Walter L. Williams: Walter L. Williams is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. He is the Editor of the INTERNATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN REVIEW.
This book is an autobiography of an African-American lesbian, who goes by the name of “Conscious.” She claims to have been infected with HIV by sexual contact with another female. This claim is controversial, because she also engaged in widespread drug use, and states that she often cut herself with glass drug bongs. It is possible she got infected by blood-to-blood contact with other drug users who were infected.
I have no doubt that Conscious sincerely believes that she was infected by HIV by sex with another woman. However, if her claim is not true, then titling her book “Girl to Girl, you can be infected” does a disservice to the lesbian community. Unless an HIV positive female has direct blood to blood contact with another female, the medical literature suggests that HIV transmission through female-female erotic behaviors is extremely rare. Most lesbians believe that they are much safer having sex with another woman, than with a man, where penile insertion is the great danger for HIV infection.
It is important to keep these relative dangers in context, and not to needlessly cause alarm where there is little danger.
Having said that, this book's call for lesbians to get tested for HIV is constructive. Especially for lesbians who have engaged in IV drug use, testing should be encouraged.
This book is written as an interview of Conscious by Allan, her counselor in a drug treatment program. Allan probes her childhood memories until she blurts out trauma that she had tried to suppress. Her mother and aunts engaged in prostitution to get money for drugs. She spent her money on expensive clothes and perfumes, rather than on her children, who lived in squalor. As a child in Harlem, Conscious was a masculine little girl. She spent most of the time with her older teenage cousins, who first introduced her to sex. She felt that this was child abuse, and she relates how she felt betrayed by practically every male cousin she had. Even her female cousin helped her boyfriend rape Conscious, and Conscious' older brother sexually exploited her.
Faced with this exploitation, she said, “My outlets were athletics and building a strong facade. I even began to change the way I looked. I became even more muscular and boyish-ooking. I even began to have dreams of being a military general covered in armor” (p.57). “I was tired of being picked on and abused. I cleverly figured that if they were looking for a pretty little girl to abuse, then I should change myself into a tough-looking little boy, in order to hopefully be overlooked” (p.59). “I soon became very aggressive and athletic in school. I needed to be in control of other children and became intimidating to them. I got involved in gymnastics, karate, swimming and basketball…. I began to disguise myself as a boy with the hopes of being overlooked by any male predators that were looking for a weak little girl” (p.61). “I became accepted as the neighborhood tomboy. A pretty tomboy. I was beyond being a tomboy though. I had this insatiable need to be superior to boys” (p.62).
Conscious became very skillful at playing basketball, and in high school joined the girls' basketball team where she finally felt at home: “It was like a big closet full of dykes in basketball. And what topped it off was our coach was the biggest dyke of them all. Baby dykes being led by one big mama dyke” (p.122). By the time she graduated from high school she won a full four-year basketball scholarship to Syracuse University. It looked like things were going much better for her, but Conscious became rebellious in college and started using cocaine. “I didn't appreciate that I had fairly easily achieved through basketball what millions of Black children and teenagers struggle to do, but never obtain…. I was stuck on my misfortunes and stuck in so much self-pity that I thought I was the only one in the world with problems…. Ultimately I sabotaged myself and let my scholarship slip down the drain. All my life, I've been good at sabotaging things that have been good for me. I quit the team and moved into an apartment off campus” (pp.162-163).
Eventually, to pay for her increasingly expensive crack habit, Conscious and her girlfriend Justeen started pimping for female prostitutes who turned tricks for drug money. They had plenty of drugs, and kept getting deeper into the drug scene. It was during this time that Conscious believed that she was infected with HIV by having sex with Justeen: “Oral sex with open fever blisters on my mouth and finger penetration with open cuts on my fingers and hands. The cuts on my hands were caused by tha glass dick [coke equipment] constantly breaking, and other open wounds on my hands were caused by handling cocaine without any protection. After handling cocaine continuously, the chemicals chapped and cracked my hands, thus enabling the virus easy entrance into my system. What made it worse was sometimes Justeen bled during finger penetration because my nails scratched and pierced the tissue lining along the walls of her vagina during rough sex” (p.206). Justeen, who had evidently been infected by her drug-using boyfriend before she met Conscious, died of AIDS before this book was published. Conscious got tested and found out that she also was HIV positive.
As depressing as all of this book is, it shows the potential for people to turn their lives around. Conscious swore to stop using drugs, and got into a drug rebab program. After completing the program she got a steady job, working as a bouncer at a New York nightclub. There she met the actor Mark Wahlberg, who hired her as his bodyguard, and after that she started working as an assistant to Queen Latifah on her television show. Now she has a web site at www.prettytomboys.com which updates the reader on her progress. She has remained a lesbian, but has stopped abusing drugs and has helped others to do also. This is an inspiring story.
commenting closed for this article