a different reality set in: The financial aid package had been determined based on the expected contribution of his family, a family he said drove him out of his home due to his sexuality. 
 
 “I started to cry, because I realized there was no way that I could go to college,” he said. “Georgetown was my only option, because I had already denied my other acceptances.” 
 
 With Georgetown refusing to amend his financial aid package and $20,000 needed for his first year’s tuition, the Florida teen thought his situation was hopeless. But then his former biology teacher stepped in. 
 
 “Seth was just a kid that really stood out to me,” the teacher, Jane Martin, told NBC News. “He was super ambitious and was always trying to go above and beyond to make sure he could be as successful as possible.” 
 
 Martin set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for Owen’s tuition, hoping to “make the impossible possible,” and she succeeded. As of Tuesday afternoon, the fundraising page raised over $50,000 — more than double its initial $20,000 goal. 
 
 “AWKWARD CONVERSION THERAPY” 
 
 Trouble at home began for Owen during his sophomore year of high school, when his Southern Baptist parents discovered he was gay. 
 
 “I was writing a paper, and my dad decided to check my phone late in the evening,” Owen recalled. “He found a damning photograph of me and another guy. Nothing inappropriate, but it clearly indicated that I was gay.” 
 
 Owen said his dad informed his mother of the discovery, and the two questioned him about his sexuality until 4:30 a.m. 
 
 “Soon after, they sent me to a Christian counselor,” he said. “It was clear that their intent was for me to walk out of therapy straight.” 
 
 “It was not like a conversion camp, but it was definitely awkward conversion therapy where they tried encouraging stereotypical masculine tasks and things like that,” Owen added. He said he participated in the Christian therapy program for a “few months” before eventually convincing his parents to let him stop. 
 
 Conversion therapy, also known as "reparative therapy" or "ex-gay therapy," aims to change one’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Despite widespread opposition from health associations, like the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, approximately 700,000 LGBTQ Americans between the ages of 18 and 59 have been subjected to this practice at some point in their lives, according to a 2018 report from UCLA’s Williams Institute. The report also estimates tens of thousands of LGBTQ youth currently between the ages of 13 and 17 will undergo “gay conversion therapy" before they turn 18. 
 
 Seth Owen, left, was on the swim team at First Coast High School in Jacksonville, Florida. Courtesy Seth Owen 
 
 On February 11, two-thirds of the way through his senior year, Owen said he left his parents’ home for his own well-being. 
 
 “I started bringing up my disagreements with the church that they attend. I mean, there was just incident after incident,” Owen said. “They talked very negatively about the LGBTQ+ community. They said that gay people would not serve in the church. Then they were talking about transgender people as though they weren't human, and that really, really bothered me.” 
 
 Owens said he tried to convince his parents to let him attend a different church, but they refused. They then gave him an ultimatum: attend their church or move out. 
 
 “The worst part was I was packing my bags, and I was walking out the door, and I was hoping that my mom would stand in my way. I was hoping that she would say ‘I love my child more than I love my religion.’” 
 
 Just a few weeks after leaving his parents’ home — when he was sleeping on friends’ couches and thought things couldn’t get any worse — Owen received his financial aid package and tuition total from Georgetown. 
 
 “I was just devastated once again,” he said of realizing his college dream was in jeopardy. 
 
 “YOU ARE NOT ALONE” 
 
 When Jane Martin, who taught Owen freshman biology and served as his mentor throughout high school, found out about his situation, she met with other teachers and students to figure out a way they could help him. 
 
 “We know that he's not the type of person to always say, ‘I need help.’ He tries to be very solution-oriented and deal with things on his own,” Martin said about Owen. “We just got to the point where we came together and said, ‘This is something where we need to take the lead, and make sure that he gets what he needs” 
 
 Seth Owen Courtesy Seth Owen 
 
 Martin set up a fundraising page for Owen’s tuition on GoFundMe, with a goal of raising $20,000. 
 
 “I know the goal seems unrealistic and the circumstances aren’t ideal, but I also know communities can make the impossible possible,” Martin wrote in her GoFundMe plea. 
 
 Six weeks and more than 750 donations later, the fundraising page surpassed $50,000. 
 
 “After we had hit $2,000, Seth was just like, ‘I'm so surprised that people, like, actually care about me,’” Martin recalled. 
 
 “He has had so much support and so many people reach out and say ‘You're not alone,’ and ‘It gets better,’ all of the things that we all need to hear when we're queer teenagers and are suffering,” Martin, who is also gay, added. “I'm just excited for him to have this community literally come around and put all of our arms together and bring him up and raise him up for the first time.” 
 
