Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (10 page)

PARENTAL RITES
September 25, 1991

Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage-managed by grown-ups and life privately held. Past thirteen, shy of twenty, our children seem to fire off from time to time like a barrel full of Roman candles. Prom pictures show them the way we want them, curled and clean.

A week ago, in his diocesan newspaper column, Cardinal O’Connor wrote of a call from a New York law firm offering to represent Catholic parents of public school students “if condoms are forced on such a youngster without parental consent.” It’s the verb that is the red flag in that sentence. The plan to make condoms available in New York City high schools has nothing to do with force. The scenario of the principal at the school door pressing prophylactics for extra credit on unwilling fourteen-year-old virgins is useful for those who are opposed to this project. But it is a fraud.

Teenagers who feel they need condoms will go to a specially designated room and receive them from a specially trained school staff member. Some will do this because they’ve been told condoms can protect against the AIDS virus. Some will do it because they’ve heard condoms can protect against sexually transmitted diseases. All will be assuming a degree of responsibility unusual in a person of seventeen. Chastity may be preferable, but if not adhered to, responsibility is critical, even lifesaving.

The idea of force in such a program is a sop for indignant parents. If we imagine teenagers being forced into condom use and, by extension, sex, we don’t have to think of them as sexual beings choosing, despite our own moral imperatives, to be sexually active. If we imagine force, we don’t have to wonder what role we parents have played; we can simply blame the schools, the liberal power structure, the social radicals.

At a Board of Education meeting earlier this month, the representative from Staten Island, Michael Petrides, announced, “There is no way in this city and in these United States that someone is going to tell my son he can have a condom when I say he can’t.” News flash, Mr. Petrides: Any drugstore clerk in America can do just that if your son has the money.

Other objections to the condom program are just as redolent of the seductive idea that we have absolute control over our kids, just as blind to what some teenagers need to stay healthy and obsessed with what some parents need to feel self-satisfied. If we are confident that they are chaste, there is nothing to worry about, despite the suggestion that condoms in the schools are the 1990’s equivalent of Spanish Fly.

If we are not confident, there is plenty to worry about, the least of it condoms; there are diseases that can cause sterility and one that will even cause death. We have many years to try to shape small and malleable people into big ones who share the values we hold most dear. Sometimes we manage to do it. And sometimes we do not. To jeopardize their health because they have not turned out exactly as we planned is an extraordinarily selfish
thing to do, reminiscent of a variation on that old vaudeville turn: Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. How do you make me feel about myself?

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.