The Board of Education has made it possible for some parents to continue to fool themselves. Those who don’t want to know any more about their kids’ sex life than they absolutely must will know that their sons and daughters are receiving education, counseling, even condoms at school. And those who want to believe that their kids don’t have a sex life can blame the condom program if they find out differently.
The prom-picture kids exist for one reason only: to make parents feel good about themselves. And that is all well and good, I suppose, until the first time you see a girl with secondary syphilis in a hospital bed, or meet a teenager who has contracted AIDS from a sex partner. You look back on plagues of the past and you see how people hundreds of years ago dealt with them, see their quirks and foibles. Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self-image. Or maybe we’ll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.
BELIEVE IN MAGIC
November 11, 1991
The last time we heard so much about a smile was when those ridiculous buttons surfaced a decade ago, the ones with the happy face and the legend “Have a nice day.” Those were phony; Magic Johnson’s smile is real, a grin that says feelgood as surely as the rest of him says basketball.
Some basketball players, because of their height and a certain hauteur, seem to demand genuflection. Magic Johnson always looks to me like a guy you should hug. That was especially true when he told the world he was infected with the AIDS virus, said he was going to become a national spokesman and flashed the grin nonetheless. What a man.
This is what AIDS looks like—good people, lovable people, people you want to hug. Are we finally ready to face that truth? Are we finally ready to behave properly instead of continuing to be infected by the horrible virus of bigotry and blindness that has accompanied this epidemic?
This is what AIDS looks like—good people who get sick. Artists, actors, soldiers, sailors, writers, editors, politicians, priests. The same issue of The New York Times that carried the astounding story of Magic Johnson’s announcement carried the deaths of four men with AIDS: an educational testing expert, an actor, a former dancer and choreographer, and a partner in a law firm. “Loving nature,” said one death notice. “Generosity of spirit,” said another. Beloved by family and friends.
In the ten years since five gay men with pneumonia became a million people who are HIV-positive, this illness has brought out the worst in America. We obsess about “life-style” in the midst of a pyramid scheme of mortality, an infectious disease spreading exponentially.
Over the last year, we have witnessed the canonization of one AIDS patient, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Kimberly Bergalis who says that she “didn’t do anything wrong.” This is code, and so is her elevation to national symbol. Kimberly Bergalis is a lovely white woman with no sexual history who contracted AIDS from her dentist. She is what some people like to call an “innocent victim.”
With that single adjective we condemn those who get AIDS from sex and those who get it from dirty needles as guilty and ultimately unworthy of our help and sympathy. We imply that gay men deserve what they get and people who shoot up might as well be dead. It’s a little like being sympathetic to the health-conscious jogger who dies of a heart attack during a stint on the Stairmaster but telling the widow of the couch potato, “Well, if he hadn’t eaten all those hot dogs, this wouldn’t have happened.”
It’s not how you get it; it’s how you spread it. And we know how that happens and what to do about it. Education. Conversation. Prevention. I don’t want to hear any more about how condoms shouldn’t be advertised on television and in the newspapers. I don’t want to hear any more about the impropriety of clean-needle exchanges or the immorality of AIDS education in the schools.
On Thursday night our eight-year-old asked about safe sex after he heard those words from Magic Johnson’s mouth. And I was amazed at how simply and straightforwardly I was able to discuss it. Because I don’t want to hear any more about good people who aren’t going to live until their fortieth birthday, about wasted talent and missed chances and children who die long before their fathers and mothers do. I’m far less concerned about my kids’ life-styles than I am about their lives.
How are all those parents who denigrate “queers” and “junkies” going to explain this one? How are all those pious people who like to talk about “innocent victims” going to deal with the lovable basketball star, the all-time sports hero, who stressed safe sex when he told the world he was HIV-positive? Will this finally make them say to their kids, “It could happen to you,” finally make them stop relying solely on chastity and start dealing with reality?
“Marc will be greatly missed,” said one of the death notices. Who cares where it began; this is where it ended, in small black letters on the obituary page. One good person after another, infected, then sick, and finally dying. Magic Johnson, with that engaging personality, that athletic legerdemain, that grin—this is what AIDS looks like. Why can’t we learn to deal with our national tragedy with as much dignity and determination as this good man brings to his personal one?
FOUL PLAY
October 4, 1990
I’ve covered politics and I’ve covered crime, and I’ve liked doing them both. But one thing I understood about those assignments: sometimes you found yourself hanging around with a questionable class of people.
I’ve never covered sports, but I hear the same is true.
Lisa Olson covers sports for The Boston Herald. No matter what people think about getting free tickets and meeting celebrities, being a sports reporter is hard work. And the last thing you need, along with deadline pressure and road trips and working weekends for your foreseeable future life, is to have a clutch of football players position their genitals close to your face and make lewd suggestions while you’re trying to work.