 If Georgetown does end up readjusting Owen’s financial aid package, which Owen and Martin are still hoping for, they plan on using the donations to create a scholarship fund for other teens facing a situation similar to Owen’s. 
 
 A spokesperson from Georgetown told NBC News the university “admits and enrolls students without regard to their financial circumstances and is committed to meeting the demonstrated financial need of eligible students.” 
 
 "While we cannot comment on any individual case, we work closely with students whose financial circumstances change after admission to modify financial aid assistance and ensure they can still enroll regardless of their ability to pay,” the spokesperson added. 
 
 CLASS OF 2022 
 
 Owen said he hopes his story inspires others to talk more openly and honestly about the adversity they’re facing. 
 
 “I remember growing up and saying I had really strict religious parents, and people would brush it off,” Owen explained. “If someone were to say that to me today, I would sit down, and I would ask them, ‘What's going on? What's going on at home? What's happening? What kind of messages are being preached in your church?’” 
 
 When asked what he would say to his sophomore self or other teens facing similar issues at home, he said, “I would tell that sophomore kid to hold their head high, roll their shoulders back and be exactly who they are.” 
 
 “It’s difficult to be who you genuinely are when you have all this pressure around you from all these different people in your life,” he added, “but if you become comfortable with who you are, you're that much more equipped to face these difficult times.” 
 
 Owen plans to move to Washington, D.C., next month to join Georgetown University's Class of 2022. 
 
 Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Owen's GPA was 4.16: It was 4.61. 
 
 FOLLOW NBC OUT ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM ||||| Seth Owen endured "conversion therapy" and homelessness to rise to the top of the class. Now he needs some help with his college tuition. 
 
 After a year of "conversion therapy" that attempted to turn him straight, Seth Owen was told by his parents he could either continue the counseling or move out of their home. After choosing the latter, Owen walked across his high school stage in Jacksonville, Fla., as co-valedictorian, and he is currently trying to raise funds through a GoFundMe page to attend Georgetown University. 
 
 The 18-year-old’s devoutly religious parents discovered he was gay after finding a picture on his phone. Their response was to force him to attend their church, which held anti-LGBT views, while he attended counseling intended to alter his sexual orientation. 
 
 “They made it clear the intention was to make me straight,” Owen told Jacksonville TV station WCWJ. “[That]was their end goal.” 
 
 Despite being technically homeless and crashing with friends, Owen maintained at 4.16 GPA and “[walked] across the stage in a Jacksonville arena weighed down by more cords and medals to count," according to biology teacher Jane Martin, reports Towleroad. 
 
 Martin was the same teacher who started the GoFundMe campaign, and reiterates that she had a close relationship with the valedictorian. According to her message on the campaign’s page, he was ringbearer at her wedding. 
 
 Tuition at Georgetown is $77,000, and the original financial aid package Owen received was based on the premise that he would be financially supported by his parents, which means that the package wouldn’t have been generous enough for Owen to attend in the fall. 
 
 After appealing to the university with letters from mental health professionals, school personnel, mentors, and community organizers, Georgetown refused to amend his financial aid package, which left Owen with a $22,000 tuition bill for his first year. 
 
 “Georgetown University admits and enrolls students without regard to their financial circumstances and is committed to meeting the demonstrated financial need of eligible students through a combination of aid programs that include grants, scholarships, employment and loans from federal, state, private, and University resources," a spokesperson from Georgetown told The Advocate. "While we cannot comment on any individual case, we work closely with students whose financial circumstances change after admission to modify financial aid assistance and ensure they can still enroll regardless of their ability to pay.” 
 
 However, the GoFundMe page has already accumulated over $30,000, which means that Owen will be be covered for his first year. 
 
 Owen plans on paying off his debt one day by becoming a defense attorney for teens, according to WCWJ. ||||| JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - Thousands of teens will leave the familiar life of high school and family next month to head off to college. But 18-year-old Seth Owen separated from his family months ago has been living on his own because he is gay and his religious beliefs didn't agree with his parents. 
 
 Owen said he too is college bound, and he's determined to become successful with or without anyone's acceptance of his lifestyle. Owen is optimistic about the future and ready for new experiences. 
 
 He said he has survived with the help of friends, his reality is far too common for LGBTQ teens. 
 
 His lesson in adversity began in his sophomore year of high school. 
 
 "I was writing a paper one night and my dad decided to check my phone," Owen said. "He was searching for quite a few hours and found a photo that clearly showed that I was gay and questioned me for quite a few hours that night." 
 
