Days of Grace Read Free Page A

Tennis Patrons at the William G. Fitzgerald Tennis Center, where the center court is named after me. I canceled that appointment, too. Then Jeanne and I began to talk. We talked for hours that day, looking at the problem from every possible angle, trying to come up with the best plan.
    In one way or another, Jeanne and I had already had this conversation many times. From the start, we had understood that the truth would eventually come out, and that basically we had three choices about the revelation: The first was to make the announcement ourselves, when and where we wanted. The second was to wait until the rumors began to build, until the story seemed about to break, then try to preempt the announcement ourselves. The third choice, easily the worst, was to wait until the announcement was a
fait accompli
, until one of us turned on the television or picked up a newspaper and saw a picture of my face and the report of a rumor, or until some reporter called on the telephone to say, “Mr. Ashe, sir, Associated Press is running a wire story about you. It says you have AIDS. Any comment, sir?” Then we would have totally lost control of our lives. We had decided long before that if we could not implement pian A, then we absolutely had to execute plan B. And now it had to be done the next day.
    Although she later told me that I was wrong, quite wrong, I was sure Jeanne was relieved that the truth was finally going to come out. I suppose that I have a deeper commitment to keeping things to myself, bottling them up, suppressing them. I tend to be more on guard. But we both knew that our lives would be changed forever by the announcement, even if we didn’t know exactly how and to what extent. I could see, too, that we were part of a larger pattern concerning AIDS and publicity, that our announcement could not be cleanly divorced from similar announcements by other persons of some celebrity. Although light needed to be shed on AIDS, very few people were willing to admit to being infected with the HIV virus, much less the disease itself.
    Before Magic Johnson went public the previous November about his HIV infection, no prominent heterosexual had admitted publicly to being HIV-positive, or to having AIDS, unless he or she were on his or her deathbed. One could argue that Magic did not have much of a choice in making his announcement, in that he would have had to explainwhy he was retiring as a basketball player at the height of his game, apparently without an injury. He could not have feigned a career-threatening injury even if he had wanted to, because the integrity of his physicians would have been on the line. Rock Hudson admitted his infection only near the very end. Only after the death of Brad Davis, who starred in the movie
Midnight Express
, did anyone admit that he had died of AIDS. Willi Smith, the gifted black clothing designer, died without admitting he had AIDS. The entertainer Peter Allen died after my announcement but never came forward before his death to tell the world that he was infected. Rudolf Nureyev forced his doctor into the position of initially denying, after the dancer’s death, that he had died of AIDS.
    Public attitudes have changed and become more enlightened, and still AIDS patients who are public figures tremble at announcing their infection. Cancer, once almost as unspeakable, is one thing, but AIDS is quite another. One can be sure that there are many famous people who are HIV-positive, or who have full-blown AIDS, and are keeping it a secret. As for myself, I never worried as much about being a social outcast as I did about not being able to maintain my life’s schedule. On visa applications, on job applications, in seeking medical treatment or insurance, and in myriad other ways, AIDS is enough in many cases to result in a blunt rejection. Brad Davis’s wife confessed that Davis had kept his illness a secret so that he could continue to take whatever acting jobs came his way.
    I love to travel,