Rayshaun Locklear (1982–1985) may have saved thousands of lives
Rayshaun Locklear 1982–1985 Blessed are the pure of heart.
Carlotta Locklear, a prostitute and heroin addict in New Haven in 1983, gave birth to an infant with AIDS in 1982, almost before AIDS had an official medical name. It was snidely called “the gay disease”at first.
At first didn’t last long.
Rayshaun never left Yale New Haven Hospital’s intensive care unit, living there under permanent care, and the affectionate and tender ministrations of his nurses. His mother, wracked by her heroin addiction, and life as a prostitute visited him every day, according to the nurse who inadvertently made Rayshaun’s Intensive Care Unit existence known to me at meeting at Yale New Haven Hospital of professionals concerned with this new and fatal disease. He died in 1985 and his short life may have saved thousands of heterosexual lives from the incorrectly labeled “gay disease” AIDS.
At the time AIDS was a new and terrifying always fatal disease which was thought to affect only gay men . It had no known cure and no identified cause (HIV had not been discovered) . The birth of Carlotta’s baby and the baby’s disease was the first known evidence in the U.S. at the time that AIDS could be transmitted heterosexually: A mother had given it to her infant through pregnancy.
The physicians and nurses at Yale New Haven Hospital could not disclose this incidence of heterosexual transmission because patient information was confidential. I found out about it because I had created AIDS Information Dissemination Service (A.I.D.S.) with Yale Biology Professor Alvin Novick, after a mutual friend of ours and a medical student at Yale, had developed a black spot on his leg (kaposi sarcoma) usually associated with elderly patients, and then rapidly and suddenly lost all immune function and died at age 29 in 1983.
Al Novick and I decided to inform the public about the disease, a taboo endeavor if ever there was one, since the general public silently thought it wasn’t their problem. After all, it only affects gay men. http://aidsatyale.blogspot.com/
Professor Novick and I wrote a pamphlet in “street language” called Sex and You for distribution to Yale students. Miss Isabel Wilder, an alumna of Yale’s Drama School agreed to pay for it but insisted on anonymity in 1984.
I found out about Carlotta and her infant when a nurse at a Yale-New Haven Hospital meeting on AIDS accidentally revealed that a prostitute in New Haven had given birth to an infant with AIDS who remained permanently in the hospital. “Carlotta visits her baby every day” she added, not realizing she had given me a vital clue to finding the woman: Her first name.
“Carlotta” I hypothesized was not the name of many women in her profession.
“Doesn’t that mean AIDS can be transmitted heterosexually?” I asked. “We don’t know” was the reply. Gay men seemed to get it when exposed to the body fluids of other gay men. No one had investigated whether the body fluids of heterosexuals could transmit the disease.
At the time I was an apartment superintendent for an 88 unit low income housing complex where Yale campus abuts the prostitute section. I had graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1980 and stayed on in New Haven in an unauthorized ‘street ministry”.
I knew plenty of folks who knew prostitutes and through quiet inquiries using her first name “Carlotta” I was able to determine the identity of this particular prostitute. I soon found her at St. Raphael’s Hospital where she was a patient.
I asked to visit her as a divinity graduate, and was made to wear a hazmat suit and gloves since no one knew for sure how AIDS was transmitted at that time, a fact which made her continued work on the streets a life threatening danger to her clients. I later learned that she ‘booted up’ other heroin addicts, i.e. she shared her needle with others and injected them to save money. Body fluids doctors hypothesized were the source of the disease’s transmission: blood and semen are body fluids. Somehow epidemiologists had failed to believe that straight men who frequented female prostitutes might also be bisexual and frequent male partners who had the disease.
I approached Carlotta with an offer of assistance. The chaplain of Yale and I would raise money to pay her rent and her food bills if she would agree to stay off the streets.
She agreed to give me her answer the next day. As I left, Carlotta’s room at St. Raphael’s Hospital the nurses took my hazmat suit and gloves and my notebook and pen and destroyed them. Such was the fear of transmission of the unknown disease at the time. It was 1983.
When I returned the next day Carlotta had fled. Her clients were unknowingly in mortal danger. No one thought you could get AIDS from heterosexual body fluids.
With full knowledge that I was violating medical ethics and perhaps my own theological ethics as a graduate of Yale Divinity School , I decided the public was in mortal danger if it continued to believe only gay men could get the disease.
“Microbes don’t have a sexual preference” I reasoned in my medical ignorance, and I turned out to be correct. But I had no proof, other than the fear of the Yale-New Haven Hospital nurse on the informal AIDS committee who had blurted the information out to me during a break in the meeting.
I knew a producer from the TV journalism program 60 Minutes named Harry Moses. He had been producer of Bill Moyers’ Journal when Moyers interviewed me at Kent State in 1971.