 Days later, Owen said his parents sent him to counseling. 
 
 "They made it clear the intention was to make me straight. (That) was their end goal." 
 
 That end goal failed and Owen lived in his truth, that he is gay. 
 
 Seth continued to live with his parents for a couple years, staying busy will three jobs, after school programs, dual enrollment classes and swimming. 
 
 "I guess you could say it was easier to try to avoid home. I felt like I was doing something good with the struggle instead of doing something damaging," Owen said. 
 
 But Owen and his parents would reach a breaking point. 
 
 The pastor at his parents' church had strong opinions about women's place in society and the LGBTQ community -- opinions that Owen couldn't abide. He asked his parents to send him to a different church, but they said no. 
 
 "Either go to church or you can move out," Owen quoted his parents telling him. "I called a mentor. I said, I can't do this. I went back in and asked, "Is there any way that we can compromise,' and my dad said no." 
 
 He moved out in February of this year -- two-thirds of the way through his senior year. 
 
 "I was really, really upset," Owen said. "It was extremely hurtful to know that I was walking out that door not knowing what lay ahead and feeling I don't know how to explain it it was devastating, absolutely devastating." 
 
 Owen was homeless, sleeping on friends' couches and find support through his mentors. 
 
 Despite the challenges, Owen maintained a 4.16 GPA and became co-valedictorian of his First Coast High School's class of 2018. 
 
 Seth story is not unique, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Bullying and assault are common for LGBTQ teens who come out. One study published on the CDC website shows 30 percent of LGBTQ teens consider suicide, compared to 6 percent for heterosexual teens. 
 
 Owen, by contrast, is looking forward to the future. He was accepted to Georgetown University, but that is its own challenge. 
 
 Tuition is $77,000 annually. Owen was awarded about $50,000 in scholarships, but has no one to help make up the difference or sign a student loan. 
 
 One of Owen's former teachers created a GoFundMe account. Within five weeks, more than 300 people donated and the total has surpassed $25,000. 
 
 "I don't think thank you is good enough," Owen said. "Of course I am extremely grateful, but I think thank you doesn't say it. Now it's time to pay it forward." 
 
 He has already decided he will pay it forward by becoming a defense attorney for teen criminals. Owen says they too have been neglected and need more help. Owen leaves for Georgetown Aug. 22. 
 
 Copyright 2018 by WJXT News4Jax - All rights reserved. ||||| Update: Emily Scheck’s gofundme page is again accepting donations to help pay her living and school costs. 
 
 Update: Canisius College has released a statement that the NCAA will allow Emily Scheck to keep her eligibility and donations. 
 
 Earlier this summer, Canisius College cross-country runner Emily Scheck received a text message from her mother that turned her life upside down. 
 
 Her mother had found a picture of Sheck and the girl she was dating, and she was horrified by it. Her mother told her that she was disgusting, and that she had to make a choice: come home and get therapy for her same-sex attraction, or be cut out of their lives forever. Sheck let her mother rant, not knowing what to do. 
 
 “I really didn’t know how someone should respond to that,” Scheck told Outsports. Yet she knew she didn’t want to have anything to do with some kind of conversion therapy, and she wanted to stay at Canisius preparing with her cross-country team for the season ahead. 
 
 Not long after that she came home to a shocker: her car’s license plates had been removed, and her car was full of her childhood belongings from home — awards, plaques, stuffed animals. She had bought her own car, but because her parents were paying for the insurance they had rescinded the payments, her father had driven to Buffalo from their home near Rochester, N.Y., and taken the license plates. He had also removed all of her belongings from their home and stuffed them in her car. 
 
 With that came a message that she was never to speak to them or her siblings again. 
 
 Suddenly Scheck was left alone, without a family and without support. She had $20 to her name and was getting paid by her jobs every two weeks — she works both at the local Wegmans and has a work-study job on campus, just to stay alive. 
 
 She didn’t have a meal plan to rely on for food, and her parents had stuck her with a Discover Card bill of items the family had purchased on a recent vacation. She also hadn’t yet bought books for the semester. She would eventually borrow friends’ books to study for the classes whose books she now couldn’t afford. 
 
 Since then Scheck has, through the generosity of friends and strangers, had money raised for her so she can stay in school and have food on the table. Yet now the NCAA may force her to choose between accepting that financial help and maintaining her eligibility to participate in the sport she loves. 
 
 “At the start it was definitely tough,” Scheck said about those first few days when she realized she was suddenly on her own without support of family. “I was lucky to be in preseason the first couple of weeks because coach could get us meals in the dining hall.” Yet since then she has struggled to find food, often relying on her girlfriend for dinner. “We’ve had a lot of meals together,” she said. 
 
