Trying to Save Lives, a Condom at a Time

“Look at this sister,” Tony Wafford says, stopping his white sedan on Figueroa at 75th Street to chat up a red-haired hooker in a skirt the size of an eye patch.

“You need condoms?” Tony asks.

She smiles and wiggles over on Tina Turner heels.

Tony lugs thousands of condoms around Los Angeles in his trunk. He takes them to the barber shop, passes them out on skid row, hands bunches of them to streetwalkers. The man has more rubber than Goodyear.

I know Tony from Tolliver’s barber shop, where he tells customers that AIDS is the worst thing to hit the black community since slavery. In the United States, AIDS is the No. 1 killer of black men between the ages of 35 and 44, and the top killer of black women between 25 and 34. The numbers aren’t much better for Latinos.

Tony, who used to promote entertainers and concerts, got into the prevention business six years ago after learning that more than half of the new HIV cases among women in L.A. County strike African Americans.

“I knew it wasn’t because of white boys comin’ down here from West Hollywood,” says Tony, 47. “And nobody was talking about it in the black community.”

Some of those black women were in the sex trade, and some were using dirty needles. But others were getting HIV from husbands and boyfriends who were “on the down low.”

What’s the down low? I ask.

Tony shoots me a wilting glance, letting me know what a square I am.

Black men are lying down with other black men, he says, and then going home to sleep with their women. “Down low” refers to the secrecy about the double lives of these men. They’re under the radar, so to speak, unwilling to admit they’re bisexual or gay.

“That ain’t down low,” Tony rails, “it’s low down.”

These men are getting HIV from unprotected sex with other men and passing it on to unsuspecting female partners. Tony calls them cowards but says a big part of the problem is the taboo against homosexuality in minority communities.

“You ain’t going to see no gay pride parade down Crenshaw Boulevard,” Tony says, wishing the black community had an Elton John or a David Geffen to pave the way.

“It’s not like West Hollywood,” adds Carrie Broadus of Women Alive. “You’re not going to go walking down the street arm-in-arm” with your gay lover.

At least a prostitute knows the risks of her trade, Broadus says. But a straight woman, living with a man she thinks is straight, is living in the dark.

The L.A. County Public Health Office estimates that 12,000 to 15,000 people have HIV and don’t know it. That’s partly because a steady girlfriend wouldn’t think to go get an HIV test. June 27 is National HIV Testing Day, by the way. Testing sites in Los Angeles County are listed at www.lapublichealth.org/aids.

Black churches don’t want to touch the subject, Tony claims, even though women and children are dying. (Let’s not forget the Vatican’s position on condoms.)

Tony reaches for his Bible and opens it to Leviticus.

“A man sleeping with another man is an abomination,” Tony reads, then goes off about how the Good Book is making his job all the harder.

We have to get out on the road, roll down the windows and let the wind cool him off. Tony tells me about fighting back with a trunk full of lubricated LifeStyles and concert tickets he gives to people who agree to HIV testing.

“Put Alan Haymon’s name in there,” he tells me. “That’s a famous black promoter, and the brother has given away $2 million worth of free concert tickets. Luther Vandross concerts, Patti LaBelle, Alicia Keyes, Beyonce. We just did Mary J. Blige.”

We roll over to the Palms, a former motel that’s now a residential center for AIDS patients. Kevin Pickett, one of Tony’s colleagues, runs the Palms and lets us talk to anyone who’s willing. About sex, AIDS and the down low.

We end up with a transgender resident named Dachaun, who admitted to years of unprotected sex, and a former resident named Reggie, who’s now an AIDS counselor. Tony is talking about the stigma of being black and homosexual, and Dachaun and Reggie both say their parents tried to literally exorcise the gayness out of them.

“They took me to every exorcist there was to get this spirit up out of me,” says Dachaun. “I told them, ‘There ain’t no demons in there. It’s just me.’ ”

Reggie says ministers hit him with the same Leviticus passage Tony had read to me. He’s still so conflicted by it, Reggie says, he would consider denouncing his homosexuality on his deathbed, just in case there’s some truth to the “lakes of fire” warnings he got from the church.

“Not me,” says Dachaun. “God says come as you are, and I’m coming just as I am.”

With blond braids, pink toenail polish and no apologies.

But Reggie is tied up in knots, admitting he can’t get rid of all the “internalized homophobia” that was drilled into him. He tells us he’d like to marry a woman and have kids, even though he has no attraction to women. Then he tells us about the down low.

Reggie says he’s had male lovers including a cop, a firefighter and a lawyer. Some of those men left his bed and then went home to girlfriends or wives.

Back on the road, Tony Wafford lays into preachers, bigots, cowards and “bourgeois Baldwin Hills Negroes” who like to pretend Dachaun and Reggie don’t exist.

He’s got a trunk full of condoms, and he drives like he’s in a race.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com, and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.