I called him and asked him if this story on AIDS interested him. “No”, he said. “It is one of a kind and 60 Minutes only does stories which affect everyone. It has to be a microcosm of a universal issue” he told me.
A week later he called me back and said he had changed his mind and wanted to do the story. He had been talking to doctors in Africa and found out that AIDS is rampant there as a heterosexually transmitted disease. I was correct in my ignorance. Microbes don’t have a sexual preference.
He and Morley Safer came to New Haven and Yale and the story aired for 20 million viewers February 19, 1984. It was titled “Helen” because I refused to cooperate unless 60 Minutes agreed not to identify Carlotta by name or race.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/02/23/Suspected-AIDS-victim-seen-on-street/6265446360400/
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/02/22/Police-search-for-runaway-AIDS-victim/5046446274000/
Al Novick publicly broke with me over the 60 Minutes issue. His parents had been prisoners in the German death camps and he himself was gay, and felt passionately about anything which could lead society to quarantine others against their will.
He was advisor to Yale’s gay alliance and he said that I would unleash hysteria if 60 Minutes reported the possible heterosexual transmission of AIDS from mother to child in during pregnancy.
People would panic he reasoned, and quarantine suspected victims of AIDS, especially gay men. We debated this for days in many heated discussions.
I argued that in the state which fought the Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut which guarantees the right to contraception, citizens would never quarantine other citizens against their will. Connecticut had proved itself enlightened once Griswold was decided. I was counting on that enlightenment to protect Carlotta.
At a public meeting with 100 gay Yale students in the audience Professor Novick stood up and pointed at me holding his arm outstretched, with the second hand around his wrist to keep it from trembling.
“”Everyone should shun this man” he said as my face turned scarlet. “He brought 60 Minutes here to torment this woman”.
“I did not bring 60 Minutes here” I equivocated, since technically 60 Minutes had refused my invitation, then came back on its own. http://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2005_07/milestones.html
I confess to having been terrified by Professor Novick’s accusation. No one had ever told people to shun me before.
After the Morley Safer interview aired, on February 19, 1985, Carlotta was arrested on drug charges. Miss Wilder told me I “looked frightened” on 60 Minutes. Are you kidding, I thought? I was terrified.
Now I felt Al Novick’s prediction coming true. Carlotta was in danger of being harmed, especially because two prostitutes had been murdered in New Haven in the last year, one whose body was found in a dumpster behind Wilbur Cross High School.
Rumor was that their pimps had killed them. (I later learned to my relief that Carlotta was one of only two prostitutes in New Haven who did not have a pimp among the many who did: She was self employed.)
The Yale Chaplain, John Vannorsdall, told me that the day after the 60 Minutes piece that he received several phone calls from panicked men who begged him to reveal the name of the prostitute. They were terrified they might have been exposed. I had unleashed a Typhoid Mary scenario.
The jailers transferred Carlotta to a rehab ward for drug users but even they were superstitious about a fatal disease with no cure. They intentionally left the doors unlocked so Carlotta could escape again.
After this disappearance I called New Haven’s William Kunstler, a fearless civil liberties attorney named John Williams. I begged him to represent Carlotta if she would agree to return.
The media let the word out and Carlotta surrendered. John Williams offered her legal support till the end, which sadly came on January 15, 1985.
https://apnews.com/47ab3db3cbd4ee236bb39ce5095cf607
About a week before her death, I was shoveling snow on Howe Street outside the apartment house where I was superintendent. Carlotta walked by me and stepped over the area I was shoveling. As she went by, I said “Hi” softly and almost dutifully. There was no joy in my voice but there was politeness. That was all. I knew we recognized each other and I half expected her to spit in my face. Instead she said “Hi” back and kept walking.
I’m pretty sure she recognized me not only from our encounter in the hospital but from the 60 Minutes. I like to think her “Hi” meant “I don’t hate you. I understand.”
The next week she was dead. A friend of mine who worked at Yale-New Haven Hospital called me when they brought her to the emergency room. I do not know what I felt when I heard the news.
Thirty six years after that 60 Minutes piece I think I did the correct thing even though I violated medical and probably theological ethics.
Before that 60 Minutes piece America trivialized AIDS . ‘Who cares. Let the fags die’ was the unspoken attitude. ‘Why should we care about a gay disease?’ After that piece, 20 million viewers knew better.
Some heterosexual lives may have been saved. And gay men would no longer be the target of hatred as the sole spreaders of a fatal disease. Some good may have been done. And Carlotta, whose name I refused to allow 60 Minutes to use, had an attorney to protect her as she walked her final days in New Haven. Her son, Rayshaun, would die soon after his mother.
And I?
I had that “Hi” to wonder about.