 She brought the plight of her sudden hardship to the coaching staff. Head coach Nate Huckle told Scheck that he would try to help figure out ways to help his young athlete, including housing during breaks and other financial options. 
 
 Yet as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, Scheck faced a hard truth. Coach Huckle hadn’t come back with any confirmed support, and none was forthcoming anywhere else. Canisius College spokesperson Matt Reitnour said Huckle and the school were trying to figure out how they could help Scheck financially, but “Trying to make things happen in large sums of dollars is not an easy thing. It’s not something anyone had given up on.” 
 
 With no support from her parents, she had no ability to pay for the next semester’s tuition — a semester’s full tuition at Canisius College is upwards of $18,000. She was on a partial athletic scholarship, but she was looking at many other costs that would add thousands of dollars. 
 
 Plus her car had been sitting in a driveway for months. While she owned the car, she simply had no way of covering for her parents’ withdrawal of insurance funds. 
 
 She was stuck. 
 
 Her friends noticed their friend in dire financial straits. That’s when her roommate created a gofundme page detailing Scheck’s plight and asking people to donate to their friend, abandoned by her parents simply for being who she is. Her roommate set a goal of raising $5,000. 
 
 Within several days she had raised $25,000. 
 
 That’s when someone at the school or the NCAA — Scheck isn’t quite sure — took notice. She said she was contacted by an NCAA compliance officer at Canisius College and told she had two options, per his communication with the NCAA: Return every penny and maintain her NCAA eligibility, or keep the money and leave the cross-country team. 
 
 She said the school offered to try to find some way to work with the NCAA to then raise some money all over again, but there were no guarantees. She claims lawyers were going to have to get involved, and there was no assurance she’d come out the other side of it with a penny. 
 
 All Sheck wanted was to buy some food, buy some books, pay her tuition and get some insurance for her car, so she wasn’t stuck. Going with the first option — returning the money and just hoping for a solution — made no sense. 
 
 So Scheck, along with her roommate, chose door #2: In order to buy food and books, she would have to take the kindness of strangers and leave the team. That was the NCAA rule. 
 
 That also, of course, is a public-relations nightmare for Canisius College and the NCAA. Headlines like “NCAA and Catholic college force disowned gay athlete to return donations for food and books” don’t bode well for either. 
 
 Yet that’s exactly what happened. A statement sent to Outsports by Canisius College spokesperson Matt Reitnour said: 
 
 After a review by the College’s compliance staff, and following consultation with the NCAA, it was determined that the online crowdfunding webpage was organized and promoted in a manner not permitted under NCAA legislation. Canisius informed the student-athletes that it would be necessary to end the online fundraising effort and work with the website host to return the donations received in order to preserve the student-athlete’s eligibility. 
 
 Canisius also said that they informed Scheck that they would work with her and the NCAA to try to find a solution. That option was simply not viable for Scheck, who has been relying on the generosity of friends for food for the last three months. 
 
 “It would run the risk of it not even happening,” Scheck said. “There was no confirmation that we would even have our eligibility reinstated, or that I would get any financial help. There was no security.” 
 
 When Outsports reached out to the NCAA for comment and an update on the situation, we were assured by a spokesperson that the NCAA and Canisius College were “currently reviewing all options for the student-athlete.” Reitnour confirmed that the situation was being re-evaluated by everyone involved. 
 
 As Scheck tries to find the funds to legally emancipate herself from the parents who have disowned her, deadlines loom. And as of right now, Scheck has no financial option but to abide by NCAA rules, accept the donations sent to her, and forgo her NCAA eligibility to participate in the sport she loves. 
 
 For now, her roommate has stopped accepting donations on the gofundme page. Friends and strangers have donated $25,759 so far. And more people are hoping to help this young woman who has been abandoned by her family. 
 
 Whether she will be abandoned in the end by her school and the NCAA remains to be seen. 
 
 You can find Emily Scheck on Facebook, on Twitter @scheck_emily, or on Instagram @emilyscheck. ||||| A few days before Christmas 2016, a phone call took place that no one could have predicted. One of the world’s most esteemed HIV doctors, Professor Sheena McCormack – whose life’s work as an epidemiologist has been to track and fight the virus – picked up the phone to deliver a message that would make headline news: In the space of 12 months, the number of gay men in London being diagnosed with HIV had dropped by 40%. Across England it was down by a third. No British doctor has been able to report a fall this steep in more than 35 years of the virus. It is the kind of figure that in medical circles is so large as to look jarring, even false; and yet it was true. Behind this story lay a series of secret meetings and a network of people with one man at the centre who, unknown to the public, helped change medical history. His name is Greg Owen. He was the man McCormack phoned. Today his story is told in full for the first time. 
 
