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For some young women in the District, the first impulse after being diagnosed with an STD is revenge.
“I encounter a lot of young ladies infected with all kinds of things,” said the Rev. Pamela Bishop during an open forum on July 16. “They get angry and say, ‘I’m going to give it to someone else.’”
The reverend’s revelation was one of many glimpses of the cultural obstacles in the local fight against HIV offered during a “Sex in the City” forum at the Ronald Reagan Building downtown. The event was moderated by Jeannie Jones, a radio personality from WKYS-FM, and sponsored by Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.).
In her opening remarks, Norton showed slides demonstrating the District’s appallingly high rates of HIV infection — the highest among medium-sized cities. “How could we be worse off than Baltimore?” Norton asked. “Gimme a break!”
It was a rhetorical question: Norton blames the feds. For years Congress attached riders to D.C. budget appropriations bills to prevent the District from using local tax money to fund needle-exchange programs. Dozens and dozens of jurisdictions across the country do this; some studies have shown that needle exchange programs stymie the spread of HIV and don’t promote drug use.
“This rider has killed innocent men, women and children,” Norton said.
But the House of Representatives, under Democratic control, lifted the ban last month, and no major beef is expected from the Senate or the White House. Government resources for needle-exchange could free up as soon as October.
Norton and Jones opened the floor to women in the audience. About a dozen spoke.
Balinda Cunningham, 55, told the audience of her devastating HIV diagnosis after finding drug paraphernalia in her boyfriend’s clothes, the subsequent whispers of family members, a rat-infested apartment and an autistic granddaughter who kept track of her pills. “I wouldn’t be alive” if it weren’t for the little girl, said Cunningham in a shaky voice.
A teenager announced that her older sister died of AIDS when she was a little girl. A mother of a 14-year-old said she’d been HIV-positive since her baby was born. A Rutgers grad said her mom was addicted to crack, her dad to heroin.
Toward the end, a woman with short, bleached-blond hair, ripped jeans and a baby stroller said she often has unprotected sex, even though her father has HIV and she used to fear lying in his bed.
“I never had nobody to love me,” she said, beginning to cry. “I never had nobody to tell me, ‘It’s gonna be OK.’” Another woman walked over to her, arms outstretched, but she continued to sob into the microphone. “I wish I had my mother!”
Conrad Cheek’s street sense If you live, work, or play around the Hill, you’ve likely heard the booming baritone of Conrad Cheek Jr., who hawks Street Sense newspapers on Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalks with unrivaled fervor.
“Help a hardworking homeless man who doesn’t panhandle for pence,” he yells, “because homeless isn’t helpless when you’ve got Street Sense!”
The hammed-up pitch is effective: It helped Cheek sell 1,204 papers in June, making him Street Sense’s No. 1 vendor. His closest competition is Anonymous, who sold 1,036 papers, and nobody else is close at all. (Cheek says he thinks Anonymous may conceal his identity for fear of the IRS.)
“Conrad’s a great guy,” says Street Sense executive director Laura Thompson Osuri. “He’s been with Street Sense since almost the first issue.”
Street Sense is a monthly paper by, for and about the homeless population of the D.C. area. Its homeless vendors sell it for a dollar donation and keep 75 percent of the proceeds for themselves. The paper occasionally breaks huge stories, including one about evictions companies exploiting homeless men that has resulted in an ongoing class-action lawsuit against the companies.
You can catch Cheek doing his thing most weekday afternoons at the corner of 3rd Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. At the end of business hours, he continues selling along the 8th Street corridor. He says he’s currently doing a bit of couch-hopping, but that he prefers to rent rooms around the Hill. He likes his job: “I work when I want to.”
A graduate of McKinley Tech high school in Northeast, Cheek earned a certificate equivalent to an associate’s degree as a biomedical equipment technician from George Washington University in 1979. He nearly obtained a patent for a portable cell phone charger last year, but says he abandoned the process because he didn’t trust his lawyer.
As for Street Sense, Cheek may be the best vendor, but he says he usually doesn’t read the paper.
Big bus fuss The U.S. Capitol Police banned commercial tour buses from streets adjacent to the Capitol complex on June 9. A press release explained the ban was “part of continued efforts by the U.S. Capitol Police to enhance security within the Capitol complex,” but not because of any specific threat.
Inevitably, more commercial tour buses than usual began to rumble down quiet Capitol Hill side streets, to the horror of the locals. Dick Wolf, president of the Capitol Hill Restoration Society (CHRS), looks at the measure this way: “You mean you’d rather have the thing explode in the neighborhood?”
Ward 6 D.C. Council member Tommy Wells introduced emergency legislation to keep the buses out of the Capitol Hill historic district, which the council approved on July 10. The historic district encompasses a huge swath of the neighborhood on the east side of the Capitol. If the new law is enforced, the buses will have to stay on the west side.
The chief complaint about buses in the neighborhood isn’t that they might have bombs on them. It’s their detrimental effect on quality of life — the rumbling, the exhaust, the unsightliness. Wolf says that CHRS has long wanted to stop buses from driving through the ’hood and idling in front of people’s houses, but bus companies have always been able to lean on their local congressman back home to prevent that from happening. The Capitol Police ban forced the issue.
Like many Hill residents, Wolf wearies of the security situation. He calls the vicinity of the Capitol “Bollardsville” for the thousands and thousands of green bollards set up to prevent truck bombs from reaching government buildings. So the Capitol is safe from trucks, and now buses, but what next?
“Life has some risk to it,” Wolf says, “but we’ve gone and built walls, and bollards, and banned things, to cover every base possible so you leave yourself in a situation where you’re sort of cowering in the corner.”
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