Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) (14 page)

Sadly, the epidemic has been creeping into another quadrant of my life as well. Also early in my college years, my mom calls to tell me that a close family friend of ours has been diagnosed. He hasn’t been identified as HIV-positive; he’s skipped directly to full-blown AIDS. What really makes an impression in this situation is that no one, but no one, is talking about it. My mom tells me, and she’s probably told my dad and my brother. But other than that, we’re sworn to secrecy. Uncle Bob, as we call him, has already lost his father; for reasons that are all too common when it comes to
HIV, he and his mother have decided to keep the diagnosis absolutely private. For the next few years, everyone knows Uncle Bob is sick. But very few know that it’s AIDS
.

So when Scott Deatherage sends us out into the world to get involved in social activism, I have an idea of where to look. I research HIV/AIDS service organizations, trying to find a place that will accept a volunteer with little previous experience and no qualifications except the desire to help
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I find what I’m looking for at Test Positive Aware Network on Belmont Avenue. It’s a hike from Evanston, but at least the el train stops nearby (in hindsight, I’m surprised by how much of my adult life has been shaped by accessibility to public transportation). TPAN, as it’s called, holds a periodic volunteer orientation, required for everyone who wants to help out—even if you just want to stick mailing labels onto envelopes. And so, one cold and rainy Chicago night, I go to the meeting and am officially cleared as a volunteer
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Make no mistake, this is not sexy work. I’m not wearing a lab coat, designing strategies, or applying for grants. I’m answering phones in two-hour shifts, often unsure of how to connect someone to a specific extension (I take a lot of messages). I’m helping out with mailings, and collating, and filing. Eventually, I’ll become part of the “buddy” program, and stop at the store for cat food on my way to hang out with Hugh, who’s mostly homebound because his health is deteriorating. But somewhere amongst all of this, having completed my course requirement but with no desire to stop visiting TPAN, I discover their library
.

I first peek in there hoping to find some data and statistics for my term paper. What I find in that small room stacked with books and binders will set my life on a completely new course. I pull things off the shelves and pile them onto a table; before I know it, I have more information and research than I can ever use. Lurking in the stack is Randy Shilts’s book
And the Band Played On.
It documents the earliest days of the AIDS movement—before anyone knew why oth
erwise healthy gay men were dying, and while medical professionals were struggling to figure out what was happening—and both his writing and the HBO movie it inspired stir anger in me. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see clearly what those early researchers were unable to uncover in time to stop thousands and thousands of deaths
.

In 1997, as I sit in that resource center on Belmont Avenue, we know exactly what causes HIV/AIDS. Not only that, we know how the virus is transmitted, what the greatest risk factors are, and most important, precisely how to stop it from spreading
.

But there’s a problem, a big one, and it will fuel my engine throughout my year as Miss America and beyond. Although we
can
stop HIV, we
aren’t
stopping it. Why? Because of fear. Because of politics. Because most Americans shy away from the kind of frank talk about AIDS that would save people’s lives. It is almost always easier to be part of the silent majority than it is to be one of the vocal minority; in this case, it’s easier for people to stay in their seats at PTA meetings and city council hearings while the passionate few are shouted down by dedicated preservers of the status quo. HIV is spreading because accurate information is simply not making its way into schools and communities around the world. Lots of people hold out hope for a cure—unlikely, of course, since eradication of a virus has always been far more attainable than medically reversing its transmission—but even I, at age nineteen, can understand that the only way to combat HIV/AIDS is to stop people from getting the virus in the first place
.

But AIDS, as it turns out, is an illness that brings out the worst tendencies of human nature. Because it spreads through traditionally taboo behaviors, contracting HIV is met with judgment, suspicion, fear, anger, and general ugliness. When a family member or friend is diagnosed with cancer, the first question is usually “how can I help?” But when it’s AIDS, far too many people wonder, “Well, what
did he (or, increasingly common, she) do to get it?” Coupled with all the misinformation floating around—that you can get HIV by kissing, touching, drinking out of a water fountain, swimming in a pool, or going to elementary school with an HIV-positive child—this tendency toward blame, instead of compassion, will prove to be fatal for millions of people. The ugliest consequence of the spread of HIV is that public figures insinuate—or say outright—that it is a punishment from on high, handed down to rid the world of sinners (sort of the viral version of the Great Flood), and it has already created a stigma that makes people with AIDS hide. Or lie. Or pretend they aren’t sick, and delay too long before they seek treatment
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These days, when I advise Miss America contestants about choosing a platform, I tell them to figure out what makes them angry—because when they can do that, they will discover their specific passion for making the world better
.

