In 1981, 18-month-old William Brawner contracted HIV after receiving a blood transfusion following a severe burn injury. Due to the hysteria and fear of HIV/AIDS in the early stages of the disease, Brawner’s mother swore him to secrecy. A secret he kept for over 25 years.
The documentary “25 to Life” details Brawner’s journey and his decision years later to tell former girlfriends and sexual partners with whom he had unprotected sex, that he has AIDS. A brutally honest film, it is sometimes hard to decide if Brawner is villain, victim or victor. A graduate from Howard University with a master’s degree from Marygrove College, Brawner is now an activist and founder of Haven Youth Center, a nonprofit organization that provides educational, social and recreational services to HIV positive youth in Philadelphia, and has received numerous awards for his advocacy and service. He took time to talk about sex, betrayal, faith and redemption. That’s also the tagline for “25 to Life,” playing Dec. 1 in more than a dozen theaters in honor of World AIDS Day — including a screening at International House Philadelphia, where Brawner will take part in a Q&A.
PGN: I just came from seeing my nephew in his first Shakespearean play and it strikes me that your story is Shakespearean in nature too.
WB: Oh yeah? How so?
PGN: Lots of drama, changing characters, tragedy and triumph.
WB: True, lots of drama.
PGN: You became infected at a very young age and, in the film, your mother speaks about the fact that she saw what Ryan White, the American teenager who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984, and his mother went through — being expelled from school, ostracized and vilified by their community — and that’s what prompted her to keep your status a secret.
WB: Yes, it was crazy back in those days. People were awful.
PGN: His experience with ignorance and intolerance brought him into a close relationship with the LGBT community. Have you found yourself becoming an ally?
WB: Oh, I would definitely consider myself an ally. I’m not sure of the year, but I think I was about 8 or 9, and I remember being in a diner downtown with my mom and they were holding the Philadelphia Gay Pride parade outside. I remember people in the diner saying bad things about the gay people and my mother starting to cry. I asked her why she was crying and she said, “If it was not for the gay community, you wouldn’t have the medication that keeps you alive. The gay community fought tooth and nail for you to have the access to medication and if it wasn’t for them, you might not even be here.” I remember that clearly.
PGN: You’re very outspoken now, but as a kid were you shy or still outgoing?
WB: I don’t think I was ever shy. I was pretty much the same outgoing person. I played a lot of sports, I wanted to be a basketball superstar and when I found out that Magic Johnson was HIV-positive, I just knew I was going to play ball. I was an average student, Bs and Cs, an occasional A. I grew up in West Philadelphia in a single-parent household and for the most part of my younger years I was raised by my mother and my grandmother. I saw a lot of stuff but was never a part of it. I remember when the crack epidemic hit the inner-city communities, I remember when rap music first became popular and cars would roll by with music blaring out of the windows so loud it would shake your house. I was shielded from a lot of it; my mother and grandmother would not allow me to go outside without some type of adult supervision. If I visited friends, one of them would escort me to their house and I’d have to stay there. They were worry warts, especially my grandmother. There wasn’t a lot to do in the community so a lot of times we’d get in the car and drive to a park or movie or go roller skating.
PGN: What was your favorite subject in school?
WB: Recess! No, actually it was math. It was my favorite until algebra hit. I might have liked it better if I had a good teacher. Mine sucked.
PGN: Your mother told you that you had AIDS at a very young age. When did you begin to understand what it was?
WB: Phew, I’ll tell you when it sunk in how important it was to keep it a secret and when it hit me that I could die … It was in the early 1980s and I remember seeing ads about AIDS and they were bleak, dark messages with AIDS in red letters and they were just like … I remember being so scared, not even in relation to me having the disease but in how people perceived people with HIV/AIDS. You would hear stories about Ryan White and other people with AIDS and I didn’t need to go outside to understand why I needed to keep it a secret, all I needed to do was turn on the television. I was 5 or 6 and I’d think, If people knew that I had the stuff in this commercial, they’d try to kill me. We didn’t even tell my grandmother at first until I started taking the medications and she had to know because I’d have reactions to the drugs. It was awful, 5 years old and having to swallow all these pills. This was before AZT. I didn’t know the severity of the disease, I just knew what I had to do. My only hint was that while I got to be a kid and have fun, my mother was always melancholy and overly cautious. If I had a cough, she’d panic. There were a lot of emotions around my health. I realized that it could take me out when I was about 11. I’d go to support groups and see these very sick kids who were my age, who had the same exact thing that I had, I remember this, and building bonds with someone and them being gone the next week. I’d think, I need a support group from going to support group. I started wondering, How soon before that happens to me? I still struggle with that, wondering when it could take me. I’ve seen countless people and friends pass with this, I’ve seen us on our last days and ask, Is that how I’m going to go out?
PGN: In the documentary, you seem to convey a feeling of invincibility having lived this long with it.
WB: It’s a full circle of emotions. One minute I’m scared that I’ll go out like that and the next, granted this was when I was young, I’d say to myself, I don’t look like that, I don’t look nothin’ close to anything like that and it ain’t took me out yet! Maybe I have some sort of different strain from everybody else or maybe I’ve found the cure. If I keep eating this peanut butter and doing pushups, I’ll beat this thing. That was my young mind.
PGN: Did that lead to your apparent fearlessness? I recall reading about Olympic diver Greg Louganis and his fear when hitting his head during the Olympics that he could accidentally infect someone. Were you concerned when playing basketball? At that time there was a lot of ignorance about the disease.
