30 Years Later: Magic Johnson, HIV, And The Press Conference That Changed The World
It was 30 years ago, on November 7, that basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. announced he’d acquired HIV. No other HIV disclosure has had such a reverberating impact before or since. From the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles, where he achieved era-defining success with the LA Lakers, the cherub-faced icon held a press conference where he revealed he was living with HIV and would immediately retire from basketball. The magnitude of this event was due not only to his popularity as a sports hero; he was a 32-year-old heterosexual Black man who appeared to be perfectly healthy and still in his athletic prime.
Unlike other celebrities with HIV whose disclosure and/or death made mainstream (Rock Hudson, Liberace) and LGBTQ (Sylvester) headlines, Magic was not gay, nor did he use intravenous drugs. He was heterosexual, which meant he was "just like anybody else" and not like those dispensable others. Those others made up a besieged minority who did not need to be convinced that AIDS was real. Among them were Black gay men.
In 1991, Black gay and bisexual men along with cisgender and transgender women and people using intravenous drugs were weathering a perfect storm of disease and stigma within our communities driven by crosswind forces of racism, homophobia, misogynoir, transphobia, and disdain for low income-poor people. Black gay men’s intimate experience with AIDS gave us profound understandings of the power and limitations of Magic Johnson’s disclosure and the distances between what it seemed to promise and what unfolded.
By 1991, I had been living with HIV for over five years. My first symptom: swollen lymph glands made their socially awkward appearance over Memorial Day weekend in 1985. I was 25 years old and in full enjoyment of my self-accepting, sexually liberated life. As my family doctor’s fingers traced the nodes in my neck, he softly asked, “Are you homosexual or normal?” It was one of several binaries forced upon my kind to choose from.
“In 1991, Black gay and bisexual men, along with cisgender and transgender women, were weathering a perfect storm of disease and stigma within our own communities. This storm was driven by crosswind forces of racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, and hatred of poor people.”
The terms people and the media used to identify people living with HIV were a transparent reflection of what they thought about us. The media labeled us as AIDS victims. People who acquired HIV through blood transfusions or accidental needle sticks were known as “innocent AIDS victims,” which meant that those who acquired HIV through sex and/or shared needles were guilty. Innocent/Guilty Straight/Gay/Normal/Other. I checked the wrong box on each of those sets.
Magic was considered by most as “normal.” He might have been considered guilty, but not shamefully so, for guilt means “I did wrong” (sexually active hetero) while shame means “I am wrong” (gay active or not). During the press conference, he made it a point to say that he was not gay. He initially denied knowing how he acquired HIV, then later admitted that it was from having sex with numerous women. When people learned someone tested positive, the burning question that followed, one which demanded an immediate response, was often not “how are they doing?” It was “how did (they) get it?”
A heterosexual majority judged the moral character, normalcy, and human worth of the person living with HIV by the answer given or what they believed was the real answer. Magic must have felt the weight of that question and pondered when and how to answer it. He had to have known that it would be the most frequently asked question reigning over all others. He had to know that the answer he gave and the answer many thought they knew probably would not match. How then did that consideration affect every public statement, TV appearance, advocacy, and funding decision he made from then on?
A Game-Changer For Black HIV Awareness
To appreciate the measure of Magic’s disclosure, one must consider the social climate of the U.S. in 1991.
“It was a curse from God for being gay,” recalls Rod Davis, 54.
“There were few safe places for people to disclose. If you did disclose, you could lose your home, your job,” Davis says.
His mother would send him articles about AIDS-related deaths and letters that said “If I don’t change my ways I would be doomed like these other white men and die and burn in hell.”
Veteran spiritual leader Claude E. Bowen, 74, describes a common response to AIDS from Black pastors.
“From the pulpit, they would say, 'There’s just too many sissies. God is not pleased with all these sissies.’ And sissies would be up in the pews, ‘Amen, pastor.’”
Larry Walker, 42 Executive Director of THRIVE SS, notes that “HIV changed gay culture, over-adherence to masculine expression, working out, the way we show up physically. The 70s girls wanted to be snatched. In the 90s, too snatched ain’t right. I want to be buffed up. Not only out of HIV and homophobia, but nobody wanted to look gay.”
