Days of Grace (42 page)

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.

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.

It helped, too, that for some time in my life I had been ready for nothing so much as the unexpected. Life, I believe, is a succession of often suddenly realized stages, of fresh beginnings for which one has constantly to be prepared. The death of my mother before I was seven had been one of those surprises, and perhaps had instilled in me the notion of life as a succession of sudden changes. I remember being startled to find this aspect of my sense of life beautifully captured in “Stages,” a poem in Hermann Hesse’s famous novel
The Glass Bead Game
(or
Magister Ludi
), probably my favorite work of modern fiction. Perhaps Hesse intended “Stages” to be ironic—after all, it was composed in the “student years” of Joseph Knecht, the main character of the novel, which is supposed to be Knecht’s biography. Still, the poem seems to me beyond irony. Just as every flower fades, Hesse writes, so too our virtues, our visions of truth, are transitory. Life itself is change, so we must be ready to take leave of the old and familiar and embark on the new. All beginnings, Hesse insists, have a magical force that can guard and empower us.
Indeed, even the hour of death may send us on to “fresh and newer spaces,” for which we should be prepared.

FOLLOWING MY ANNOUNCEMENT
, one of my most urgent decisions was to establish the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS. I was conscious of the possibility that I did not have sufficient time left to mount such a project, but I became determined to move ahead with it, come what may. Although I could have joined an existing organization, I wanted my foundation to be somewhat more international in scope than any I knew, as befits an epidemic that knows no national boundaries and is ravaging some of the poorest countries of the world. According to the Harvard AIDS Institute, by the year 2000 as many as 110 million people around the world may be infected. The plight of patients in Africa is particularly terrible; nations such as the Central African Republic, Uganda, Kenya, Zaïre, and Zambia loom as major sites of AIDS devastation. With death rates soaring across Africa, some experts predict perhaps 10 to 15 million orphans there by the year 2000. With the average cost of treating a patient in the United States now about $100,000 from diagnosis to death, it is clear that many people, perhaps most, will die untreated.

I decided that my foundation would keep these tragic facts in mind, in the hope that it could contribute to lessening the dimensions of this global disaster. Accordingly, I decided that at least half of the money we raise would go to AIDS research and treatment outside the United States. As a matter of policy, we would work with and through respected organizations such as the International Red Cross and the World Health Organization of the United Nations. We would guard our resources carefully, and do everything we could to ensure that the maximum part of each contribution went to alleviate the suffering of AIDS patients, or to promote some vital aspect of AIDS research.

By mid-August, helped especially by my friend and colleague Margaret Mahoney, who selflessly shared her time and expertise as executive director of the Commonwealth
Fund, the Arthur Ashe Foundation began to take shape. The extensive legal work was complete, as was my selection of board members. In addition to Jeanne and myself, the members are Dr. Henry Murray, Bill Cosby, Donald Dell, and Frank Craighill, a former law and business partner of Dell’s, now with the management firm Advantage International; also, Seth Abraham of HBO, Sheila Foster, a social worker and a family friend (her husband is the former baseball star George Foster), Dr. Irving Chen of the UCLA AIDS Institute, Dr. Machelle Allen, whose practice at Bellevue Hospital in New York is almost exclusively with HIV-positive women, Dr. George Fareed, who has been associated with the U.S. Davis Cup program as a physician, and Dr. Michael Merson, the director of the Global Programme on AIDS of the World Health Organization.