The HIV/AIDS movement becomes exactly that kind of passion project for me. My volunteering experience leads me to sign up for Alternative Spring Break. Along with a bunch of other Northwestern students, I go to San Francisco and Oakland to spend the traditional vacation week doing hard labor. While our friends drink mai tais in Cancún, we clean out a garage and serve meals at a soup kitchen. While they chill out on the beach in Panama City, we build a patio and water-seal a deck at a hospice. While they take pictures of their frat brothers, we carefully hang up individual panels of the NAMES Project’s AIDS Memorial Quilt so that they can be photographed. The quilt panels, which family members and friends create to commemorate those who died of AIDS-related illnesses, are beginning to deteriorate; the goal is to archive every one of them on film. While there, I meet a woman who has moved to San Francisco because every single one of her friends has died. I’m at an impressionable age anyway; suffice it to say that this makes an impression
.

Ironically, once I realize that the cause I have become pas
sionate about is far more important than winning a pageant, I begin winning pageants. My competition interviews start to focus on ending a disease, not on my fitness routine or my career plans. Almost by accident (and later, with plenty of strategic guidance from people who know their way around interview technique), I refocus my ambitions on making the whole thing bigger than myself. Pageant judges are people, after all, and when people give up their free time to pick the winner of a contest, they tend to want that young woman to make a mark on the world. Otherwise, they truly are just judging singers and dancers and swimsuits and dresses. Only by connecting the competition to an issue that transcends those individual elements—an issue to which I truly intend to devote my year—do I make it to the next level. And then the next. And then the last
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We always like to say that there’s no typical day for Miss America, and in many ways, that’s completely true. But when I flip through my (uncharacteristically) neatly organized schedules from the year, I see many of the same things. News show after news show. Fund-raising chicken dinner after fund-raising chicken dinner. Legislative meeting after legislative meeting; site visit after site visit. And my favorite of all: school after school after school after school, across every demographic group and age group and location. Bleachers full of hundreds, classrooms with small groups of twenty-five, many of whom start out with the same difficulty in staying awake, the same vanilla questions they’ve been authorized to ask, the same confusion about why Miss America has come to talk to them and why they should care about what she has to say
.

Eventually, the lead-up to these school visits becomes the most predictable thing of all. I might be in suburban Florida or rural Indiana or inner-city Des Moines, but the conversations are eerily similar. Almost always, I have a sit-down with the principal before the assembly. And very rarely—although it does happen, and I’m always grateful
for it—does that principal say anything like “tell them whatever you want. Our kids really need to hear about safer sex and AIDS.”

Nope, most of the time it just doesn’t work that way. It’s me, my traveling companion du jour, and a (usually nervous) man in a suit and tie. Before he introduces me to his students, he’s obligated to let me know that while they’re thrilled to have me visit with their kids, HIV/AIDS is a topic that has raised some concerns in the past few days. “You see,” this well-intentioned person will typically go on to say, “we really don’t have a problem with that kind of thing here. Our kids are good, they graduate and go to college, they’re involved in lots of extracurricular activities, and the best thing you can do is encourage them to study hard and chase their dreams like you did.” Or something like that. Again and again
.

