How Magic Johnson Fought The AIDS Epidemic --Deserves enormous credit

Earvin "Magic" Johnson

By Michael Specter, May 15, 2014, The New Yorker

Donald Sterling, the racist cretin who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, raised a series of interesting questions about Magic Johnson on Monday, during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “What has he done, can you tell me? Big Magic Johnson, what has he done?” Sterling asked dismissively. “What does he do for the black people?” Sterling added that Johnson should be “ashamed of himself” for having H.I.V., and suggested that he was a terrible role model for children.

As it happens, I started working as a reporter for the New York Times in November of 1991, a few days before Johnson announced that he had been infected with H.I.V. In the nineteen-eighties, I spent several years covering the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post, and my first stories at the Times were about Johnson’s announcement and the seismic impact it had for African-American teen-agers across the country.

Many people have devoted their lives to ending the AIDS epidemic. Some of them became famous. Ryan White was the sweet, sad teen-ager who was expelled from his high school in Kokomo, Indiana, because he had been infected, through a tainted blood transfusion. White died in 1990, and the first essential American AIDS legislation is named after him, because he was an “innocent” young white boy—congressional leaders refused even to consider naming the law after a gay man or a minority. Larry Kramer started the two most important American AIDS organizations: Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACTUP, and screamed so loudly and at so many people about the potential of an epidemic that some of them actually began to listen. And C. Everett Koop, as surgeon general, transformed himself from a right-wing anti-abortion crusader into the most compelling advocate for AIDS education in the United States.

These people—and many others—had a remarkable impact on the course of the AIDS epidemic. But none of them possessed Magic Johnson’s ability to connect with the people who needed help the most: young minorities. There was no better way to demonstrate that H.I.V. is a virus that can attack anyone than for one of America’s most electrifying athletes to acknowledge that he was infected. Johnson’s announcement came at a critical point in the epidemic. In 1991, many Americans remained convinced that AIDS was a disease that affected gay, white men—people like Rock Hudson—but almost nobody else. As Ronald Johnson, who was then executive director of the New York-based Minority Task Force on AIDS, told me at the time, “This is a tragedy beyond measure for Mr. Johnson and his family. But for the first time this could convince people in our community that when it comes to this disease we are all very much at risk.”

Read the full story:  www.newyorker.com

Follow Larry Elder on Twitter

"Like" Larry Elder on Facebook