Lee Daniels was speaking at a lecture at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film & TV and told the audience that he once tried to contract HIV/AIDS.

He told them:

“I thought that I needed to go. And so I descended into drugs and into sexual bathhouses to die,”

He then said that God was the reason he was still alive and that:

“That I don’t have AIDS is a miracle from God,”

“I really don’t understand it, because I should have had HIV. Everybody else did.”

Daniels went onto speak about HIV/AIDS and those around him saying:

“It wiped away all of my friends. I had no friends,”

“It was terrifying, because we never knew whether you could drink from glasses or what it was. It was the most terrifying thing ever, and I didn’t understand why it was that I wasn’t [dead], because there were far better souls than me that were going.”

Watch some of the lecture below: