TWENTY-SIX
FINAL SET
IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH of his AIDS announcement, Arthur Ashe discovered just how public his private life could be. The magnitude of the national and international press reaction troubled him, but he decided his best option was to add some additional public comment of his own as a prophylactic against misinformation. On Thursday, April 8, 1992, he appeared on both the NBC Today show and ABC’s Nightline to express his outrage over USA Today’s invasion of his family’s privacy; and on Friday evening Barbara Walters interviewed him on the 20/20 news and entertainment program, during which he described the involuntary disclosure of his struggle with “the 1990s version of leprosy” as “demeaning.” Taking advantage of an opportunity to educate the public, he assured Walters and her national audience that he posed no danger to those around him. “You can kiss me,” he told his host. “You can hug me. You can shake my hand. You can drink out of the same glass. I can sneeze on you. You’re not going to get it from me.”1
Few newspapers commented on the issue of contagion, except as it applied to the safety of the nation’s blood supply, and there was even less discussion of AIDS victims as societal pariahs. Instead, editors and reporters focused on Ashe’s personal saga as a physically and emotionally wounded celebrity and the issue of “weighing privacy against the public’s need to know,” as Alex Jones of The New York Times put it. On the latter issue, many journalists—despite considerable sympathy for Ashe’s predicament—sided with USA Today. An informal poll of a half dozen editors attending the national convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors revealed that all but one favored disclosure. Speaking for many of her colleagues, Jane Healy of the Orlando Sentinel declared: “I can’t imagine knowing that information and keeping it quiet. I think a lot of it comes down to whether there is a real public issue there rather than just titillating the public.”2
A surprisingly large number of editors and reporters, however, disagreed with Healy, and a thoroughgoing debate over Ashe’s right to privacy soon made its way into editorials and journalism school classrooms, where it is still being studied twenty-five years later. In the first few days following the announcement, Ashe welcomed the supportive comments of several prominent journalists, including the syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, who described USA Today’s action as “the medical equivalent of an outing,” using the popular term for dragging gay men and women out of “the closet.” Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post condemned USA Today for pursuing the story “with all the fury of a cur attacking a T-bone. . . . That Ashe had long ago ceased to be a ‘public figure’ as anyone in his right mind would interpret the term was entirely beside the point; the point was that red meat was there to be eaten.”3
Raymond Coffey of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote a biting commentary under the headline “Media Double-Faulted on Ashe Story,” and Michael Olesker of the Baltimore Sun characterized “Ashe’s agony” as “journalism’s shame.” “Sometimes the scoop is a shame on us all,” he wrote. “It’s gossip pretending to be investigative journalism. It’s invasion of privacy masquerading as the public’s right to know. This time it’s nobody’s business but Arthur Ashe’s, only now it’s been turned into everybody’s business.”4
New York Times sportswriter Robert Lipsyte began his April 10 column with the simple question: “Do we need to know that Arthur Ashe has AIDS?” “My first answer to myself,” he continued, “was an emotional No. Here was a man whose public life has been about fairness, responsibility, respect and self-control. For the last three years he had tightly gripped the fraying corners of his life. Now they were being torn from his hands.”5
Other commentators writing in the nation’s most influential newspaper took a more measured stance, seeing merit on both sides of the privacy issue. The noted feature writer Anna Quindlen confessed she was conflicted and “disquieted by the Arthur Ashe story.” “I can’t help but feel that in the medical sense we outed him, a practice that, in the sexual sense, I deplore,” she wrote with candor. “That’s the human being talking. The reporter understands: public figure, big news.” The Times editorial board took a somewhat different tack, expressing sympathy for Ashe while scolding him for attacking “the wrong target.” The real culprit was not an overly aggressive and invasive newspaper but rather “the cruel and benighted public attitudes that compelled Mr. Ashe to keep his disease secret for three years.”6