“From the pulpit, they would say, ‘There’s just too many sissies. God is not pleased with all these sissies.’ And sissies would be up in the pews, ‘Amen, pastor.’”
Reactions to Magic Johnson’s HIV disclosure varied, often depending on preconceived notions about how HIV is transmitted and earlier rumors about the athlete’s sexuality.
Davis remembers it was “Oh yeah, he got the sissy disease. He got the gay disease. They tried to figure out how he got it. He couldn’t have gotten it from a female, so he must have been with a transgender [woman] or something like that.”
Graphic designer Maurice Cook, 51, noted the cultural weight of the barbershop as a central space where Black men shared their speculations.
“At the barbershop, they were saying, ‘I always knew he was too friendly with Isiah Thomas. I knew he was a faggot. That’s the reason why so many want to keep it a secret.’”
Regardless of what people thought they knew about Magic’s sexuality, HIV/STD hotlines and testing clinics across the country were slammed for days afterward.
Davis thought, “Oh finally, a Black person of power and stature and wealth. It’s now gonna bring some of the best treatment and services available.”
Davis would read articles on Magic and follow appearances where he talked about treatment options so that he could discuss the shared strategies with his doctor.
From CNN: During a press conference in 1991 basketball legend Magic Johnson announces he has HIV and is leaving the NBA.
“I knew he was going to get the best of the best because of who he was,” Davis says.
The legacy of Magic Johnson’s disclosure is beyond dispute. By revealing his HIV status, he signaled that AIDS is not exclusively a gay man’s disease. For Black America, he amplified the very relevance of AIDS. The perception of which was limited by misinformation and negative biases. Yet he rarely addressed the effects of anti-LGBTQ hatred and the disproportionate impact on Black queer men and transgender women. He also put distance between himself and the “harems of women” with whom he had multiple sexual encounters. During an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show on the first anniversary of his disclosure, Oprah, Magic, and his wife Cookie referred to his sexual partners as “floozies” on live television.
In her essay “Fatal Floozies,” author Pearl Cleage writes of this moment: “We want him to be the innocent victim of some anonymous fast girls because the fantasy of the fatal floozies helps us feel safer, just like we used to when we were pretending that the only people who got AIDS were gay white men.”
For all his relative courage, Magic either perpetuated or avoided challenging status quo treatment of sexual and gender minorities in Black communities. Like many celebrities enveloped in layers of privilege afforded by wealth and identity, Magic may have taken a significant risk in disclosing, but he also played it safe.
HIV disclosure, particularly from public figures, is an important tool in increasing awareness and promoting dialogue. But like any single tool, it has limitations. It does little to address the biases and structural injustices that lock Black populations in chronic physical and emotional trauma, of which HIV is more a symptom than a cause. Disclosure requires context and initiative to carry the ball further beyond the initial act.
“It’s like leaving the parts to build a house just sitting there, without constructing anything,” Walker observes.
“Those parts could do a myriad of things. They could build a house or start a fire. Seeing celebrity disclosure is like bringing these materials to a site and leaving it there, especially for poor people. Give us context, or else it could hurt us, start a fire, or the kids will get tetanus from the rusty nails,” Walker adds.
“Seeing celebrity disclosure is like bringing these materials to a site and leaving it there, especially for poor people. Give us context, or else it could hurt us, start a fire, or the kids will get tetanus from the rusty nails.”
More importantly, this work should not be left to people living with HIV to shoulder as they have enough to bear. Those who decide to disclose do a meaningful service to us all. All things considered, Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. was destined to play a unique role in our nation’s history that ultimately qualified him for more than one Hall of Fame. He delivered a game-changer, overturning at least some of what a largely indifferent and bigoted majority thought and said about AIDS.
Walker points to crucial steps overlooked in most of the responses to Magic's disclosure. Yes, more heterosexual Black folks were alerted to being HIV susceptible, thus lifting it a few notches on their crowded list of woes. AIDS was suddenly deemed more relevant because straight men could get it. Black queer men and Black women became indispensable to Black HIV/AIDS advocacy and services, as they have been to the Church and other Black institutions. However, more was needed to address our divisions along with the disproportionate impact of AIDS in Black communities as another symptom of our oppression and not just a consequence of our behavior. For the 30 years that followed, we all paid dearly for those divisions, some of us with our lives.
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