How Magic Johnson Fought the AIDS Epidemic
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on May 14th, 2014 11:08 pm by HL
How Magic Johnson Fought the AIDS Epidemic
Donald Sterling, the racist cretin who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, raised a series of interesting questions about Magic Johnson on Monday, during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “What has he done, can you tell me? Big Magic Johnson, what has he done?” Sterling asked dismissively. “What does he do for the black people?” Sterling added that Johnson should be “ashamed of himself” for having H.I.V., and suggested that he was a terrible role model for children.
As it happens, I started working as a reporter for the New York Times in November of 1991, a few days before Johnson announced that he had been infected with H.I.V. In the nineteen-eighties, I spent several years covering the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post, and my first stories at the Times were about Johnson’s announcement and the seismic impact it had for African-American teen-agers across the country.