This is what Lisa Olson says happened to her while she was sitting on a stool interviewing a player in the locker room of the New England Patriots. News reports have tidied it up and called it sexual harassment, which makes it sound a little like some affirmative action issue. I’m giving the untidy version in the interests of accuracy.
Jocks have this tacit deal with the public. The deal is that they can get away with almost anything as long as they deliver the goods. One graduates from college barely able to read. Another gets caught driving drunk and mollifies the cop with an autograph. Yet another does drugs and after he comes out of rehab we welcome him back, and after it turns out he was lying about being clean we welcome him back again. We even had one ball player sent to jail for illegal gambling while fans contended that he deserved a place in the Hall of Fame.
Athletes are American princes and the locker room is their castle. Some of them behave in a princely fashion, become legitimate heroes to us all. And some are jerks. Jane Leavy, a former sportswriter for The Washington Post, has written a novel called Squeeze Play about a woman covering baseball and this is my favorite sentence: “You can’t grow up if you spend your whole life perfecting the rhythms of childhood.”
The other day Ms. Leavy recalled that the first time she interviewed Billy Martin, he was nude except for his socks and he had his feet up on his desk. This would be an interesting situation if you were a police reporter interviewing the police commissioner. Because you could describe this and then sit back and watch as the man lost his job.
Sports is different. That was just Billy being Billy.
Athletes are always testing, testing, testing. Some of them aren’t good at finding the end zones in their own lives, which is why they test their bodies until their hamstrings snap, why they test coaches and owners until nobody wants them on their team, and why they test reporters. Particularly women reporters.
Some don’t think women have any business being in locker rooms. With five hundred women sports reporters working today and the locker room still the place where repor
ters interview athletes, this view seems anachronistic. But it is a reasonable view if you believe the closest women should come to pro sports is the cheerleading squad or the backseat of a limousine.
Some also believe women are in the locker room for the express purpose of staring at what my sons, who have the same delusion of universal interest because they are small boys, call their “private parts.” This is a red herring, this idea that somehow athletes must be naked in a locker room when reporters arrive. This week the coach of the Cincinnati Bengals decided to bar women from his locker room, a violation of law and of league policy, and said, “I will not allow women to walk in on fifty naked men.”
Here’s a tip, genius: Have them put on underwear.
Ordinary locker-room behavior doesn’t have much to do with the organized harassment the league is investigating in the Olson case. And female sportswriters say lots of athletes are decent guys. The women sports reporters I know are very smart, smart enough to know who gets blamed for the sins of the jocks. At the Patriots game last Sunday, it was Lisa Olson the fans hooted.
This incident has changed her life, perhaps shortened her career as a sportswriter. Professional athletes know about short careers. Twenty years from now Lisa Olson will still be able to write, but there probably won’t be one of the guys on that team who can still play football. Twenty years from now we will still have this bad bargain: You don’t have to play by our rules as long as you perform. So long as you can dunk or pitch or block, you can get away with murder. Of course, when the legs and the arm are gone, all bets are off.
JOURNALISM 2001
April 12, 1992
I feel like one of those cartoon characters who have a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other. The reporter—the one some people would say is carrying the pitchfork—says one thing, the human being another. There’s a lot of this going around.
The subject is Arthur Ashe: the news is AIDS. This week the gentleman tennis player became a reluctant symbol. He had known since 1988 that he’d been infected by a transfusion, but he and his wife and a few close friends kept the secret for an obvious reason: they feared the shunning. Then someone tipped USA Today, and USA Today called and asked. Confirm or deny. That’s how we do these things. Mr. Ashe called a press conference and went public.
Welcome to Journalism 2001. Anyone who tries to make readers believe the questions are simple ones, who automatically invokes freedom of the press and the public’s right to know, is doing a disservice to America’s newspapers and straining the credulity of its people. Naming rape victims. Outing gay people. The candidate’s sex life. The candidate’s drug use. Editors are making decisions they have never made before, on deadline, with only hours to spare, with competitors breathing down their necks.
I am disquieted by the Arthur Ashe story. I can’t help feeling that in the medical sense we outed him, a practice that, in the sexual sense, I deplore. That’s the human being talking. The reporter understands: public figure, big news. An editor argued rather persuasively on television that if Mr. Ashe had been in a car accident or been hospitalized for cancer, we would have written about it.
But listening to those arguments was like listening to others I’d heard not so long ago. We publish the names of victims of muggings, of murder; why not the names of victims of rape? The answer is that rape is not like other crimes. There are good arguments to be made that our newspapers shape our mind-set, and that by withholding the names of rape victims we perpetuate the stigma. You can make the same argument about reporting AIDS.
But, like the women who were raped, perhaps the victims of this illness deserve some special privacy.
