day, a woman named Dottie came to visit Denise at the treatment center. Denise told her about being HIV positive. Dottie told her that there were many women who needed to hear her story and arranged for Denise to meet and encourage other women facing the same challenge. Because her health was compromised, she was able to receive disability payments to survive during this period of time.
Denise began doing outreach work as a peer counselor at a local AIDS clinic, where she eventually served on the board. She delivered culturally sensitive HIV/AIDS education, incorporating messages about addiction and recovery. She says that she constantly rode the bus here and there for speaking engagements related to AIDS education. She tried to convey to infected people that they had a right to live productive lives despite their HIV status.
When Denise had been sober for three years, she received what she thought was a crank call. The person on the telephone said he was a White House aide and asked if she would be interested in working in Washington, D.C. for the Clinton administration, advising the President and other government officials on AIDS policy. He went on to say that her name was on a very short list of possible appointees. “I thought it was just some weirdo,” she says. But, very soon a packet of papers appeared in the mail that made the offer official. Her appointment to The National HIV/AIDS Advisory Council began to be noticed by the press and she received numerous notes of congratulations from various government officials. People approached her and asked, “Now that you have the ear of the President, what are you going to do with it?”
Denise thought about her constituency of disenfranchised people with HIV and AIDS. Some had addiction problems. Many had been hurt by homophobia and/or racism. She knew that what she wanted to do with “the President’s ear” was to represent these people. She wanted the President to know about the problems they faced. She says that she focused on writing sound policy and making sure the focus was on practical help and getting things done.
Denise says that from 1995 until 2000, when her term ended, she put her whole heart into this work. “My integrity spoke for itself and my voice was heard,” she says. She goes on to say that President Clinton was attentive to the issues she presented and appreciated her.
“This is how I finished growing up,” Denise says. “I went from the crack house to the White House and I found my womanhood. To this day, I can go to the White House website and pull up speeches I gave. I am proud of what I was able to do there.”
Denise has continued her public speaking engagements. She has spoken at two Democratic National Conventions, including one for nominee John Kerry. She is a regular speaker at NFL Rookie Symposiums and on Black-Entertainment Television’s, Rap It Up, HIV/AIDS education programs.
“I tell my story,” she says. “I don’t like telling people what to do or not to do, or how to behave. I just tell them where I’ve been and what I’ve done. People melt into the feelings and they relate to the feelings. I want them to be introspective and realize how their decisions affect themselves and others. I let people come to their own resolution.”
In addition, Denise is an emerging writer, with work contributed to James Adler’s Memento More —An AIDS Requiem. She has released a spoken word project called Elevation.
In reflecting on her life, Denise says that she sees the connection between having no father and being attracted as a teenager to an older man. “It took me a long time to let go of my father. I had no consistent father figure and it left a hole in my identity. I had no idea about how to do a relationship. But, I now know what I want and where my lines are. I won’t move my lines for anyone.”
She goes on to say, “My life had begun to unravel even before I knew I had HIV. With the diagnosis, I became immobilized. When I realized that I would live, I had no idea how to live. I just knew I didn’t want to hurt inside anymore and that there were things I needed to learn. I had spent so much of my life trying to get my mother to love me. I tried to earn her love and this spilled over into my other relationships. It just didn’t work.”
“So, I realized that I can’t be who I am if I don’t know who I am and I set about to find out. I found my passion in life and that’s when I found myself. When the noise in my head stopped, and I got other people’s voices out, I could just really be me.”
Victoria Rowell
“Wow is me! Not woe is me.”
I received an invitation to a “High Tea at the Beverly Hills Hotel” benefit for Victoria Rowell’s nonprofit foundation, which provides money to children in foster care for lessons of various sorts in the performing arts. It was a beautiful invitation, but I couldn’t afford to go. I’m not a television watcher, so I had not heard of Victoria. But when it was suggested that I interview her for this book, I decided to find out more about her. I read her book, The Women Who Raised Me, and was amazed by her story.
I made arrangements to attend her fundraiser the next year with my daughter-in-law, and it was great fun, as well as a delicious and elegant tea.
When Victoria modeled her cute outfit for the audience, I loved it when she made mention that she was experiencing menopause and that it was definitely changing her body. “It’s a natural thing!” she said so publicly and easily as she walked down the stage runway.
Victoria Rowell is an accomplished and successful dancer and actress. She is living proof of her advice to others, which is: “Do not let your circumstances define you, but use them as a cornerstone of your strength.”
Victoria was born as a ward of the state of Maine. Her mother had received no prenatal care and was kept in quarantine because she was mentally ill and filthy. Victoria’s first five days were spent with the nuns at Mercy Hospital before she was transferred to The Holy Innocents Home for orphans. Her Caucasian mother immediately lost custody of three other children, due to her continuing mental illness and instability. Her father was an unknown black man.
Ultimately, her mother gave birth to six children—three boys and three girls. The boys remained virtually unknown to Victoria until she searched for and found them when she was an adult. She and her sisters all had fathers from various minority groups. Her brothers all had white fathers, which made them acceptable to her mother’s white family. Victoria and her sisters were rejected and referred to as her mother’s “nigger children.”
At three weeks of age, Victoria was placed in foster care with a white family. The mother of this family, Bertha Taylor, had to argue with the social worker to take this baby home. Social Services did not believe that a minority child should reside with a white family. In fact, there were antiquated laws on the books in Maine at that time disallowing adoptions of black children by white families. However, adoption was never an option for Victoria anyway, as her birth mother refused to relinquish her children, hoping to be reunited with them at some later time—an event that never happened.
Though Victoria has no memory of her two years in the loving care of the Taylor family, she says that she knows that the time spent there, surrounded by love and kindness, gave her a foundation of resilience so essential to healthy emotional development.
Though the Taylors had every expectation of raising Victoria to adulthood, this dream ended when the Child Welfare department determined that the “racial difference” between her and the Taylors would present a problem in the future. No amount of pleading on the part of the Taylors or their close friends could persuade the social worker otherwise.
And so, Victoria was removed from the only family she had known and placed with a new foster family on a rural farm. Interestingly, this family
