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 trouble would “meet a guy with a good head on his shoulders,” their one chance for safety. Classrooms at Jamestown High bear handmade signs urging students to JUST SAY NO to all the familiar vices, and the school system has a strategy group to keep kids on the straight and narrow that is affectionately called the Pizza and Flashlight Committee. The concept, according to assistant school superintendent James Coffman, is “if you attract them with pizza they will come, and if you shine a light on the cockroaches they will go away.” The cockroaches are the Nushawn Williamses of the world, “The Outsiders” depicted in a student’s drawing reprinted last fall in the Post-Journal—archetypal white toughs hanging out, drinking and smoking—and the girls who, by daring to go with such boys, deserve whatever they get and whatever name anyone chooses to call them.
For kids who are one step away from that category, just on the cusp of expulsion, the county runs an alternative education program. They go to school in the evening, when the regular students are home, and the emphasis is on behavior modification. A policeman escorts them in, watches them remove engagement rings and other jewelry, and stands guard the whole time. Sometimes the chief of police comes to teach English or Behavior.
The idea is “to make everyone part of the team,” Coffman told me. It’s an experiment borrowed from Erie, Pennsylvania, forty-five miles away, and Coffman urged me to remember that the program is in its infancy. I believe he was sincere when he said that the county wants to help these kids succeed. Over the years it has put a tremendous amount of energy into various schemes advanced by one or another national expert. But often the experts haven’t a clue. Observing one evening’s session—the teachers exhausted from working all day, the kids surly though full of secret knowledge, the cop on the beat, the lessons stripped of anything that might provoke surprise or curiosity or love—I took it as preparation for prison.
Jamestown is the kind of place that can make a person’s hate pure, and not for anyone in it, or anything particular to the town. I left it as I’ve left countless places in America where people labor for so little and the spirit has been so robbed—praying that every kid I met could get out, and moved by the strength of the people who fight for the future: Ron Graham, who coaches girls’ track and consults on youth programs; Matt Milovich, who runs the shelter; Sam Teresi; Nancy Glatz; Rose Torres. There are others. And there are more still who refuse to pass judgement on the young people caught up in the crisis. “Unless you walk in their shoes, how can you know what life is like for these girls, or even for that fella?” an older woman who works as a cook and waitress said to me. For months people have been meeting to decide what to do next. “Low self-esteem” has been identified as the basic problem of “kids at risk,” but some aren’t so sure.
“I think it’s too easy,” Rose Torres said. Rose worked at the runaway shelter and was on welfare with her three-year-old daughter before coming to AIDS Community Services. “I can have a lot of self-esteem and still make bad choices—based on need, based on want. I’m still going to do what I have to do. It may go against reason. Am I going to stay in an unhappy relationship with someone who abuses me, with someone who cheats on me, because it will let me take care of my child? If I go to a hospital and they say they can’t do something for my sick child because Medicaid won’t cover it, do you think I won’t do anything to get that child what it needs? If I just want to be loved and I don’t make someone wear a condom for all the reasons any of us might not do it, is he a monster? Am I a victim? I’m not a victim; I’m a volunteer. We need a little honesty. Why do any of us make the choices we make? A lot of women don’t have a lot of options.”
None of the young women with Nushawn Williams had enough options. Neither did he. Neither does Jamestown.
(1998)