And see, the first few times, it really scares the hell out of me. I mean, who do I think I am, introducing something like AIDS to a bunch of seventeen-year-olds, or fourteen-year-olds, or ten-year-olds? It’s a wake-up call. I mean, you can read all the statistics you want about middle-schoolers having sex (which they do, in incredibly worrisome numbers), but when you actually stand up in front of a room full of them, it seems impossible to believe. Because they just look so small. It’s shocking to think that they’re already at risk for all kinds of things that threaten their lives. It’s even more nerve-wracking to stand outside an auditorium, waiting to be introduced. Because they’re inside hoping you brought your crown, and you’re hoping you don’t spend the next forty-five minutes killing a piece of their innocence. The butterflies always rampage through my stomach at such moments
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The principals don’t just give gentle hints, either. They hand me lists. Lists of words I can’t say, topics I shouldn’t discuss, messages their kids don’t need to hear. The most vivid example of this is the one I’ve spoken of most often: sit
ting on a plane from San Francisco to South Carolina, reviewing both the state and the district guidelines on what I cannot say at the schools where I’ll be speaking. Like everyone, of course, they’re happy to have me. And they know I’m traveling the country talking about AIDS. But in the course of doing so on their turf, I am not allowed to say “condom.” I can’t say “gay” or “straight” or “lesbian,” not even to discuss the history of the epidemic. Can’t get into the high rates of transmission attributed to the dirty hypodermic needles passed around by IV drug users. Can’t talk about sex too much, either, because all they teach is abstinence until marriage. Sidebar: If you’re an educator or city council member or parent and you’re reading this, you should know that abstinence-only education is an enormous waste of taxpayer money, with only minimal anecdotal evidence that it ever, ever works. Comprehensive sex education that includes abstinence talk has consistently proven to be much more effective at reducing risk without increasing sexual activity rates among teenagers. So . . . that
.

In the beginning, I chicken out more often than not. I start to think that maybe I’m the crazy one. That maybe the statistics are incorrect. Or that the numbers are skewed by inner-city kids going at it like rabbits, while the kids in small Texas towns really do put it off until they get to the honeymoon suite. And then one day I’m on a rural road in middle-of-nowhere Illinois, sitting in the back of a car and waiting for the stoplight to change. As I’m thinking about all this, I’m looking out the window at the red pickup that’s just screeched to a halt beside our stretch limo. The girl in the driver’s seat can’t be older than seventeen. Bleached blonde hair. Music blasting. A row of piercings up the ear that I can see, and a couple of tattoos on the arm that’s hanging out the open window, so she can hold her cigarette
.

Huh
.

It may sound like a small thing, but it’s about as pronounced a eureka moment as I’ve had. And I start really
paying attention to the kids, and figure out pretty quickly that they
want
to ask about a lot more than whether I have a boyfriend or what kind of car I drive. The more I talk to them like equals—the more I think of myself as a peer educator instead of a pageant winner from on high—the more they come out of their shells and ask the tough questions
.

And again, it almost always happens the same way. It gets to the point where I literally agree to anything the principals ask in what I’ve come to think of as our sinister little meetings. Don’t say condom? Sure. Don’t talk about gay people? You got it. After a couple months, I probably would consent to avoid using the letter “w” as much as humanly possible. As long as I offhandedly slip in one polite question before I leave that room. See, I can happily agree to their terms, as long as they’re cool with the fact that I need to have an open forum when we get to the question-and-answer portion. I’m perfectly fine with not mentioning any of their designated dirty words, but if the students ask about those things, I want the administration’s blessing to answer honestly. Not one single decision maker ever turns down my request. Usually they laugh it off; they’re so sure that their kids won’t ask anything improper, that they aren’t involved in any of that stuff, that they’re going to be on their best behavior, that they’ve never even thought about sex
.

Jackpot
.

Once I figure this part out, school assemblies are a blast and a half. I give my speech, they ask questions. And as I get bolder, I start to drop hints into my speech to provoke their questions. I mean, if you use the word “protection” a few times, you haven’t technically broken any of the agreed-upon rules, right? And when the kids later ask you what you mean by “protection,” and you say “condoms,” isn’t that what the principal has agreed to regarding a no-holds-barred Q&A? Sure, I totally game the system. But what else am I supposed to do? Give a boring, condescending, up-on-a-pedestal speech that provides no information beyond “just say no”
and “follow your dreams,” when that type of evasion is exactly what’s causing AIDS to spread faster and faster and faster? I mean, if you see a sixteen-year-old standing in the street, with his back to a Mack truck that’s barreling toward him, do you really want to be the loser who doesn’t yell, “Hey! Look out for that truck!”