Several other major papers followed the Times editorial board’s lead, including USA Today, which had to deal with an avalanche of criticism from angry readers—481 phone calls, mostly negative, and sixty canceled subscriptions in the first thirty hours after Ashe’s announcement. Eventually the paper received over six hundred protest letters, a situation the paper’s editor, Peter Prichard, tried to preempt with an April 13 editorial defending his disclosure policy. “Generally, I think it is a mistake for journalists to keep secrets—or to protect some friends who happen to be public figures, but not others,” he contended, citing misguided press suppression of two presidential maladies—Franklin Roosevelt’s paralysis and Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 stroke—as classic examples. Neither “conspiracy of silence,” Prichard insisted, “served the public.” And in Ashe’s case, he argued, sustaining such a conspiracy could have especially dire consequences, since “sweeping Ashe’s secret under the rug would have contributed to the public ignorance of AIDS and done nothing to reduce the disease’s stigma.” USA Today had actually done Ashe a favor by forcing him to share his story with the public. Thanks to the disclosure, “Ashe and his family are free of a great weight.”7
Carl Rowan, the acclaimed African American journalist who knew and admired Ashe, made the case for disclosure even more forcefully, writing: “The self-glorifiers in the media who claim they would have joined in the secret-keeping apparently have not thought about the possible gains to millions of people and the nation because Ashe has told his story however reluctantly.” To Rowan, it was obvious “the monstrous threat of this killer disease AIDS is multiplied when current victims hide it, succumbing to the bigotry of those who call AIDS ‘God’s punishment of bad people’ or to the fears of those who think someone with AIDS is ‘untouchable.’ ” “We need more unsentimental reporting about this disease,” he insisted, “not journalistic copouts in the name of ‘privacy’ or ‘friendship.’ AIDS education was far more important than any man’s privacy, even if that man was Arthur Ashe.” “Ashe may still be angry that some friend ‘ratted’ on him and told USA Today that he has AIDS,” he argued in closing. “Yet, having stepped forward with class, Ashe may now see that secrecy did not become him nearly as well as his recent actions to rip the ‘leper’ label off the victims of a terribly wretched disease.”8
Ashe would eventually see the wisdom in Rowan’s words, but only after his anger about being outed began to subside. It would not take him long to embrace his new role as an advocate for AIDS sufferers, confirming Bud Collins’s prediction that he would “treat AIDS as any other task or foe—straightforwardly and with grace and courage.” First, however, he had to confront the day-to-day challenges of dealing with public suspicions and ignorance of his disease, beginning with two appointments the day after the announcement. “I made sure to keep the two appointments,” he recalled, “because I was anxious to see how people would respond to me. . . . I was thinking not only about the people I knew personally, even intimately, but also about waiters and bartenders, doormen and taxi drivers. I knew all the myths and fears about AIDS.”
The first two tests—a morning fund-raising appointment at the New York Community Trust’s development office and an evening black-tie gala celebrating his friend Joe Cullman’s eightieth birthday—went better than he expected. He was pleased with the genuine warmth and the absence of awkwardness at both events. Cullman, the former CEO at Philip Morris, had known about Arthur’s condition for some time, as had all of his major commercial employers—Aetna, Head, Doral, Le Coq Sportif, HBO, and ABC. Yet “none of those c
ompanies had dropped me after I quietly revealed to their most important executives that I had AIDS,” he reported. For a time following the public disclosure, he wasn’t sure they could withstand the inevitable pressure from nervous stockholders or executives to cancel his contracts. But as he noted in the July 1992 issue of Tennis: “Not only have companies reaffirmed their allegiance, I have had new offers.”9
Judging by the torrent of supportive letters, he had reason for optimism. Yet the situation on the ground remained uncertain and threatening, at least in his mind. When Sally Jenkins of Sports Illustrated interviewed him in mid-April, she found a man extremely anxious about what he was likely to face in the real world. The questions she inferred were troubling: “Will the world be a friendly place when he steps out of his apartment building and people wonder if he’s headed to New York Hospital for his monthly blood test to check the status of a disease that is most frequently transmitted by homosexuals and intravenous drug users? Will it be a friendly place for his five-year-old daughter, Camera, a radiant child who attends an elite private school? Will it be a beautiful place for him and his erudite wife, Jeanne, the next time they dine out? Ashe is not at all certain.”
