DNA! But DNA matching in HIV cases, according to Dr. Marcia Kalish at the CDC, “doesn’t prove anything. It simply supports the fact that there could have been recent transmission. It’s not like matching blood; you don’t have that definite answer. It’s just a very small piece of the puzzle.”5
The terrain gets slipperier when you think for a moment about the real way people have sex—the way risk arouses and arousal subordinates thoughts of risk, the way shame influences almost any discussion of desire, the way denial is always, always at work. If a woman begged for it up the ass because she wanted to avoid pregnancy or maybe because she actually likes it (yes, even nice girls do), would she admit it, or would she worry that such an admission would put her in a different category of victim, the one occupied by drug users and homosexuals? If a person was told he is HIV positive but also “knows,” the way so many straight Americans “know,” that “it’s almost impossible to get it just from sex between men and women,” might he have assumed—still in considerable disbelief about his condition—that the risk was rather low and he was just unlucky? And then how might this assumption—on which hangs the balance of guilt or innocence—have played out in the sex act? As the calm preface to judicious decision-making, or as one of a hundred flighty things in a highly fractured process of thought? So how does a court of law have the means or the right to decide any of this?
Intent is a necessary requirement for criminal prosecution. In California recently, an appellate court ruled that assault charges could not be brought against an HIV-positive straight man who failed to disclose his status, because some studies show that the annual rate of heterosexual transmission from man to woman is quite low—5.7 percent—and, applying the reasoning of the betting parlor, it could no more be said that he intended to cause harm than that somebody who put money on a horse favored seventeen-to-one intended to lose. It was a victory against criminalization, but by this logic it might be argued that groups whose odds of transmission are higher, or who, unlike the avowed heterosexual, have been branded with the scarlet A, ought to be criminalized. Criminal intent is extremely difficult to prove in consensual sex cases, gay or straight, which is why laws proscribing the behavior of HIV-positive individuals simply say that knowledge equals intent to harm.
Which brings us back to the fuzzy matter of truth. In the Bronx courtroom in late February, a defense attorney was telling a colleague that he would favor new criminal law to prosecute people like Nushawn Williams, “people who know and don’t tell.” People who don’t know—that’s another matter. So, suppose a man, maybe a man like this lawyer, has unprotected sex. And suppose he doesn’t think HIV can touch him, so it never occurs to him to be tested. Then suppose he doesn’t tell his wife he’s had sex with others, and one day she discovers she is HIV positive. With the same outcome, the lie of Nushawn Williams is a crime while the lie of the hypothetical lawyer is an unfortunate mistake. To be consistent, every lie would be a potential crime and every one of us a potential criminal.
In the sex panic around Nushawn Williams—as in the scandal around President Clinton, for different reasons—scarcely anyone pauses to consider the big lies that make the smaller ones inevitable. In Chautauqua County, Kathleen Whitmore travels to public schools for the allowed one day of AIDS education and is regularly told by administrators, to her frustration, just please say nothing about anal sex or oral sex or condoms (unless they ask), nothing about homosexuality (“there are no gay kids here,” one teenager told me); of course, nothing about pleasure. Dr. Rzepkowski, who is gay, out and HIV positive, has spoken at some schools about all those things and has never been asked back. After the news about Williams hit, a high school teacher in the county, Marcia Lindquist, was suspended after talking to her students about abstinence, because it was not appropriately abstracted from sex.
This is not provincial ignorance. In the entire history of the AIDS epidemic, the federal government has done exactly one national mailing on the health issues involved. There is no serious education on the relationship between other sexually transmitted diseases and HIV, and no effective prevention effort, even though people with one of those diseases are three to five times more likely to contract HIV, and people who are HIV positive and have another sexually transmitted disease are more likely to pass on the virus. These other diseases can, of course, be cured or suppressed, but it is as if public knowledge on the subject were frozen in 1981, and along with it the shame-brand that compels people to hold tight to their secrets and risk the very thing they hope to avoid: dying of embarrassment.
One in five Americans over the age of twelve has genital herpes, and up to eight in ten have oral herpes, which can also be transmitted to the genitals, but no one talks about that anymore. Over 50,000 Americans contract syphilis every year, but at current spending rates the disease will never be eliminated.6 There’s not a public school in the country that has a curriculum on human sexuality—its complications and wonders and varieties, “the emotional part,” as Tania put it, and the physical part without evasion or disdain. Too many young women I met still spoke of “feeling dirty” because they’d had sex, or were eager to label someone else dirty. Mainstream feminism is nowhere on this issue, and nowhere in the lives of these girls, who often don’t use birth control and don’t approve of abortion because, like sex, a baby is a little piece of goodness.
Now government officials grandstand on the need to “protect our kids,” but a comparison of rates of HIV infection for young people, particularly young women, at the beginning of the epidemic and today ought to nullify the state’s claims to legitimacy as an ally in safety. Former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders said, “I’d have a bag [of condoms] on every corner, so all you’d have to do is reach in and pick them up,” but we know where such ideas got her. A runaway shelter in Jamestown offers a refuge so that kids don’t have to choose between sleeping with their father, sleeping with another man or sleeping on the street, but it can’t keep them longer than thirty days, and funding for homeless assistance nationally is down 14 percent since 1996. The government conducts research on the spread of HIV among young people, and wants to keep statistics on everybody, but plans for universal surveillance are not being accompanied by plans for universal education or universal treatment, and there are no broad support networks for kids who learn they are positive and have no family, no insurance, no solid income and no emotional preparation for hearing that their life is in jeopardy. By providing the names of his partners for tracing, Nushawn Williams did exactly what public health officials advocate and was then vilified by those same officials as “some kind of scorekeeper.” It would have been better for him if he had lied. And with the specter of name reporting and national registries and more energetic prosecution, increasing numbers of people will decide that it is better for them never to get tested. But most grotesque in a rich field of hypocrisy is that anyone in authority should ask, Why didn’t he tell? when from its beginning HIV infection has been treated more as a social condition than a disease, when the files of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund bulge with cases of discrimination, and when you don’t have to know any of those details to know that being a carrier of the AIDS virus on top of being a black out-of-town drug-dealing ex-con is very bad news. Just how bad is symbolized by the spit mask Williams had to wear while being transported to courtrooms and even to meet visitors in New York—a gauzy bubble over his head with a black opaque strip over the area of his mouth, the whole contraption attached to a wooden collar with a stick jutting out, “like a dogcatcher uses to catch dogs,” Amber said.
The mask, the jail cell, they were just waiting for him—much as jail awaits the “bad kids” of Chautauqua County who are not already inside. Either that or marriage or death, and sometimes all three. Again and again in Jamestown I met well-meaning adults who said they only hoped girls in