 Owen sits in an echoing meeting room in the BuzzFeed News office recalling that conversation, and what it was that McCormack really wanted to convey to him about those figures. “She said, ‘Don’t look at the percentage; I want you to look at this another way. There are thousands of people who didn’t become HIV-positive this year because of you.’” Owen started to cry. And after that call, he says, he used to cry every day. “I knew I was doing something of substance, but I didn’t know what. It feels really good but it’s really overwhelming because how many people in my position get to do what I did?” The man McCormack credited with this unprecedented reduction in HIV transmissions was not a fellow doctor, nor the head of a charity, nor even a politician. Owen is unemployed, a former sex worker, and homeless. What he managed to pull off – and why – is so outlandish it warrants comparisons with Ron Woodroof, the AIDS patient depicted by Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club, who in 1980s America smuggled in unauthorised HIV drugs for desperate fellow sufferers. The difference is that Woodroof’s was an outrageous story that ended in tragedy. Owen’s is a tragic story that ends in outrageous success. 
 
 
 
 Justin Sullivan / Getty Images 
 
 In the summer of 2015, Owen was 35 and working part-time as a barman and club promoter. One of six children, from a working-class Catholic family in Northern Ireland, he had come to England to train as an actor before finding his way into London’s bacchanalian nightlife. That summer, he was trying to make a difficult decision. He had heard about a new drug regime that was being used to prevent HIV. The medication’s brand name is Truvada, and the regime – which involves taking this antiretroviral pill every day – is dubbed PrEP: pre-exposure prophylaxis. Owen, fearful of contracting the virus amid this unleashed world, couldn’t decide whether to start taking the drug, let alone how to obtain it. PrEP was not available on the NHS and a private prescription would cost about £500 per month. But a major NHS study was underway to ascertain how effective the drug was, and who should be given it. The study, called PROUD, was being run by Professor McCormack. “I heard about the PROUD study at a sex party,” says Owen, casually, in the middle of a much longer sentence. He talks at twice the speed of most people, with clauses within clauses and tangents branching from other tangents in a bewildering cascade of verbal Russian dolls. The problem was that Owen was too late to enrol in the study. He was also increasingly aware of his own chaotic situation: After a relationship breakdown and a suicide attempt, Owen was sleeping on friends’ sofas and sliding into full escapism mode. “I’d gone through enough risk-taking,” he says in his soft Belfast accent. “I was like, ‘You know what? I just need to do this – I take GHB and smoke crystal [meth] all weekend.’” But there was another reason for Owen's determination. He had watched someone he loved (who we cannot name in order to protect their anonymity) fall apart after being diagnosed. “He was in a really bad state,” says Owen. The man descended so far into the drugs scene in an attempt to blot out the diagnosis that he had had a heart attack soon after. “He was having a breakdown. Everything was fucked.” After trying in vain to help him, Owen focused on remaining HIV-negative himself and seeing if there was some way to help HIV-positive people more generally. On 11 August 2015, Owen posted on Facebook to let his friends know that he planned to begin taking PrEP. A friend, who was HIV-positive and had been prescribed the drug as part of his treatment before switching medication, offered him some spare pills. Owen’s plan was to start taking them and blog about his experiences – a “blow by blow” account, he says, laughing. Owen laughs a lot when he isn’t raging, frowning, or grinning with delight – often with a frenzy of gestures. He is rarely still. 
 
 Laura Gallant / BuzzFeed 
 
 The day after the Facebook post, he went to a sexual health clinic to double-check he was HIV-negative before taking the pills. Moments later, the nurse gave him the result of the rapid pin-prick blood test: It was positive. He had missed his chance to prevent it. “I felt sick,” says Owen. “I said, ‘I need to have a cigarette.’ I was in shock.” The following evening, aware that his friends on Facebook would soon be asking how he was getting on with PrEP, and while working a shift in a gay bar, Owen posted an update on the site telling everyone he was HIV-positive. 
 