He told Jenkins his “first order of business” was to “destigmatize” a disease that loomed as “the modern-day equivalent of leprosy.” But he also reported he had encountered very little of the ugly and standoffish behavior accorded many AIDS victims. “I have not yet walked into a restaurant where I might feel that they really don’t want me in there,” he told her. On the contrary, he had experienced numerous acts of kindness, some expressed in letters and others in more tangible gestures of affection. “On the street, strangers wish him good luck,” Jenkins wrote. “Elizabeth Taylor, whom he has never met, sends a glorious spray of tulips. A neighbor gives him a box of chocolates, shakes his hand and then reaches up to give him something more, a kiss.”10
During the critical time of adjustment in April and May, as Ashe became acclimated to his new situation, the outpouring of love and affection was beyond anything he had ever experienced. The kindness coming from his closest friends was to be expected. But dozens of his other ATP colleagues—including Rod Laver, Tom Okker, Brian Gottfried, and Jeff Borowiak—took the time to send him personal cards and letters expressing their concern. Chris Evert, Steffi Graf, Pam Shriver, Tracy Austin, and several other members of the WTA also reached out to him, as did a number of athletes and coaches from other sports, including Magic Johnson, Pelé, Sugar Ray Leonard, Lynn Swann, John Thompson, and even the South African Gary Player.
From beyond the sports world came letters from people of all ages and walks of life—from elementary school children and retired teachers, from white Mississippians and black South Africans—all sharing a bond of attachment to someone they respected and admired. “I’ve watched all the interview shows you’ve been on, read all the columns which say only superlatives about your grace, strength and intelligence,” a woman from Larchmont, New York, wrote. “So I can’t add to that. All I can say is . . . when I think about the one person whose fame is deserved, you are it.”
A Brooklyn woman dealing with her sister-in-law’s struggle with AIDS expressed her admiration and empathy: “I know that I am only one of many to offer you support and applaud your courage and dignity. . . . I hope that the publicity you are receiving now does not hamper the quality of your life. . . . I hope as well that if you feel prepared to do so, you will speak out on AIDS issues as eloquently and effectively as you have on civil rights, apartheid, and heart disease. Voices like yours send powerful messages.” There were hundreds of letters like these, confirming Barry Lorge’s judgment that “of all the champions in sports, few have earned more respect and affection than Arthur Ashe.”11
Ashe felt his widening circle of supporters deserved the best he could give them, which in the short term meant resuming his normal range of activities. He wanted to repay their faith in him by remaining strong and active—by living up to the high standard that Pancho Gonzales had set for him years earlier, that of a man who “won’t duck a thing” and “won’t let anybody down.” So within days of the disclosure he was back at it, handling his multiple responsibilities as a philanthropist, businessman, and public intellectual. He wouldn’t allow himself to skip a single meeting or miss a single deadline, as he shuttled from one public function after another. As he kept saying, “I am not sick,” and he was determined to prove it by maintaining a breakneck schedule. “I never worried as much about being a social outcast as I did about not being able to maintain my life’s schedule,” he insisted.12
Instead of slowing down, he immediately embraced a whole new set of responsibilities as an advocate for AIDS victims. Less than twenty-four hours after the announcement at the HBO building, he stood next to Mayor Dinkins at a second gathering called to announce the appointment of the city’s first municipal coordinator of AIDS policy. The new coordinator, Ronald S. Johnson, the executive director of the Minority Task Force on AIDS, had often criticized the city’s handling of the AIDS crisis, and after accepting the appointment as coordinator he surprised the crowd of reporters—and the mayor—by announcing he was not only gay but also HIV-positive. Dinkins took the announcement in stride, claiming: “I didn’t know he was H.I.V.-positive,” but “had I known I would have leaped more quickly to make the appointment.” Unimpressed, William Dobbs, a leading member of the radical AIDS advocacy group Act Up, insisted there was “no substance to the appointment of an AIDS czar who has no real power” to increase the city budget’s paltry allocation for solving AIDS-related problems. “It makes one wonder,” Dobbs continued, “if the Mayor is only doing this in response to his good friend Arthur Ashe getting AIDS.”13
For Ashe, this was an eye-opening entry into the battleground of AIDS politics. And he would encounter more of the same the next day when The New York Times reported he planned to remain on the board of directors of Aetna Life and Casualty Company “despite the company’s refusal to sell new policies to people with AIDS or to people who test positive for the virus that causes AIDS.” Aetna’s board chairman, Ronald Compton, insisted the policy was “appropriate” considering “the social context of this devastating disease,” though he acknowledged Ashe’s recent announcement “might make the board more sensitive to AIDS.” While this statement held out some hope Ashe could work from within to liberalize the company’s seemingly harsh policy, his current situation on the board was awkward at best.
