A Road Not Traveled

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, Oprah’s come and gone again. Her show, now 23 years older, and presumably that much wiser, came into Williamson last Wednesday for a reprise of it’s 1987 show that was intended to showcase how America’s small towns were dealing with AIDS. Her purpose this time? To see if our attitude has changed noticeably.

The incident that precipitated her first visit could have been entitled “An Incident at a Municipal Pool”. It was a scene straight out of the film “Caddyshack”, minus the candy bar. You know, an avowed gay man, Mike Sisco, who’d been diagnosed with AIDS, goes for a swim, and before you know it, Williamson’s version of the Ted Knight character Judge Smails is saying “"I want the entire pool scrubbed, sterilized, and disinfected!"

Oprah subsequently stated that fear was the driving motivation behind the incivility directed at Mike Sisco, incivilities that culminated in this admitted overreaction by the locals. That much was made clear at the first show, that incivility in the form of rumors, etc., was the full extent of any action taken against him.

Well, this is certainly no excuse, but at the time, AIDS was a death sentence. And there was a lot of uncertainty as to how the disease was transmitted. No cocktail of drugs were available then to keep this condition at bay.

Anyway, this wasn’t the only town Oprah might have visited to gage small town America’s reaction to this condition. There were other far more egregious examples of small towns reacting badly to AIDS victims, and one example in particular comes to mind.

At about the same time the Williamson municipal pool was getting a scrub down, three young brothers, Randy, Robert, and Ricky Ray, then aged 8-10, and all hemophiliacs, had all been diagnosed with AIDS as a result of receiving clotting agents from tainted transfusions.

The difference between their hometown of Arcadia, Florida, and Williamson was that the people there didn’t stop with just rumors or other acts of incivility. No one wanted the boys in that town. And they certainly didn’t want the boys to enrol in the local grade school. For over a year, the boys were kept out. In fact, the boys’ father, Clifford Ray, was obliged to get an order from a federal court that forced the local school board to finally admit the boys.

But this did not stop the locals. The students at what would have been their new school organized a boycott against them. Meanwhile, concerned citizens busied themselves with making threatening phone calls and death threats to the Ray family.

The ultimate response to keep the boys out of Arcadia Elementary School came when someone caught the Rays gone one night, and burned the family house down. I suppose the Rays should have been grateful the arsonist waited until they were gone. With no house to live in, the Rays were forced to move, this time to an undisclosed new location in Florida.

Their oldest boy had nightmares afterwards. It was said that he blamed himself for his family’s situation. As for the townspeople, we can only guess they were able to sleep peacefully. I wonder if any of them has ever contemplated the real meaning of “Suffer the little children…”?