Chances are you don’t remember where you were when Earvin “Magic” Johnson announced his HIV positive status. The reason I remember it so vividly is that I was interning at St. Louis Effort for AIDS on Thursday, November 7th, 1991, at a time when “breaking news” meant, in fact, that something was interrupting scheduled programming. On this particular day, we were all called to the EFA conference room to hear his announcement on live television.
Magic Johnson was all of 32 years when he announced his HIV positive status. He was also newly married to Earleatha, aka “Cookie,” his wife of nearly three decades now, at a time when AIDS was referred to as “the gay plague.” Magic Johnson was neither gay nor bisexual. He has consistently maintained that he contracted HIV through unprotected heterosexual sex. And consider that by 1991, HIV and AIDS had been around for a full decade. Another Republican president had all but ignored the disease as long as possible, and then only begrudgingly. In 1989 when Reagan left office, 89,343 Americans had died of AIDS, a fraction of the number of COVID-19 deaths in the US today.
Barely ten months into the current pandemic and a generation and a half later, you may recall where you were when Tom Hanks announced his COVID-19 status. But Magic Johnson’s HIV announcement was a much bigger deal at the time. First, not only was HIV considered a gay disease 30 years ago, it was also treated as a death sentence. Second, Magic immediately and simultaneously retired from professional basketball; there was no 14-day quarantine. This is unthinkable now, and not just because the Denver Broncos’ four quarterbacks were all exposed to coronavirus and thus ineligible to play in Sunday’s game versus the New Orleans Saints, which the latter easily won.
What made Magic Johnson’s news conference so powerful was his candor. His exact quote was, “I plan to go on living for a long time.” After so many years of fear, denial, and misinformation about the virus that causes AIDS, it’s nice to see how prescient his words really were. We should all take a minute to appreciate Johnson’s announcement anew: how bravely he adjusted to a scary diagnosis for himself, his family, his colleagues, and the nation in the midst of a global health crisis.
World AIDS Day is celebrated every December 1st to raise awareness about HIV infection and mourn those who have died of the disease. Nothing would be more appropriate for Joe Biden to do on day one than to establish a national commission on COVID-19 and cancel Donald Trump’s misguided withdrawal from the World Health Organization. And a World COVID Day to beat back pandemic conspiracies and general COVID misinformation would be nothing less than transcendental.
