AIDS: The black plague

Then there's this other issue. My sense is that a lot of the really great journalism and films made about AIDS and gay America were so riveting, and that, for all the suffering that gay America endured, they really advanced the issue of gay life and gay culture and rights. AIDS blew our assumptions about them out of the water and really brought them into the mainstream.

Part of the reason that happened was because gay men, and certainly gay men living with AIDS, wrote these books and wrote these plays. And in some ways, we expect these communities -- in the culturally sensitive world we live in -- to tell their stories, and then we can embrace them. The "other" is not supposed to come in and do the piece.

That worked in the gay community, but when you deal with communities that were literally falling apart, and an epidemic that was hitting people who weren't necessarily educated, and throw on top of that the idea of all the shame and secrecy, we didn't see the wealth of journalism and memoir and art come out of this epidemic in black America. Once you have that wealth of art, it gives the media traction to engage.

That said, it has been a failure of the media not to take some responsibility. It's constantly amazing to me while I was writing that there was so much incredible material and no one has written this book. It's almost absurd. Early on, I was this 25-year-old kid who stumbled into this almost by accident, 18 years into the epidemic, and to have numbers in front of you that say that over 100,000 black people have died of AIDS, it's phenomenal that this book hasn't been written six times over.

What kind of response has your book gotten from black readers?

The response I've gotten so far has been really great. The black people who've read the book have seemed really engaged by it. The people who read it felt very connected to the characters, and that I captured something about the experience, which to me was really gratifying.

The white people-- [Laughs.] The response I've consistently gotten is, "Wow, I never would've thought I would've wanted to read this. Who wants to read another AIDS book?" Which is really honest. The truth is, I wouldn't have wanted to read an AIDS book. I consider myself someone who has a public consciousness and is interested in public health and knew about AIDS, but quite frankly, I felt like I'd heard about AIDS and didn't want to read another book about suffering and dying. The outcome seemed predictable.

But then reporting the book, I started out asking really basic questions, and I found that AIDS put the 25-year history of race and the lived experience of race into a really dramatic relief. I had this pastiche of fragments and moments and memories that were so powerful. That kind of unvarnished window into their experience was exciting and gripping for me, and I found that the white people who've read the book have really been drawn into that.

How did you get interested in the subject in the first place?

I was studying at the Columbia Journalism School and, through that, covering an education story in Harlem. A member of the PTA came up and said, "You want a real story, talk to all the kids whose parents are dying of AIDS." My response was, "Wow-- huh?"

Then I started to report it a little bit, and what I found was that AIDS has been disproportionately black since the moment the epidemic began. That was another "wow" moment. We're 18 years into the AIDS epidemic, there have been thousands of stories written, plays, books, movies, and I haven't really heard this. What happened here?

Then as I reported more, I realized that AIDS intersected with crack cocaine, heroin, the black church, the legacy of the civil rights movement, the American South, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the crumbling of Harlem and Oakland [Calif.]. These were things I had always been really confused by, interested in, but always had a hard time wrapping my mind around.

I had been dissatisfied with the culture of racial debate in this country -- it felt very stilted and cautious. Too often it was either always peering backwards at the civil rights movement and these heroic figures and how we overcame 200 years of institutionalized racism, or else painting people in terms of their victimhood, or else, more often -- with most of us, myself included -- there was this sense of caution. As a white person I'm really not supposed to be thinking about or being critical of black people, or really engaging them in any kind of serious debate. And if I do, it's a fairly dangerous road to traverse.

I'm about as white as they come. I'm glow-in-the-dark. And this question dogged me the whole way through: Why are you doing this? Why have you been interested in this subject? Have you been touched by this? Do you have a black friend?

But working on the book not only empowered me to engage with the black community in a way that felt honest and way freer than I ever felt before, it made me feel more comfortable talking to my white well-meaning, liberal friends about race in this open way, which for so long has felt really stilted and uncomfortable. What I found was that more than black people, white people were nervous about me writing this book. You know, "What are you getting at? What are you trying to say?" My agent said, "White people don't get book contracts to write about blacks."

How did you get the subjects of your book to trust you enough to really open up? And how did you find your own attitudes about race changing?

Even now I'm doing these readings and I'm on the radio and I'm talking about subjects like the black church, black sexuality, and the social breakdown of the black community, and I'm thinking, "My God, am I killing my career? Am I going to be crucified?"

I didn't really know my head from my feet when I got into this topic. It was this huge, complicated thing that I couldn't get my mind around. But I made two decisions. One was, I'm never going to even try to sound faintly black. I'm not going to try to ingratiate myself that way. But I'm also not going to censor myself. I'm not going to try to over-empathize and say, "I don't know, I can't imagine where you're coming from, please just tell me." I decided that in my interviews, I was going to ask whatever questions came to mind, no matter how critical or potentially explosive or racially sensitive they were. Bearing in mind that I would communicate them in sensitive, respectful ways.

About a year into my research, I was sitting with Bob Fullilove [one of the book's central characters], and he said, "Jacob, you don't know this, but you've crossed the boundary, you speak the language, you talk like a black person." And I was like, "Huh?" I sounded about as white as they come.

Next Page: The black editor who proclaimed: "This white boy is not going to be writing this book for me"

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