 That single act triggered a chain of events that would change everything. “When I came out on my break two hours later, I had 375 likes, 175 comments, 50 shares. I was like, ‘Sweet Jesus,’” he says. “Then I opened my Messenger – streams of disclosures and supportive messages from people. I must have had 50 or 60 people in two hours saying, ‘I can’t believe you’ve done that, I’m HIV-positive as well and I haven’t told anyone,’ or, ‘I have only told my family and you’ve told 5,000 people.’” But then the messages started changing. “People were like, ‘What is this PrEP thing and if you had it why wouldn’t you have become HIV-positive?’ It got to a point within a week where I would get 10 people a day asking me about PrEP – and that’s 10 people asking 10 questions each.” Keen to get on with life and with his blog, Owen found the questions from acquaintances and strangers were proving a near-constant interruption. He told his friend Alex that something had to give. And it was then that he remembered something. “I was like, ‘I’m sure I was at a meeting somewhere and heard you can import generic hepatitis C drugs for a tenth of the price,’” he says. This thought fused with the need to rid himself of the endless inquiries, or “these fucking bastards asking me about PrEP”, as he puts it. He decided to set up a website with all the information he could find, thus allowing him to “walk away from PrEP”. He laughs at the irony. It would prove to do the opposite. The idea for the site wasn’t only to provide facts; it was also going to help readers buy cheap, non-branded versions of the drug – known as “generics” – from manufacturers overseas. 
 
 Owen just had to figure out how to do this. He knew someone who worked in a sexual health clinic, whom he prefers not to name, for reasons that soon become clear. He phoned the man up. “I said, ‘I’m aware we can maybe import something? Do you know anything about this?’ And he replied, ‘Yeeeeees. Come in tomorrow at 3pm.’” The next day they met in the clinic. Owen was told to keep everything confidential. “This person said, ‘We have a handful of people who use our clinic and they have been self-sourcing generics from this website and we have been discreetly doing the monitoring – discreetly checking their blood periodically to check that there’s active levels of the drug.’” In one sentence, everything was possible. There was somewhere to buy the non-branded versions of the drug – and at around £50 a month, a tenth of the price of a private prescription. And there was, potentially, a way to ensure the drugs were working properly. At the time, because PrEP was not available on the NHS, neither – officially ­– were the urine and blood tests needed to check that the drugs were not adversely affecting kidney function (which some antiretrovirals can do) and were not fake. The man in the clinic, says Owen, then made the possible workable: He showed Owen which websites were supplying this handful of patients with the generics, and which ones they knew – because they had run the tests – were supplying the effective pills. “I said, ‘So this is legit – legit but dodgy. Can we do this?’ And he said, ‘Not only can you do this; you must do this. We’ve been waiting for someone to do this. We’re diagnosing people every day and do you know how heart-breaking it is to know that PrEP would stop it and not be able to do something?’” And that, says Owen, was all the motivation he needed. He and his friend Alex spent a few weeks building the website, gathering as much information as they could, and including a simple click-to-buy button that linked through to the pharmacies in Asia that sold and shipped the generics. They called it IWantPrEPNow.co.uk. “At the time I was shitting myself,” he says. “I was thinking, It’s not like I’m selling Viagra that might work or might not work – the worst that happens is you don’t get a boner – I’m selling drugs where people might rely on it for their HIV protection.” 
 
 But by then, September 2015, the results of the PROUD study were in: PrEP was enormously effective – comparable to condoms – but unlike condoms, this pill is not reliant on people being able or willing to implement the precaution at the very moment when desire can overwhelm. Add in drugs or alcohol, low self-esteem or even self-destruction, and the underuse of condoms across all demographics is hardly surprising. PrEP offered a viable alternative. 
 
 What was surprising in the PROUD study, however, was that rates of other STIs weren't significantly higher among those taking the pill. The fears of many were therefore unfounded. For Owen, then, as long as the overseas online pharmacies kept selling decent alternative versions to the branded drugs, everything would be OK. The website launched on 19 October 2015, and for the first two months, Owen says, he was simply “fronting it out”, having to pretend he was feeling confident. He was also still sleeping on friends’ sofas. “I didn’t know anything!” he says. “I had no clinical background, no pharmaceutical background, nothing. For the remainder of the year I thought someone was going to message me going, ‘I got HIV because of you.’” But something propelled him forward, muzzling the self-doubts: the person he loved who had a heart attack, coupled with the knowledge of his own HIV status. He tries to explain how this motivation manifested, in a mission to compensate for what had happened to the two of them. “All I was out to do was to even out the score for him and me,” he says. “My whole goal was that if I helped keep one person negative then my HIV status is equal, and then one more person means that I won. I don’t deal in shame or guilt or regret but [the thought was], ‘I’m going to make my situation count.’” Within days of launching, traffic started flowing into the website, fanned by Owen blitzing social media with posts about it. The questions he hoped would disappear only mounted. Media requests began trickling in: a chance to talk on the radio in Bristol about PrEP and his website. “I was like, ‘Why would I want to do that?’ I didn’t understand jack shit. I couldn’t even pronounce emtricitabine and tenofovir [the constituent drugs in Truvada]. I was winging it.” He took a four-hour coach journey to Bristol, spoke for 20 minutes on the show, then took the four-hour journey back. “I was so broke I had to borrow my travel money.” The traffic to IWantPrEPNow immediately spiked. 
 
