by Arthur Ashe
Some people think that only the receptive partner can become infected as a result of anal sex. Not so, according to the report; a man can also become infected in this way even if he is the inserter. And although I have always assumed that AIDS cannot be transmitted in lesbian sex, the report cites two possible incidents of infection that took place by woman-to-woman sexual activity.
The report also discusses such acts as individual masturbation, “dry” kissing, massaging, hugging, and stroking. While these and other activities treated in the report are not normally the stuff of polite conversation, there is nothing polite about AIDS. Around the world, heterosexual contacts make up the majority of infections, and a similar pattern is fast developing in the United States. Nothing is gained by suppressing these essential pieces of information.
For the African American community, as for other communities, condoms can protect against AIDS and also protect against an evil just as dangerous, and possibly more so: the flood of unplanned, unwanted, and insupportable teenage pregnancies that lead in part to the army of delinquents, drug addicts, welfare recipients, and violent criminals who are destroying our community. In my work with youngsters in Newark, New Jersey, our instructors have emphasized and encouraged the avoidance of pregnancy among our teenagers. I am proud that not one of the unmarried young women in our program has given birth.
For Jeanne and me, as parents of a child about to enter the first grade in New York City, these issues are not a matter of theory alone. The clash between religion and morality, on the one hand, and practicality and science, on the other, has come close to a flash point here; I am sure that similar conflicts will arise in other parts of the nation and perhaps the world. Bitter opposition has arisen to the City Board of Education over its proposed elementary- and secondary-school curriculum. Among its goals, this curriculum aims to teach the children tolerance of both homosexuality and heterosexuality. It does so mainly by engaging the question of what constitutes a family. The simple sentence “Heather has two mommies,” which introduces a lesson designed to teach tolerance of lesbianism, has enraged many people. Frankly, I myself am not sure that I want my daughter to be taught about lesbian parents in her first year at school, when she is only seven. I am certain, however, that I want her to have a tolerant and enlightened attitude toward homosexuals.
The conservatives are not without supporters on the Board of Education, and elsewhere. At one point, the board voted to require those groups offering AIDS education to New York City schoolchildren to sign an oath stating that they would emphasize abstinence first, and prophylactics and other defenses against diseases only later. Within the health-care apparatus of the Roman Catholic church, on which many people depend for medical assistance, a debate rages about AIDS treatment, AIDS education, and the use of condoms. Late in 1992, a major Catholic hospital in New York City, breaking with years of tradition, decided against observing World AIDS Day. The reason given by administrators was the nature of the information and materials handed out on behalf of AIDS education; they were “not in keeping with the teachings of the Catholic church.”
I believe in the wisdom of the Bible and I believe also in ascertaining the moral implications of our actions. I respect the Roman Catholic church; Jeanne, a Catholic, goes to mass regularly. Yet science and statistics tell us that AIDS in America is spread increasingly by heterosexual contact. To preach morality only and at the same time to ignore the practical aspects of the problem seems to me unwise. The aim of all sex education should be to inform children what it means to act responsibly, and also to convince them that they should do so. The distribution of condoms should be an essential part, but only one part, of the overall effort at education. If the aim is to stop the spread of AIDS, we must have both condoms and moral instruction. One without the other will not do the job. The result will be more young people who are HIV-positive in the suburbs, in the city, and in rural areas; poor, middle-class, and rich.
Nevertheless, no one should sneer at the idea of sexual abstinence or of self-control under certain conditions. I believe in abstinence from extramarital affairs. I think such activity is morally wrong, as well as contractually wrong in the context of the vow one takes in a marriage. I absolutely believe in the need to refrain from promiscuity. This is a term almost always applied to women and almost never applied to men, but in writing of promiscuity I am thinking above all of men and the double standard by which we have lived for centuries. Nowadays, it is true, some women measure their freedom in the same way: the ability to be sexually promiscuous. I think that this is not freedom but one of the fantasies of freedom. Both men and women should recognize that promiscuity is, as often as not, a condition of violence against our own individual best interests.
