Stephen Kloster began working for the San Francisco Fire Department in 2001. About five years later, he became ill and tested positive for HIV. He was cleared to return to work in 2007, but since then, according to a San Francisco Examiner article, Kloster said he has been harassed and discriminated against.

Kloster said this culminated last year, when he was not assigned to a station. In what is a precursor to a lawsuit, he filed a claim against the city.

Kloster said that he also received homophobic taunts, although he is not gay (the city’s Department of Human Resources confirmed that his HIV is work-related; he claims he likely contracted the virus when he was splashed with blood while loading a patient with an open wound onto a stretcher).

Veteran firefighter Keith Baraka, a gay black man, told the Examiner that he knew of no other HIV-positive people among the 1,500 firefighters in the city. He added that LGBTQ people were ostracized in the department and that in the 18 years he has worked as a firefighter for the city, there has been no substantive training regarding HIV.