Every time you win, it diminishes the fear a little bit. You never really cancel the fear of losing; you keep challenging it. — Arthur Ashe
My last post (which I thought was at least semi-brilliant), was lost in a mid-WIFI cycle at Starbucks. Fortunately, the coffee was still good. So, I sat down to re-create my brilliance, and for an inexplicable reason, the above quote by Arthur Ashe floated across my internet’s world. His life was noble and tragic and I want to write about him instead of giving into self-indulgence.
Mr. Ashe was 43
Mr. Ashe would have been approaching 83 had he lived. Instead, he passed nearly 40-years ago of HIV-AIDS in 1993. He received his diagnosis in the summer of 1988, just months before I separated from the paramedic job. The featured photo is not Arthur Ashe at the peak of his physicality, but as he pleaded with organizations such as the United Nations for more funding and research.
Neither AIDS victims nor medical research received encouraging signs of funding Ashe’s pleas. To this day in 2025, there exist no vaccine or cure for an HIV infection. Please spare me any bullshit about viral suppressant drugs. Sometimes they work, sometimes not but most important, they are veneer. In 2024, about 38,000 new cases were reported in the U.S. Around the world, many continue to die. There is, as I have mentioned before, virtually no similarities between COVID-19 and HIV.
I remember those times when Arthur Ashe pleaded, for those times were filled with inaction and judgment. As a New York City Paramedic during those days, when AIDS most always meant a death sentence, every patient (in addition to rightfully being terrified) was placed under a societal lens. Of course, there were gossipy discussions around the life of Ashe post diagnosis. Do I think people are more sensitive, “woke,” or compassionate now versus then? No, hell no. Social media had made sure of that.
When I wrote The Sea of Peroxide, I interviewed family members whose relatives had passed, and gay or straight, they reported acts of bias, snide finger pointing, whispers of judgment and lots of dumb-ass stupidity. In the remembrance of those times, Arthur Ashe was immediately deemed to have been in the closet.
Strange Meetings
It is ironic that Arthur Ashe met with Ronald Reagan in 1982 when he was all the rage, and also when the administration was essentially doing everything it could to turn its back on the developing crisis. The crisis developed, Ashe was caught up in it, and so was the gossip of his orientation. For historical record-setting, let’s set aside the Republican versus Democrat discussions. For in those days, for nearly every indifferent politician on the Right, there were comedians and comments on the Left that were equally obnoxious. Congress, then as now was a mixture of Left and Right, and by 1983 it was Democrat controlled. No one cared much about AIDS victims.
We New York City paramedics and EMTs often had more AIDS patients who were IV drug abusers than homosexuals. Rather early on, medical science realized the virus was blood-borne, patient to patient. It should have been enough. However, the game dragged-on and suspected personalities such as Liberace, Peter Allen and Rock Hudson came to represent the fundamentalist mindset.
The blood supply did not get rigorously tested before 1985. Even then, units of tainted blood slipped through the cracks. There were many fly-by-night inner-city blood donation clinics that sold to hospitals. Hospitals may not have had an accurate HIV screening protocol, but they had one for Hepatitis. There was often a high association between HIV and Hepatitis.
Arthur Ashe was one of many tragedies during that time. It wasn’t the rich and famous I came to mourn, but the invisible, the common man, the marginalized. They had no funeral corteges, nor giant sprays of flowers, nor courtside eulogies.
I wrote The Sea of Peroxide in part, because I needed to remember. Who will remember Arthur Ashe for his greatest achievements; a dedication to peace, to finding cures, to helping the poor? Ultimately, there are a hundred reasons “to forget the unpleasant,” and only one to remember: compassion. Compassion makes us human. Everything else is like broken WIFI.