Total premarital abstinence, stressed by many churches and by those who would have young people “Just Say No” (although this slogan was first used for a campaign against drugs), is another matter altogether. I and others of my generation or older have lived through extraordinary changes in the level of tolerance about premarital sex. Not very long ago, many hotels would not allow an unmarried couple to register and stay in a room together. Once, for instance, when I went to San Juan, Puerto Rico, with a young woman to whom I was formally engaged at the time, we took separate rooms at our hotel. A couple I know, despite the evidence of their marriage license, was once refused accommodations in a Massachusetts hotel because the wife had not taken her husband’s last name. Honestly, I am not always sure how I feel about the new freedom. As I get older, and with a young daughter, I see increasingly how rules and conventions about behavior help to protect the integrity of the family. I believe that the family, however defined, must be protected. No African American, in particular, watching the deterioration of our culture through the decline of the family, can sensibly wish otherwise. However, I know that rules about appropriate male and female behavior often work to keep women in an inferior place by permitting double standards, as existed flagrantly in the recent past and even in some areas today, as well as to intimidate gay people.
I believe strongly that homosexuals should enjoy equal protection under the law. One of the members of my family closest to me is gay, and I feel for him and the problems he routinely encounters. I am disappointed at the attitude of certain churches toward homosexuals, who are excluded in various ways, sometimes callously. Surely it isn’t hard to see the homosexual’s point of view on the question of rights. If I am gay and have been so all my life, why shouldn’t I be protected equally and given all the rights and privileges of a heterosexual citizen?
Religious opponents of homosexuals regularly cite the Bible to support their position. I am well aware that Mosaic law decreed certain unspecified homosexual acts to be punishable by death (as it also did for several other, to us, ordinary types of behavior). In Leviticus 18:22, in a translation from ancient Hebrew increasingly called into question by scholars, the Bible says (in the New International Version, at least): “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.” (The practice is called “an abomination” in the King James version.) Nevertheless, whatever the accuracy of the translation, I believe that Leviticus 18:22 must be read in the more tolerant light shed by other parts of the Bible, including the New Testament. This position is only reinforced when I consider the legal and constitutional issues raised by this question within the context of American democracy.
However, I sometimes fear that a major anti-gay backlash is coming in the United States. The repeal of a statute protecting the rights of gays in Colorado, and the narrow upholding of a similar statute in Oregon, may be warning signs. In Colorado, voters across the state passed Amendment 2 to the state constitution, which prevents the adoption of laws anywhere in the state to protect homosexuals against acts of discrimination. The voters in the resort of Aspen and in the cities of Boulder and Denver voted against the passage of Amendment 2, but anti-discrimination statutes in those communities were automatically rescinded by the passage of the amendmen
t, which took effect in January 1993. The sponsors of Amendment 2, a group called Colorado for Family Values, evidently expressed the opinion of a large number of people concerning homosexuality and homosexuals. “What they want is a special protected status,” one of the leaders said. “They just don’t deserve it. The majority of America is with us on this.”
Even as gays and their supporters, who regard the “special protection” argument as specious, work hard to promote a climate of acceptance, most Americans indeed seem to oppose granting gays protection as a group. A large percentage of Americans take religion and the Bible seriously and claim that both support their anti-gay position. However, a large percentage of gay people also take religion and the Bible seriously. I am in favor of guaranteeing the rights of gays as citizens. Unquestionably, homosexuals are the object of prejudice and discrimination. They constitute a group threatened by special problems and dangers deriving from prejudice, from which they should be protected by law.
I am inclined, further, to support the boycott of the state of Colorado or any other state that acts against the rights of individual gay men and women. I regret that some innocent people, mainly merchants and their employees, will suffer, just as some innocent people suffered with the boycott of South Africa and perhaps suffer when any economic sanction is imposed. Practically speaking, however, opponents of the new amendment, and especially those people outside the state who fear the spread of similar amendments, have few options in making their case. As a leader of the American Civil Liberties Union put it: “People need to know that if they adopt measures that discriminate against gays they will be ostracized.”
