Sex in the days following Magic Johnson`s announcement: It`s different.
Thursday afternoon, Nov. 7. Johnson-hero and heterosexual-discloses that he is carrying the virus that causes AIDS.
Friday night, Nov. 8. The social scene in and around Chicago just isn`t the same.
At Lime Ricky`s, a nightclub in Des Plaines with a late-night singles clientele, people stay in their own groups. They don`t pair off and disappear into the evening the way they usually do.
At a house party in Lake Forest, the going-steady teens, many of whom normally drift off to the bedrooms at such affairs, remain downstairs, shooting pool.
At the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house at Northwestern University in Evanston, things are unusually quiet. One member says the residents are in mourning.
No one knows how long-or to what extent-the news of the NBA star`s infection will affect heterosexual behavior.
Although the media have periodically reported that AIDS was poised to spread into the straight community (Life magazine, 1985, ”Now No One Is Safe From AIDS”; U.S. News & World Report, 1987, ”Everyone Is at Risk”;
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Newsweek, 1988, ”A Grim Warning for Straight Society”), not everyone believed it.
After all, less than 6 percent of the 196,000 diagnosed cases of AIDS in America are heterosexuals. Not everyone changed his or her behavior.
But Johnson`s announcement 10 days ago appears to have caused many to rethink their lives and their lifestyles.
Here is a look at how some Chicago area teens, college students, singles and minority males are dealing with life in the wake of Magic Johnson`s disclosure.
The high school scene
Robert (some names in this story have been changed or withheld to protect the privacy of the subjects), a 17-year-old Hispanic senior at Lake View High School (the name of the school as published has been corrected here and in a subsequent reference in this text) in Chicago, is the rare teenager who`s actually focused on AIDS. He has thought about it a lot. When a skating-board injury took nearly six months to heal, he was afraid he had the disease.
But he continued, he recalls, to have sex during those six months. And he never wore a condom.
”I personally don`t like to use them, therefore I don`t,” says Robert, who estimates that he has had 15 sexual partners since age 12. But thanks to Magic Johnson, that may change.
”It really opened my eyes. Just to hear that he had suddenly gotten (the AIDS virus), that scared me.”
But not that much. The weekend after Johnson`s announcement, Robert says he thought about AIDS, but still had sex without using a condom.
”Teenagers think they`re immortal,” says an 18-year-old senior at Lake View, a girl who describes her family as ”white, middle-class” and who says she had 10 sexual partners during the summer between her freshman and sophomore years.
She worries about AIDS, she admits, but routinely has sex without using condoms-unless it`s a one-night stand, in which case she usually insists on them. And she doesn`t feel she`s in any real danger.
”Sure, people are talking about Magic. But it`s, `Oh, God, he got it.`
Not, `He got it, I could get it.` It`s not going to hit home until your best friend gets it.”
No one among her friends, she says, is initiating any intimate safe-sex discussions before having intercourse: ”It`s not something that`s a hot topic.”
In Evanston, a 15-year-old boy, a straight-A sophomore at Evanston Township High School, couldn`t disagree more.
”Right now sex is a stupid thing,” he says. ”The possible risks outweigh the possible benefits by a lot. STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) can mess up your life. AIDS can end it.
”It`s impossible to protect yourself completely, without abstinence. So I think abstinence is the way to go. The only risk is getting teased. That`s a lot easier to deal with than getting killed.”
The college scene
The revelation that Magic Johnson has the HIV virus seems to have been a boon to pharmacies near the Evanston campus of Northwestern University.
”People went out and got condoms that night,” says Jay Riven, 22, a student and a volunteer ”peer contraceptive educator” who speaks to other students about the prevention of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. ”But you know something? I`m waiting to see if people fall back into their old habits. My guess is they will.”
Students note that they have reached sexual maturity in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. ”As soon as I knew about sex, I knew about AIDS,” says a 22- year-old woman at the University of Chicago.
Some students say they will not consider engaging in unprotected intercourse.
”You`re putting your life on the line,” says Sergio Barreto, 20, a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
”I get offended if a guy starts something and doesn`t use a condom and waits for me to ask,” says Rachel West, an 18-year-old Northwestern student who has on occasion refrained from sex because the man did not provide a condom.
Even in an 18-month-old monogamous relationship, one 21-year-old student at Northern Illinois University in De Kalb says, she still insists on condoms. She says she won`t stop using them until her boyfriend is tested for HIV.
But others acknowledge that they do not always carry through on their good intentions.
”When you drink and get really horny, it`s hard to say, `Hey, I shouldn`t do this,` ” says Nicholas Reding, a 19-year-old Northwestern student.
And college students tend to perceive AIDS as a distant threat.
”The people I`m with don`t do drugs, aren`t bisexual, and haven`t had a recent transfusion,” says Greg, a 30-year-old graduate student at
Northeastern Illinois University. He believes he can ”tell the promiscuous ones from the others.”