Privacy, privacy. The white light of the press and the closed doors of our homes are two of the most deeply prized aspects of our lives as Americans. It just so happens that, just like those two little cartoon characters, they are often in direct opposition to each other.
Is Arthur Ashe still a public figure, this many years after his days at center court? If he is, need we know the medical condition of every public figure? If we are entitled to expose a reluctant patient, what about a reluctant gay person? What are the parameters? Mr. Ashe argued eloquently that he was neither running for office nor running a corporation, and that his health was no one’s concern but his own. At a convention of newspaper editors, my colleagues argued otherwise.
I don’t usually put this many questions in a column, but it’s questioning that is going to serve the press best. Actually, there is no “the press.” We are a collection of men and women, the good, the bad, and the nondescript. We know the dangers of knowing too little: we remember the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam, and, more recently, the arid historical record of the Persian Gulf war.
We know about the man who was a member of the American Nazi Party and a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, who, in the face of a story that he had been born and raised a Jew, committed suicide. It was a very good story; the hypothetical is always whether you’d publish it, knowing the aftermath.
We tell people what we think they need to know. We hurt people, sometimes without reason. Sometimes we are kind. Mr. Ashe described a “silent and generous conspiracy to assist me in maintaining my privacy” on the part of some reporters. I would have joined up. This story makes me queasy. Perhaps it is the disparity between the value of the information conveyed and the magnitude of the pain inflicted.
But kindness is not the point. Information is the point of the product, and questioning the point of the process. We are making a lot of this up as we go along. In the newspaper business we assume certainty; when you spell Steven with a v it is because you know that’s how Steven spells it. But we are moving these days into areas of great uncertainty. Arthur Ashe has already begun to turn his exposure into education. I hope we manage to do the same.
SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN
July 26, 1992
Remember thirteen? Remember waking up in the morning never certain of exactly who you’d be? Remember being self-conscious about everything from your hair to your feet? Remember wild crushes, endless self-examination, stormy silences?
Corinne Quayle is thirteen. And she should be left in peace.
Oh, there was a certain satisfaction in watching what her dad did on television. Larry King personalized a question about abortion, asking the vice president what he would do if Corinne, when grown, discovered she was pregnant. The vice president launched into what abortion-rights advocates think of as the “my daughter” response.
People are troubled by abortion, even outright opposed. And then their daughter, their real daughter, not a poll question, not a hypothetical situation, turns out to be pregnant. And the world tilts.
That tilt is how Mr. Quayle, who has been an unwavering opponent of legal abortion, came to say of Corinne that he would “support her on whatever decision she made.”
And that response is how his wife, Marilyn, came to say peremptorily, “If she becomes pregnant, she’ll take the child to term.”
And that is how I come to say “Enough.” The right answer to Larry King’s question was not about abortion but about privacy. Remember being thirteen. Imagine your mom and dad arguing on the national news about what they’d do if you got pregnant. Imagine P.E. class the next day.
Wow.
We have had one argument after another about privacy in this campaign. My sympathies have not been substantially aroused by the invasion of privacy that accompanies running for president.
But I feel for these kids. When I see Chelsea Clinton standing small at the center of the convention celebration, her braces glittering in the limelight, or when I think about Corinne Quayle being the most famous hypothetical in health class, the perimeters of privacy loom large.
I never liked Bill Clinton half so much as when, asked what he would do if Chelsea were pregnant, he replied, “I wouldn’t talk to the press about it.”
Political parents collaborate in this process. I thought Senator Core was way over
the line between illumination and invasion when he described his little boy’s near-death experience in his acceptance speech. And I winced at the suggestion that Chelsea Clinton was upbeat about her parents’ appearance on 60 Minutes during the Gennifer Flowers adultery brouhaha. At twelve, I didn’t even want to think about my parents having sex with each other, much less with someone else.
I appreciate the balancing act. I’ve written about my own kids, wrestling with what is telling and what is merely tattling. The personal approach often yields the secrets of the heart; witness Larry King. But we have to count the cost.
The press exposure is not a new problem—ask Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, who dated George Hamilton with a pop-eyed nation waiting up for her, or John F. Kennedy, Jr., who in some way will be forever three. But the kind of exposure is different now, tougher, more invasive, less fan mag, more social policy. Less fashion and dating, more drugs and abortion.
The exposure is so taken for granted that recently Linda Chavez, a former Reagan aide, suggested there was something odd about Chelsea Clinton’s low profile during the primary season, as though political parents are suspect when they keep their children’s lives private. Ms. Chavez remarked snidely that perhaps there was a problem, not with the quality of Clinton kids but the quantity.
“The one-child family is still the exception in America,” Ms. Chavez said, “and I think that this whole image again sort of looks like the Democratic liberal version of what a family looks like.”
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