To refrain from boycotting Colorado is in effect to condone the actions of those who voted yes to the question on the ballot: “Do you want to repeal the Gay Rights Act?” A boycott is usually a messy and divisive affair, but it worked in the state of Arizona after the state voted against making Martin Luther King, Jr., Day a paid holiday. In two years, Arizona lost more than $500 million in business through the cancellation of lucrative conventions and other meetings. It even lost the chance to host a Super Bowl—the most eagerly anticipated football game of the year in the United States—along with the millions of dollars in revenue that it would have made for the state. In 1992, Arizona reversed its decision and established the state holiday honoring King. If the Colorado boycott is pursued with the same vigor, it will hasten the day when laws guaranteeing the same rights to homosexuals as are accorded to heterosexuals are on the books there again. Some people will insist that homosexuality is a sin; I respond that, to me, it is definitely not a crime, and must not be treated as such.
* * *
FROM TIME TO time, I find myself thinking about those forty figure skaters and the tragedy of their lives and deaths. They were no doubt, most of them, young men of good family and bright hopes, of powerful bodies and soaring imaginations. Some no doubt were secure in their homosexuality; some must have been furtive, guilt-ridden, ashamed. All had to work brutally to make themselves ready for the challenges of their demanding sport. I think of the long, chilly years of labor when they strove to master their sport, to bring their bodies to the peak of physical perfection, and to learn to seem effortless in creating their designs. Their task, in a sense, was to write their names on ice. Now the ice is melted, and they are gone.
I am moved by the fact that despite their best efforts to achieve fame and fortune, they nevertheless went to their deaths without fanfare. Unlike Magic Johnson or me, they had no electrifying news flash, no emotional press conference, no opportunity to be a hero stoical before the television cameras, no outpouring of sympathy and affection from the loving public. A few had won a measure of fame, but nothing that could adequately recompense them for the way they died. Many had no sporting reputation to speak of, except what they had eked out in minor competitions. What they all had were those years of chilly labor and the endless gliding over ice in search of perfection.
In each case, I hope, his family and friends made sure that he died with dignity and honor, surrounded by love. These young men did not deserve to die so young, and they did not deserve to die unnoticed, to be resurrected only as a statistic in a newspaper report. As a fellow athlete, I mourn them. As an AIDS patient, I feel a kinship to them that goes far beyond the bonds of sport. I wish I had the power to keep their memory alive. I would do so, not least of all, as yet another token of our human determination to live in the face of this terrible disease that has brought death into every corner of our lives, including the world of sport.
Chapter Nine
Stepping Up
AFTER MY AIDS announcement on April 8, 1992, I was angry for several days. But when Jeanne and I had to tell Camera of my illness, I swallowed my feelings and put on a dispassionate face.
“Precious,” I asked her that evening, when Jeanne and I decided that the time had come, “have you noticed anything unusual lately at home?”
“Yes,” she said.
“What?”
“The telephones,” she replied, not looking up from my computer, which she was using. “They keep ringing all the time.”
“Yes. Do you know why? They’re ringing because Daddy had to go on television and tell everybody that he is sick, that he has AIDS.”
“What’s AIDS?” she asked, looking at me now. “Is it like when you have diarrhea? When you don’t feel well in the morning? Is that AIDS?”
Her instincts surprised Jeanne and me; she knew more, had noticed and associated more, than we had ever suspected. Five years old, she could understand only a small part of what we said, but we talked to her as best we could about the illness. We also tried to prepare her for the taunts of classmates and other children.
“Camera, what are you going to say to anybody who tells you your daddy has AIDS?”
“What should I say?” she asked.
