Photos by Jackie Dives

One of the indescribable aspects of being a member of a minority group is knowing that things are better than they have ever been and, simultaneously, not good enough.

The LGBTQ community has won the right to same-sex marriage and achieved unprecedented visibility in politics, media and entertainment. Yet we still lag far behind the straight and cis population when it comes to mental health, substance abuse and HIV rates .

Travis Salway is an epidemiologist trying to close this gap. In 2014, he discovered that in Canada, suicide had surpassed HIV as the leading cause of death among gay and bisexual men. More recently, hes been advocating to outlaw conversion therapy and offer mental health screenings at clinics that diagnose and treat sexually transmitted diseases.

HuffPost talked to Salway about these persistent challenges and the fight for health equity.

How did you find out that more gay and bisexual men were dying of suicide than of causes related to HIV?

I had been working in HIV prevention for years, motivated by the fact that new HIV infections werent coming down among gay men. One of the theories we were exploring was that social isolation, depression, drug addiction and other social factors were leading to sexual behavior associated with HIV transmission. These same factors, of course, can also lead someone to suicide.

I pulled the suicide statistics among gay and bisexual men and was really shocked at how high they were. Though HIV mortality rates had been declining for years, suicide rates remained stable or even increased. So we think that the mortality lines have crossed for gay and bisexual men, with suicide likely having surpassed HIV as a leading cause of death.