Aetna’s position on HIV/AIDS patients later received blistering criticism from The Village Voice, which condemned Ashe for his involvement with a company wedded to corporate greed. “I was accused of colluding with the company despite my own condition,” he recalled. This charge, he insisted, had no basis in fact: “The truth is that I would never have remained on the Aetna board if it had such a policy; but I have certainly voted in support of prudent and sensible changes in connection with individual life-insurance policies. At a certain point, Aetna decided to stop selling individual health-insurance policies to anyone. . . . We did so for a simple, sufficient reason: we were losing money on individual policies. . . . We insure groups of people. We absolutely do not require these groups to test its members or its prospective members for AIDS. And most groups do not require tests for basic individual coverage, only for excessive amounts of coverage.” While it is doubtful that this capitalistic justification satisfied the company’s critics, Ashe’s faith in Aetna’s good intentions was undoubtedly sincere. Later in the year, he declared: “I am proud of Aetna and of my association with the company.”14
As the spring of 1992 wore on, Ashe demonstrated that he was ready to tackle the AIDS crisis with conviction and determination. Wherever he found himself, from college lecture halls to the National Press Club, he felt compelled to address one aspect of the crisis or another. At the same time, he also recognized there were still important non-AIDS-related issues to address. “I am not going to drop everything else I do in life just to be a single-f
ocus, single-minded AIDS activist,” he told a reporter in April. Accordingly, he kept his hand in a wide variety of activities, including broadcasting for HBO and ABC and writing for Tennis magazine and The Washington Post. He also weighed in on ongoing controversies such as the proposed expansion of the National Tennis Center in Queens, Nelson Mandela’s plans for democracy in South Africa, and the shocking acquittal (“It defies logic” and “the standards of Common decency,” he told the press) of the white police officers responsible for African American Rodney King’s brutal beating in Los Angeles. Whenever possible he mixed his AIDS work with other commitments, and in his own estimation he had developed a knack for “putting things together and seeing relationships between things that” had once “seemed disparate.”15
In early May, he honored a long-standing commitment to conduct a youth clinic at Byrd Park in Richmond. Returning to his hometown was always emotional for Ashe, but Byrd Park, in particular, flooded his mind with memories both good and bad. It had been forbidden ground for him as a young tennis player, yet it was also where he had lost his virginity. He yearned for reconciliation with the local power structure, primarily as a means of affirming his identity as a Richmond native. In November 1982, Richmond officials had made a tangible gesture of respect by naming the city’s new six-thousand-seat, multipurpose arena the Arthur Ashe Athletic Center, and ever since he had wanted to respond in kind. He also appreciated the Richmond City Council’s unanimous resolution (passed four days after his AIDS announcement) commending him “for his courageous statement to the world about his own personal fight against AIDS and for taking on a leadership role in advancing the cause of AIDS education, prevention, and treatment.” Clearly, Richmond was no longer just Harry Byrd’s town, or the “holy city” of the “Lost Cause.” It was also Doug Wilder’s town, and to some degree it was Arthur Ashe’s town, too.
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