 After this, he says, “it all started going crazy”. The website was being inundated with requests and queries, the answers to many of which Owen had to google. “It was the blind leading the blind,” he says, glaring as if still on a white-knuckle ride. Staff at sexual health clinics, meanwhile, had the tool they needed: a URL to give to patients who were interested in PrEP. It caught the attention of an HIV consultant, Dr Mags Portman, at one of the country’s leading sexual health clinics, the Mortimer Market Centre in central London. She contacted Owen and arranged to meet him round the corner from the clinic, over a glass of wine. It would prove pivotal, he says. “She said, ‘What can I do? What are you struggling with?’ And I said, ‘I’m learning as I go but I need credibility and visibility.’ And she said, ‘Leave it with me.’” Portman made a crucial move. She contacted the General Medical Council, to seek advice on how sexual health doctors could respond to patients interested in PrEP or already accessing the drugs when the NHS still wasn’t providing them. “Clinicians were anxious about even discussing it [with patients],” says Owen. “And the GMC directed her to something that was already established and given as guidelines. It basically says it is your responsibility as a doctor to advocate for the best treatment for your patient, even if it’s not commissioned. In other words, the GMC gave the green light to initiate the conversation around PrEP.” After this, increasing numbers of gay men started turning up to clinics saying they were buying generic PrEP online and asking for the urine and blood tests – known as therapeutic blood monitoring. And within weeks, more and more sexual health clinics started offering the service to cater to the demand. Thanks to Portman’s discussions with fellow doctors, the Mortimer Market Centre also brought Owen in to train medical staff about PrEP. 
 
 “I thought it was hilarious,” says Owen, laughing at what seemed like an absurdity. “Now I’m giving staff training to professors and doctors?” But he knew why they wanted him there. “The thing is, I speak with hundreds and thousands of PrEP users across the world all the time. I know what they need, I know what will encourage them to be honest with clinicians.” Meanwhile, he was working round the clock, often responding to inquiries on IWantPrEPNow through the night, and spreading the word about the service on Twitter and Facebook. In the first couple of months, the site had around 2,500 unique visitors. This may not seem a huge number, but with around 6,000 people in England being diagnosed with HIV per year it was significant – and it was soon going to rise. A new and unexpected battle began in March 2016. After 18 months of discussions with the HIV sector, NHS England derailed the commissioning process – the path that leads to a drug being funded – for PrEP. Suddenly, all the doctors and charities who thought that it might soon become available to patients were left disappointed. And Owen, who thought he would need to keep the website going for only a few months until the NHS took over, now faced the prospect of this becoming his life for the foreseeable future. The resulting publicity surrounding the decision, however, had an interesting effect: More and more people were becoming aware of the drug and, says Owen, seeking it out on IWantPrEPNow. Traffic began to double and triple. His social media presence swelled, fuelling further traffic and media traction: appearances on the BBC, more radio discussions, more press coverage. Greg Owen was becoming Mr PrEP. In response to NHS England’s decision, all the major HIV charities joined forces to fight it. A series of meetings ensued. Owen was the only activist invited to attend, as every HIV specialist knew that he was the main link to thousands of people wanting the drug. BuzzFeed News was the only media organisation allowed in. 
 
 Facebook 
 
 As respected doctors and leaders of long-standing NGOs carefully strategised, Owen would interject, often loudly, sometimes interrupting people who he deemed to be veering off topic, and sometimes seemingly close to banging his fists on the table as he conveyed what PrEP users and fellow activists from around the world were telling him: Not only did people in Britain need this drug, but also if the NHS provided it, major healthcare systems in other countries would be likely to follow suit. His heightened manner and rapid-fire delivery bellowed one thing: This had to be fought, urgently, and they had to win. A legal battle commenced, brought by the National AIDS Trust, to counter NHS England’s claim that it was not their responsibility to provide PrEP as HIV prevention was the job of local councils. At each step of this process, as news reports described what was happening, traffic to IWantPrEPNow continued to climb. By the time NHS England lost in the High Court in August last year, 12,000 people were visiting the site every month. NHS England swiftly appealed the ruling. Orders of generic PrEP kept rising. Meanwhile, on hook-up apps for gay and bisexual men such as Grindr and Scruff, increasing numbers of users started stating on their profile that they were on PrEP. This was also happening across Europe: Although most visitors to IWantPrEPNow were from Britain, many from a range of continental countries were buying PrEP through the site and having it shipped to them. As the NHS stalled, an underground movement, facilitated by Owen, was in full swing. “The whole experience was really weird,” he says. “On a personal level, I went from being seen as this trashy, slutty, whore-y guy who was always hanging out of a club in Vauxhall to… all of a sudden I was seen as this ‘good gay’…this ‘community leader’.” 
 