WB: I was educated very early on about how the disease was transmitted so it wasn’t a concern for me. If I had a cut and came into contact with someone else, blah, blah, blah, I knew what was what.
PGN: Which brings me to, why would someone who’d been struggling with this for so long and who’d been an educator and activist go — as you stated — “wild” and have unprotected sex with so many women?
WB: That is something I still struggle with. When I was 18, I started engaging in unprotected sex with a woman I was dating. I disclosed to her after two years and believe it or not, it was OK with her. We were supposed to get married, etc. When I got to college, we broke up and she wrote a letter to the president of the school that rocked my world. She was the only person outside of my support groups that I’d ever told and she betrayed me. And I didn’t know what her next move would be, if she was going to put up posters or stand with a megaphone. So I went into survivor mode and decided to do everything and anything so that people wouldn’t believe her. I threw all of my medications away and began to become a guy I called Reds. He was a party dude, a ladies man, the wild and crazy boy. I don’t have any rationale for what I did. It’s just where my mind was. I did not engage in much unprotected sex, just with one person at school and that was by accident.
PGN: The film gave a different impression both on how she felt and your multiple partners.
WB: No, no. But I’ll say this, even though I used protection the majority of times, I should have disclosed. My partners should have had the opportunity to make a decision for themselves. As a 35-year-old man with a daughter, I take full responsibility, but back then I saw things differently.
PGN: I wonder if part of your “hyper masculinity” was to counteract the perception that anyone with AIDS had to be gay?
WB: Well, no one knew I was positive. Especially after being betrayed, I thought I’d go to the grave without ever telling anyone else.
PGN: No fear though that people would think that?
WB: Here’s what did happen. After I finally did disclose, I’ve spent more time than I care to convincing people that I actually got AIDS as a child. People assume that there’s no way that I’ve lived this long and look as healthy as I look, so I must have had contracted it as an older person and I must be gay. I don’t care about people speculating about my sexuality, I know who I am, but when you detach yourself from the reality of what HIV/AIDS really is and attach stigmas, it bothers me. If you think that the only way you can get AIDS is to be gay, there’s a problem. It’s not just a gay disease. And because of the stigma, you have less and less people coming out with their status.
PGN: You are the founder and executive director of Haven Youth Center here in Philadelphia. Tell me a little bit about what you do and what the stats are. I know that HIV/AIDS has been a growing problem in the black community.
WB: Yes, the largest growing population of people with AIDS right now are young African-American MSM [men who have sex with men], but AIDS doesn’t stand still; it may be heavy within one population now and will move tomorrow, understand? Just a few years ago, HIV/AIDS was the number-one killer of African-American women between the ages of 25-44, before that it was white MSM. So I have a problem with dividing us up into subdivisions, we need to focus on ev-er-y-body. We can’t just fight for our specific populations, we need to fight for everybody. Let’s bring all of our forces to bear. Don’t just send in the Army, send in the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force to fight this battle. Because when you walk into a room and people know you have HIV/AIDS, they don’t give a damn how you got it. You’re still the person they’re going to give a plastic plate to, talk to you for a minute and keep it moving. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, hemophiliac, perinatal; if you got it, you got it.
PGN: I was struck by something you said in the film: “I was alone with AIDS. Any time I tried mention it to my mom, she’d get upset. I wasn’t allowed to talk about it and because I couldn’t talk about it, I couldn’t express it and so it didn’t exist.”
WB: I created Haven to be what I wished I had. As an activist, I’m trying to be the person I wish I’d seen. Magic Johnson was great, but he wasn’t reachable. I first thought of it when I was 8, 9 years old going through the side effects of my meds in a bed alone, shaking and sweating under the covers with no one to talk to. It’s a place where infected and affected youth can just come and be themselves and talk about what they’re going through, so they won’t make some of the same decisions that I made. We also focus a lot on testing and getting people into care so they can get the proper meds and live a long and productive life. We also have a camp, Bright Feathers, that the kids go to. I attended it as a youth and it inspired me to start Haven House. The kids get a free week of rock climbing and canoeing, fresh air and bonfires, swimming and all that.
PGN: Are there LGBT youth in your group?
WB: Absolutely. We have everybody. And if you recall in the film, there’s a segment where I tell the kids, “I don’t give a damn, what goes on outside these walls, what you think about each other. When you come in here, this is a safe space for all of us. We are all family here.” And I have to check them sometimes when someone will say, “Well I didn’t ask for this, my mom gave it to me.” Who the hell asked for this? Do you think you’re better? Are you taking different meds from the rest of us? No! We’re all in the same boat. Get over it.
PGN: Is there ever any backlash because you have survived for so long, looking so “healthy?”
WB: Funny you should mention that. I do a lot of public speaking and this one college had invited me for years. One year they didn’t ask me to come back. I called to see if they’d lost their funding or something and they said that they couldn’t have me come out any more because the kids saw me and figured AIDS was no big deal. I’m thankful for how I look and feel and give all glory to God for that, but at the same time it can hinder my message. I think about death damn near every day, not to mention that I pop pills. Every day. And that I have a disease that was second-only to Ebola in the fear and negative connotation it has. Not to mention that I can’t have unprotected sex with my wife. If you think all that’s no big deal … perhaps you need to look a little closer. This ain’t no walk in the park.
PGN: Yes, the part of the film is about you trying to have a baby and having to do it through in-vitro, something I never considered.
WB: Yeah, something that should have been the most natural thing in the world became a whole process.