America Discovers AIDS Is Real : Disease: Why do we need a celebrity like Magic Johnson to tell us why thousands and thousands have died during the last 10 years?

SAN FRANCISCO —  Will you weep now, America?

Magic Johnson is infected with the AIDS virus. A celebrity, a graceful god from the sports pages, is infected with the AIDS virus. Magic Johnson tells us of his infection with poise and dignity. He speaks with candor of the disease that many in this country have chosen to deny or consign to some other part of town where queers or addicts live and die.

The newscasters with their orange hair and blue sports jackets are full of pieties now. The politicians rush forward with their lament. It is as if AIDS has come, at last, to their side of town.

I know many men like Magic Johnson, men infected with the AIDS virus. Men of poise and dignity. But they cannot gather press conferences to announce the news of their infection. They fear telling their employers; they fear telling their landlords; they fear confessing to their priests; they fear, most of all, telling their families.

The spotted transvestite lies on his mattress on the floor in a single room. His companion, most days, most hours, is the TV that is never turned off. Doubtless, the TV was jabbering the news last Thursday of Magic Johnson’s infection.

But, of course, you will say Magic Johnson is famous and a great athlete and a role model for millions of young people who never guessed that heroes can die. What do I expect? Magic Johnson is a television hero.

But let me tell you about some other heroes I know. I know two men in their 20s--lovers--each infected with the AIDS virus, each dying. One is closer to death than the other. Recently, I saw them--two skeletal figures, inching from their bedroom to the toilet. The healthier of the two was propping up his lover with a thin shoulder. Nothing I have ever read in Shakespearean sonnets, nothing I have heard from the Courtier poets or from the Brownings, could have prepared me for this vision of love.

A high school kid I know came running into a store last Thursday night with the news. It was like Pearl Harbor. Magic Johnson has the AIDS virus.

A generation that has been raised with multimillion-dollar rock stars, multimillion-dollar running-shoe contracts and mega-sports heroes is in shock. The newspaper shows a photo of high school jocks weeping. Suddenly, we hear, Americans of all ages are phoning their local AIDS hotline. Suddenly, the thought occurs to millions that maybe AIDS is not just something happening in some other part of the city.

“How do I get tested?”

“How can a person contract the virus?”

Where have these Americans been for the last 10 years? How is it possible that, after 10 years, they still need to be told about condoms and dirty needles and body fluids? The young, certainly, are innocent of death and are startled to discover its possibility. But America has, regarding AIDS, been in a determined state of denial. So, of course, health officials are pleased by the sudden interest, the anxious questions.

America will learn from Magic Johnson--and this is the piety--that even “normal” people get AIDS. And America will learn that even celebrities get AIDS. Magic Johnson is Rock Hudson and Perry Ellis and Brad Davis all rolled into one. But he is more. He exists in the manly world of professional sports, a world as far away from the AIDS ward as it is possible, we imagine, to get.

Ten years into the AIDS epidemic, Americans pretend to be surprised that AIDS is real and that it implicates all of us. Americans learn from the man who flies across the TV screen that thousands and thousands and thousands of people have been dying for 10 years. Why do we need a celebrity to tell us such a thing?

Why do we need someone who lives on a television screen--an image in million-dollar running shoes, a beautiful abstraction, to remind us that men and women are dying with tough purple scabs on their bodies, that people are dying with little flesh on their bodies, that people are dying in terror or in madness or blind or, in the end, singing of God in a morphine dream?

America learns from Magic Johnson, the celebrity, that AIDS is real.