What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo. JoAnn Wypijewski
in. People don’t want to talk about that.” Indeed, Rose’s colleague, Kathleen Whitmore, didn’t.
“What about women in relationships?” I asked Whitmore. “If you’re a ‘bad girl’ maybe people think you have no right to safety, but if you’re a ‘good girl’ you have no need for safety. How do you deal with that, since statistically the majority of women with HIV got it from a partner, not from a one-night stand?”
“What do you mean when you use the word relationship?”
“Married women, people who live together—a month, a year, twelve years. How do you ask a guy to use a condom when asking suggests he’s cheating, and cheating suggests you’re failing?”
“Well, I kind of think you can tell when someone’s cheating, don’t you?”
“Do you ever use a condom?”
“I’m married.”
There have been fifty-two cases of full-blown AIDS in Chautauqua County since the epidemic began being tracked in the US in the 1980s, but most of those, Dr. Berke said, “have been secret.” The county women with HIV whom nurse Margaret Geer has been visiting to help with insurance claims, social services and the like all thought marriage or commitment was a prophylactic until someone in the family got sick. Only one of their men was an IV drug user, and only one had clandestine homosexual encounters from what Geer has been able to determine, though the men might not tell everything. (Did they ever share a needle? Did they ever have sex in prison?) What they do admit to is sex with other women. One called it “my sport.” And what strikes Geer about the women she visits, all working-class, is their isolation, their lack of confidence, the huge degree of control they ceded to their men, and the silence that, until HIV was added to the mix, covered it all. Lately she’s begun visiting one of Williams’ partners.
Nationally, two of the top known concentrations of women with HIV are in Newark, New Jersey, and Macon, Georgia. In Newark the profile of “women at risk” fits those most at risk of any torment of poverty in a hard city. In Macon it’s different. Women there learned they were HIV positive when they went to give blood for Desert Storm at Robins Air Force Base. Many of their husbands are vets who years earlier had had trouble with drugs, cleaned up and came home to set their lives right. They didn’t talk much about the past, not at all about HIV. The CDC estimates that anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 people don’t know they’re positive, and the majority of the public that thinks HIV is someone else’s problem grows bigger with every poll. Almost every straight person I talked to before leaving for Jamestown, most of them well-educated grown-ups in New York, said there must be some secret I’d have to unearth about these girls. “It’s almost impossible to get it just from sex between men and women,” they said, even though sex between men and women is the fastest-growing mode of HIV transmission.2 Amber Hollibaugh says that when she started the Lesbian AIDS Project some gay women said she’d never find more than a dozen cases—Everyone knows we don’t get it!—but now the project involves 400 women in New York City alone. In Jamestown some of Williams’ friends said they believe him when he says he thought the authorities who told him he was positive while in jail were just trying to scare him into leaving town. But his friend Amber, who was with him on and off for nine months, now thinks that he was mostly in denial: “When I went to visit him, he said, ‘Do I look sick? I don’t feel sick.’ I think he convinced himself that it wasn’t true—and, you know, you can convince yourself of anything.”
Watching Williams escorted out of a Bronx courtroom, giving a half-smile and two-fingered salute to someone in the gallery, I thought of Ohio. “That was his big dream,” Amber said, “to move to Ohio and make a life. He went there when he was younger; his dad used to live there—now, I don’t know if that’s true but it’s what he said—and he loved it.” By now the rough sketch of Williams’ biography has been drawn often enough, and it contains precious little of the stuff of dreams: born in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, his mother addicted to crack, his father jailed when he was four; a sweet kid attractive to females from an early age, an angry teenager who was in special ed for reasons unclear and who robbed one of the few people who tried to help him; a Blood, a dealer, a “wild cat” who survived a shooting in a housing project and a string of charges, including one for murder (he was acquitted); a guy with more sexual partners than Bill Clinton and, yes, a “pleasing personality.”
But what did they see in him? The question, overt or indirect, has riveted reporters and TV presenters. It’s funny how the opposite question—what did he see in them?—is never asked, only implicitly answered in the assumption that he was “looking for victims” and they were easy “prey.” There’s more than a touch of racism behind the media prurience, since, except that so many of them are white, the young women in this case mostly swam in the same stream of trouble as Williams. It would have been stranger if they hadn’t found each other. But America could have a lifetime of “conversations on race” and the white press would still twitch at the idea of a black man in bed with white women. This time the history of white perceptions of savage blackness was compressed in an economy of symbols—the reproduced poster, the headline language of beastliness, a young woman’s photograph, all of which worked together like a logo. The symbols made it unnecessary for most reporters even to remark on the interracial nature of the liaisons; allowed them, actually, to write or speak as if such pair-ups among young people in Jamestown were as common as they are, in upstate New York or anywhere, judging from the 57 percent of US teenagers who pollsters say have been in interracial relationships. Common, though, is not part of the vocabulary of the media in scandal mode. The scandal, the news, was therefore best conveyed by images, which effectively told the story, superseding all other language. In the story of Williams, pop culture’s trinity of sex, race and danger was perfectly realized.
Still, it’s too neat, and too disregarding of the women who are HIV positive, to say, as some have, that the panic is reducible to white, straight male America’s historic fear of black male sexuality. Racism poisons the brew in Chautauqua County as it does everywhere, but the fact is it wouldn’t have much mattered if Williams had infected one white girl (unless she was the mayor’s daughter), just as it wouldn’t have much mattered if the only person traced to him was the black thirteen-year-old, who I was told could pass for the seventeen years she claimed to be when everyone was partying.
In the catalogue of victimology, working-class women count only in bulk. Before Williams became an issue, no one with power got excited that Ernest Lockett, another black man in the county, had infected his white partner, Nan Nowak, and through her their daughter, Nadia. They were just another throwaway family. Nor is the state any more concerned with the health of such families now. Legal action has gained currency as a reasonable response to infectious disease, so Lockett is being prosecuted for assault, an action that Nowak had advocated but the state had resisted for years. If convicted, he will be one more black prisoner. Ernest, Nan, little Nadia: nobody knows their names. In the Williams case, numbers assumed such fetishistic value that Dr. Berke declared Williams had “damaged hundreds and hundreds of lives,” even when at the time the positive individuals associated with him numbered nine, and perhaps half of those had the virus before he was told he was positive. The state announced he’d named fifty to seventy-five partners in New York City, who in turn were placing untold others at risk. Those numbers were totally manufactured. According to sources at the New York City Health Department, Williams named about fifteen city women, of whom fewer than half have been found and none have been linked to him by HIV with any confidence. But the larger number was excitedly reported, implying an ugly chain of equivalence: one mayor’s daughter is worth twenty small-town “risk takers” is worth seventy-five big-city sluts is worth …
When numbers are so thrown about, the individual recedes, which is exactly the purpose of such panics. In propagating the extraordinary, they distract from the crushing ordinariness of life and death in the age of AIDS: from the 380,000 deaths and the 900,000 HIV-altered lives; from the man or woman infected every hour without notice or care; from the catastrophic failure of public health and the common, terrible but no less human realities of one man—one youth, really, for Williams was not more than eighteen when he came to Jamestown—for whom the best of all possible futures, a regular