 Laura Gallant / BuzzFeed 
 
 To Owen, it made no sense. “I’m thinking, You don’t know I have to walk sometimes because I can’t afford my Oyster [the London bus and tube pass]. You don’t know that I’m literally eating once a day because I’m so broke, and I’m sleeping on someone’s sofa because no one is going to pay me to do this. I am no different to how I was when I was a sex worker.” By August he had given up two different part-time bar jobs to focus solely on IWantPrEPNow – unpaid. Broke and working 60 to 70 hours per week, sometimes he would go home to his mother’s in Belfast and run Britain’s main gateway to HIV-prevention drugs from her kitchen. She was an immense support throughout, he says. Last summer, a doctor, who Owen prefers we do not name, asked for his bank details. The doctor gave him £1,000 to help with the running costs of the site. In November, NHS England lost its appeal: It could commission PrEP. And the following month, a statement was made: It would provide the drugs for 10,000 people over three years – which will begin early this summer – before a bigger rollout. When the announcement came, at midnight on 4 December 2016, Owen was temporarily in Belfast doing a shift behind a bar. “I’m serving pints, I asked for five minutes off, Twitter and Facebook went mad and for about an hour, every time I turned round from the bar I’d be sobbing and have to dry my eyes and carry on serving pints.” 
 
 By then, he had already heard that some of the London sexual health clinics were seeing a massive drop in HIV diagnoses. But soon after the announcement, Professor McCormack phoned him to confirm it and to thank him for what he had done. “She said, ‘It’s all very well us doing this – professors, doctors, researchers – but you did something that none of us could have done. You convinced people that they would want to use PrEP because you showed them how easy it was. And then you implemented support for them and then made it easy for them to buy it. None of us could have done that because none of us are you.’” In McCormack’s own London clinic alone, says Owen, 300 fewer people were diagnosed with HIV in 2016. And when McCormack speaks to BuzzFeed News, she is quick to emphasise the role of IWantPrEPNow in the drop in diagnoses. “It’s been absolutely critical,” she says. “As clinicians I think we realised that it was going to be far too slow even if the NHS had commissioned a PrEP programme. And if IWantPrEPNow hadn’t come along, we would not have been able to signpost people [to it], or to very quickly come together with Greg to work up a safety net to make sure the drugs people were accessing were real.” 
 
 YouTube Prof. Sheena McCormack 
 
 Greg Owen / Facebook, Facebook
– Seth Owen was over the moon when he received what appeared to be the path to his "life goal" of going to college: an acceptance letter from Georgetown University. But the Florida 18-year-old, who was the co-valedictorian of his senior class, had his hopes dashed when he later received his financial aid package from Georgetown, which had been based on the expected contribution from his family. The problem: He's estranged from his Southern Baptist parents, and was essentially forced out of his home, because he's gay, NBC News reports. Owen says his parents found out he was gay when he was a sophomore, made him go to Christian-based conversion therapy, and eventually told him he had to keep going to their church—which Owen says bashed the LGBT community—or leave. And so in February, he did, crashing with friends instead. He says he was "devastated" when he realized he couldn't afford the tuition for his first year at Georgetown—annual tuition and fees comes to around $70,000, and Owen would have to pay about $22,000 of that, per the Advocate—let alone for all four years. Enter Jane Martin, Owen's former bio teacher, who says Owen always "stood out to me." Martin, who's also gay, set up a GoFundMe for her ex-student, who also served as the ring bearer in her wedding. She explained she wanted to "help … bring a rainbow in the midst of Seth's storm" and "make the impossible possible." The GoFundMe has so far raised more than $82,000—and if Georgetown eventually acquiesces and adjusts Owen's financial aid package, Martin and Owen say they'll use leftover donations to set up a scholarship fund for other gay teens. Owen plans on studying to become a criminal defense lawyer for teens, per WJXT.