San Francisco Chronicle (SF); Monday, November 18, 1991
Dan Levy, Chronicle Staff Writer

TEXT:

After the most intense week of AIDS media coverage in history, many people are still uneasy over Magic Johnson's attempt to distance himself from gays and the media's tenacity in establishing that he was infected through heterosexual sex.

AIDS workers say they are uncomfortable with these conflicting messages -- on the one hand, they welcome him as a giant spokesman for the cause and praise the grace and dignity with which he has handled his public drama. On the other hand, they see homophobia in media coverage of Johnson's condition.

"Magic Johnson has done more to change public awareness of AIDS than any of us has been able to achieve in the last decade," said Gregory King, executive director of the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C. "But he's been treated as though he's the first real person who has contracted HIV."

Nearly 60 percent of the 196,000 reported AIDS cases in America have involved gay or bisexual men, according to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. An additional 22 percent have involved intravenous drug users. Less than 1 percent involve men who contracted HIV from infected women, the way Johnson said he got it.

The headlines that read "Anybody Can Get AIDS" after Johnson's announcement suggested that gays, bisexuals and IV drug users -- and other "high risk" groups such as hemophiliacs -- are somehow less human than people who get AIDS through straight sex, King said.

"Many people have gone through the exact same diagnosis as Magic, but his prominent example really lets one know that there are a lot of people who don't consider gay people to be real," he said.

Washington Post critic Howard Kurtz said, "The obvious question is: Why should it have taken Magic Johnson to galvanize the media?"

(In Africa and Asia, where 7 million people are thought to be infected with HIV, the virus is overwhelmingly transmitted through heterosexual contact, World Health Organization officials say.)

Gay voices were notably scarce in a hyper-conscious week that saw 125 articles relating to Magic Johnson appear in the Los Angeles Times, 57 in the New York Times and 55 in The Chronicle. News stories documented Magic's effect on black churches, presidential politics, child rearing, advertising, shoe contracts and the condom market.

The news media were supplemented by a national discussion in forums such as "Nightline," "Larry King Live" and the popular "Arsenio Hall Show," in which Johnson's assurance that "I'm far from being a homosexual" was greeted by cheers from the studio audience.

FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNT

Magic's first-person account of his ordeal in this week's issue of Sports Illustrated was excerpted in newspapers, and ran under the headline "Magic: Infected by Woman" on the front page of The Chronicle's Sporting Green.

"I wish Magic had said, 'How I got this is nobody's business,' " said Michael Bodkin, media coordinator for ACT-UP Golden Gate. "I find it disgusting that the media have been treating it as offensive if he got it from a homosexual experience. I don't consider it a dishonor to be gay."

But cultural observers suggest that Johnson's distancing himself from gays has to do with being caught in a remarkable identity bind as a black man, athlete and Hollywood celebrity, with all the mainstream assumptions of heterosexuality that go with those categories.

"It's all there in the locker room: the image of the virile athlete with a woman in every port," said sociology Professor Harry Edwards of the University of California at Berkeley, an expert on sports and the media and an adviser to many professional sports teams. Edwards said he was not surprised at the sports world's eagerness to dispel notions that Johnson was infected by any means other than sex with a woman.

In the black community, being gay is like "double indemnity," said dancer Djola Branner of the San Francisco performance group Pomo Afro Homos. With blacks already sensitive to racial prejudice, "why have the extra stress of being gay if you can avoid it?" he asked.

But Johnson has only confirmed the straight "superstud" stereotype, some say. "I was the one most NBA players looked up to when it came to women," he wrote in Sports Illustrated. In the glamorous "Showtime" world of Lakers basketball, sportswriters say, even utility players could choose among female admirers after a game.

A TABOO SUBJECT

In the end, most agree, the point is not how Johnson picked up HIV but how his infection has made a taboo disease a subject for national and even global focus.

"I have a lot of respect for the courage he showed, (enough respect) to give him a lot of leeway," said King of the Human Rights Campaign. "To the best of my knowledge, Magic Johnson himself has said nothing anti- gay."

And as a unique individual -- revolutionary basketball player, ubiquitous television salesman, folk hero, youth role model, the biggest of stars in star-filled L.A. -- Johnson is in a unique position to help fight AIDS.

"It's not surprising that some people weigh larger than others in the culture," said Todd Gitlin, professor of sociology at UC Berkeley. "And you couldn't ask for a better embodiment of risk and guts."

CAPTION: PHOTO Magic Johnson

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