Ordinary People

"NORMAL PEOPLE get AIDS too."

The press has seized upon the story of Arthur Ashe, the tennis star who admitted last week that he has AIDS, as an example of the perfect innocent victim. Ashe was infected through a blood transfusion--not through promiscuous heterosexual sex like Magic Johnson, nor through "immoral" lifestyles like homosexuality or drug use.

Unlike these profligates, there is no question of Ashe having "asked for it." This is why, after three years of keeping his illness private, he has bowed to the pressure of going public so that he could teach others to be compassionate by showing them that AIDS patients are not lepers but victims. What it really shows, however, is that the media still makes the distinction between innocent and guilty AIDS patients, with only the former being worthy of our immediate concern.

THE IDEA BEHIND making Ashe's illness public is that clean-living people all across the country will suddenly slap their foreheads and say, "Aha! I realize now that AIDS affects right-thinking folk like me as well as those gays and druggies who deserve to be wiped out."

A similar scenario was played out when Magic Johnson announced that he had AIDS: the subtext was that even straight (read: blameless) people got AIDS. Because he was a convenient illustration of this fact, Magic became a spokesperson for AIDS education and prevention (there was even a children's special about him on cable TV) in a way that no gay AIDS patient has been. The same thing will most likely happen to Ashe unless he chooses to protect his privacy from further intrusions. He is to be respected for living with AIDS for three years and refusing to make it a media event.

If making examples out of people like Johnson and Ashe is supposed to reduce the stigma of AIDS, it seems to be a misguided plan. It only serves to reinforce the distinction between the anonymous gays, Haitians and needle-users who get AIDS because their lifestyles are "different from ours," and the well-publicized individuals who were innocent victims such as we might be.

Nor is the fame of these individuals merely due to their prior status as celebrities. People also become celebrities if they symbolize the blameless AIDS sufferer, as did Kimberly Bergalis when she contracted AIDS from her dentist last year. My intention is not to brush aside these patients' sufferings or to impugn their motives, but to point out the cultural trend of recognizing two separate and unequal classes of AIDS patients.

ONE MIGHT GO so far as to wonder whether making public someone's identity as an AIDS patient (whether he is gay or straight) does not in fact increase the stigma of the disease. From then on he is identified with the illness, as a cancer or heart attack sufferer, for example, is not.

Some would argue that AIDS "examples" are necessary to educate people about AIDS prevention. Yet cancer is also a nearly incurable, often fatal illness that can be prevented to some extent by changes in lifestyle, and education about cancer prevention has been accomplished without this sort of celebrity brouhaha. One would never hear reporters deciding to "out" famous people with cancer, but editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Orlando Sentinel, among others, said they would have made Ashe's illness known--even without his consent--for the good of the public. This only reinforces the perception that AIDS is different from all other illnesses.

The practice of making AIDS patients into AIDS celebrities should cease. As past experiences show, the media is bound to be selective about which sufferers it publicizes as innocent victims and which remain among the anonymous masses of the great unwashed. This differentiation tends to occur along already existing lines of discrimination in our society.

Furthermore, singling out AIDS patients for this media exposure turns the disease into more than just a disease. It becomes the symbol for all our social ills, as leprosy was in the middle ages, and has the same stigmatizing effect on its victims. Compassion towards AIDS patients should begin with the decision to see them as normal people trying to live normal lives.