Still, a certain level of anxiety appears to have settled in on local campuses. One 24-year-old Northwestern student says he has been tested for the AIDS virus twice. ”I had a long cold that would not go away,” he recalls.
”The anxiety was driving me crazy.”
His tests were negative, but the experience was harrowing. Even so, he confesses, he sometimes does not use a condom.
While casual sex still happens in college, there seems to be an underlying sense among many students that such behavior is socially undesirable, the result of lapses in judgment and momentary weaknesses.
”You can`t go around randomly sleeping with people,” says Michelle Dennison, 19, a student at Northwestern. ”It just seems so unnatural now.”
”Someone who would have sex with me the first time I knew her, I wouldn`t want to have sex with,” says a 22-year-old student at Northern Illinois University. ”I would wonder how many other men she slept with the first time.”
Moreover, there seems to be in some quarters a renewed, if pragmatic, appreciation of virginity. Reding recalls somewhat wistfully that in high school many of his sex partners were girls who had no sexual histories.
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But one 22-year-old Northwestern student suggests that the current attention being paid to sexual restraint may be just temporary. ”As soon as they find a cure,” he says, ”I`m sure people are going to be like rabbits.”
The singles scene
This is the crowd that`s really nervous. They`re older-20s, 30s, 40s and up-so the sense of youthful invincibility is gone. These folks are wiser. They know a little bit more about AIDS than the younger set does. And they`re scared.
”I asked my fiance if he could list all his previous sexual partners on one hand,” says Janice, 26, a sales representative from Schaumburg. ”I said how about on both hands. He just laughed.”
”I dated a woman in 1981,” recalls Donald, 45, an environmental engineer who lives in Glenwood. ”If I saw her on the street today, I`d put on rubber gloves before I shook her hand.”
Many of these people came of age in the if-it-feels-good-do-it 1960s and
`70s. Even the ones who became sexually active in the 1980s were more worried about pregnancy and herpes than AIDS.
If they used condoms, they used them as David, 34, did-casually. Sometimes he used them, he says, sometimes he didn`t. Why was he so cavalier? ”It`s hard to say,” says David, who lives in Elmwood Park and works in marketing. ”I guess I wasn`t thinking. But I`m not taking anything for granted anymore.”
Janice is like many people. She used condoms only at the start of a relationship. ”Once I felt comfortable with the person, the condoms were generally abandoned.”
Some people never used them. In May, 32-year-old Lisa, of Schaumburg, ended a four-year relationship. Four years of unsafe sex. What was she thinking?
”I was probably thinking the same thing Magic Johnson was thinking: It can`t happen to me.”
Now these people feel they have to account for decisions they made 4, 6, 10 years ago. It can take a decade or longer after someone contracts the virus for symptoms of AIDS to appear.
Some of these single adults, like Jill, 35, of Lincoln Park, who works in the art business, are in a panic, even though she doesn`t know one heterosexual man or woman with AIDS. But through the years she has had a lot of unprotected sex with a lot of partners.
Jill says she recently met a man she was interested in. He was also dating another woman and he didn`t use a condom. When Jill asked him why, he said he and the woman had both recently tested negative for HIV.
”Who knows if he`s telling the truth? I`ve told men I`ve been tested and I haven`t.”
That is about to change. Last week, Jill made an appointment for an AIDS test.
The minority scene
The impact of Magic Johnson`s announcement on young black men was perhaps greater than on any other group. Here was someone who looked like them, who was a master of the black national sport and who had that quality especially prized by young black men: He was big time fresh. Translation: cool.
”I think this will change things,” says Sean Little, 19, a student at Harold Washington College in the Loop. ”He`s a real role model. And he was married and all. It`s a shock.”
But while the news about Johnson commanded people`s attention and over time may change behavior, it seemed to make little difference in the conduct of patrons at some city nightclubs the weekend after it hit the airwaves.
”At the clubs, it was ignored,” Little recalls. ”No one talked about it. The people were there to party, to meet other people they were sexually attracted to.”
And not everyone seemed to have gotten the message that if you`re going to have sex these days, it had better be the safe kind.
Little`s friend Jonathan Beckom, 19, remembers hearing someone he knows say about Johnson`s plight, ” `That`s him. This is me. I`m still going to be out there doing my thing.` ”
It might take a while for reality to catch up to a youth culture that made the song ”I Want to Sex You Up” a top hit last summer.
But ”this will wake some folks up because there are a lot of people out there who are still ignorant of the fact that this is a very dangerous disease,” says Deron Jackson, 20, another student.
His friend Sean Porter, 21, says he has used condoms for years. ”I don`t care what my friends think.”
Jackson says he doesn`t use them because he`s got a steady girlfriend to whom he`s faithful. ”Like that makes a difference?” asks Porter.
”Even Magic said it: Use your thinking cap. And while you`re at it, put on a cap down there,” Porter says.
”This isn`t going to be forgotten,” says Jackson of Magic Johnson`s impact. ”It`s going to be talked about,” adds Porter, ”through the `90s.”