Looking for a single word, an adjective, that means "HIV-positive" or "having AIDS".
I am especially looking for slang/informal equivalents, but open to all suggestions.
Edit:
I am translating a text that was written when much less was known about the disease, so the lines were blurrier. The text is also about a very marginalized community, where you went from being HIV-positive to having AIDS much faster than in, say, the US or much of Europe — the blurriness of the language also reflects that.
I should also mention that words I'm translating ("sidada" and "sidosa") are derived from the acronym "SIDA" (AIDS) but often were used by this community to mean HIV-positive.
To a certain extent, I am looking for pejorative terms, but pejorative in the sense that "queer" was pejorative and then taken back through positive usage by the community itself.
Best Answer
One colloquial/slang term that has been commonly used in the gay community for at least the past 15 or so years (though I'm not sure how widespread it was in the earlier stages of the HIV epidemic back in the ’80s) is poz (short for HIV-positive).
I believe it was originally at least somewhat derogatory and used especially by non-infected people; but nowadays, I'd say it is used mostly by HIV-positive people as an embraced term to identify with.