“Just say, ‘Oh, I know that.’ ” We hoped that this simple reply would stop the teasing. We were sure that Camera would master this response easily. After all, like it was for almost every child of her age, “I know that” had become her spontaneous reply to almost anything said to her, even if she didn’t have a clue about it. But this piece of information—that her father suffered from AIDS—she would indeed have, and her knowledge would save her from hurt. Or so we hoped.
I also spent an hour and a half at Camera’s school, Marymount, the Catholic institution she has attended until recently, after I discovered that many of the girls in the upper school were upset and confused by the news about me. After visiting Camera’s classroom, I spoke to a subdued gathering of these older girls in the auditorium. As best I could, I tried to help them understand AIDS as a new force in their lives, and to assure them that they could do much to curb its destructive power.
Although my anger at being “outed” was real and intense, it quickly began to ebb. After all, I am not one to bank and stoke rage; instead, I want its fire to go out as soon as possible, and cool reason to return. Within two or three weeks, anger on this score passed out of me entirely, or almost entirely, as I turned to the new stage of my life. Ever since September 1988, AIDS had been a fact I had integrated into my life. Now I tried to integrate into my sense of self, as smoothly as possible, the public knowledge that I had AIDS.
The world saw me now in a different way. Although I was on guard against paranoia, I thought I detected people whispering and pointing more than before, when I was an ordinary celebrity. Most people are kind to me, but I felt a degree of solicitude that wasn’t there before, an element of tenderness and perhaps even of pity. I do not care for pity, but I know that people who pity others usually mean well. Above all, as closely as I looked, I saw nothing of the revulsion I had feared others would manifest because they now knew I had AIDS.
In one respect, I was relieved by my announcement. No longer would I have to make different excuses to different people about lapses in my health, as I had been doing since 1988. Nor did I have to deny being ill, as I had often done. Now I
could tell the truth when my body hurt or failed me, and also talk about particular nuances of my illness. For this freedom I was grateful.
Because this latest stage of my life opened almost without warning, at first I felt in danger of being overwhelmed by the publicity. More than ever before, the world wanted to hear from me. Requests for speeches more than tripled. Invitations to meetings, to dinners, awards ceremonies, and the like, also increased dramatically. Here I saw something of a dilemma. On the one hand, the last thing I wanted to do was to dine out on my story of AIDS. On the other hand, I was bent on telling the story of AIDS so that as many people as possible would be aware of its dangers, its myths and realities. I made up my mind not to withdraw from the world nor even to turn bashfully from the limelight. Unless I fell severely ill and became gaunt and wasted, as many AIDS patients do, I would not become a recluse. “You come to the realization that time is short,” I told a reporter later that year. “These are extraordinary conditions, and you have to step up.”
How much time I had left, I did not know; no doctor could tell me. In the first two or three years of knowing I had AIDS, I could argue to myself that I might defeat it, that with the right combination of medical help and mental and physical toughness, I might be one of the first to beat the odds and survive it. Or survive for so many years that I could claim a victory over the disease. Already, in fact, the medical community saw me as a long-term survivor. However, I could not ignore the fact that AIDS, as well as heart disease, was exacting a heavy toll on my body. My weight was down, perhaps irremediably so; at six feet one inch, I now weighed just over 140 pounds. (In my playing days, I weighed just over 150.) My stamina, too, was impaired. I had no time to waste.
As I settled deeper into this new stage of my life, I became increasingly conscious of a certain thrill, an exhilaration even, about what I was doing. Yes, I felt pain, physical and psychological; but I also felt something like pleasure in responding purposefully, vigorously, to my illness. I had lost many matches on the tennis court, but I had seldom quit. I was losing, but playing well now; my head was down, eyes riveted on the ball as I stroked it; I had to be careful but I could not be tentative; my follow-through must flow from the shot, fluid and smooth. Experience as an athlete had taught me that in times of danger I had to respond with confidence, authority, and calm. So many looming defeats had turned strangely, sometimes even miraculously, into victories as I applied that lesson to the task before me.