Original-From: hlwpk!ktw (Kenneth T Wolman +1 201 564 2866)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Fri, 10 Apr 1992 11:22:00 EDT
 <WORDS-L%UGA.bitnet@VTVM2.CC.VT.EDU>
From:         ktw%HLWPK.ATT.COM@VTVM2.CC.VT.EDU
Subject:      Re: Ashe and AIDS
Comments: To: English Language Discussion Group <WORDS-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>

Leah asks the question of the month....

>WHY does AIDS or HIV in a celebrity "remain newsworthy"?  It strikes
>me that as much of so-called news is today, it is merely gossip, and
>years ago, would have been in Walter Winchell's or Sid Skolsky's
>columns.

Up on my soapbox....

Remember when it came out that Rock Hudson was dying of AIDS?  It was
like Horror Time: this wasn't just some anonymous person, this was a
big Macho Movie Star, albeit one about whom there'd been "rumors" as
far back as the Sixties.  Then Liberace.  Then the artists, musicians,
athletes, painters, dancers, actors, and less famous folk began
dropping like flies: not just the ones who were homosexual and/or
promiscuous, but also the ones like the designer Tina Chow, who had a
brief fling with a bisexual man in 1985.  The point is that everyone
got this frisson of both horror and titillation: wow, what musta been
going on in Rock's house...but how awful for him...but what musta been
going on in Rock's house....

AIDS is no less ghastly now than it was in 1985, except that my kids
have to have lessons in school on how not to get it.  And it's still a
way for the media to titillate the public's interest, because most
people get it FUCKING or from (like the actor Brad Davis) from
SHOOTING UP.  Hey, Magic Johnson (the ideal name, right?) did not
become HIV-positive from sharing a water glass with someone, or from
hugging Isiah Thomas before a game against the Pistons.  Magic was
dipping his johnson all over LA and probably every city with an NBA
franchise.  Whether it was men or women doesn't matter.

But then you get the people like Kim Bergalis who got AIDS from her
dentist.  Or you get someone like Arthur Ashe who got it in a hospital
where they were saving his life.  Arthur Ashe did not intend to have
this come out.  Perhaps Arthur Ashe did not feel like being the
current Black Poster Boy.  Perhaps he deluded himself into thinking he
had merely become a private citizen with a life-shortening illness,
and wanted to keep it inside his family.  Fat chance.  Not when there
is a public that will suck up The Star and The Enquirer and USA Today
(no, I don't see a big difference except USA Today prints the baseball
scores and they use two-syllable words) to read sensationalized
accounts of illnesses, liaisons (dangereuses and otherwise), and
hermaphrodites who fathered and birthed their own children.  Not when
"organs" like USA Today will pay somebody to sell out Arthur Ashe's
privacy because he USED TO BE a tennis champion.

The answer is that Ashe is NOT a public figure anymore, and even a
public figure has a right to his own privacy unless, like Magic
Johnson, he chooses to use his affliction as a tool to educate others.
We love to read about this stuff for the same reason people slow down
to rubberneck auto accidents: to look for the blood.

Descending soapbox now....

Ken
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