Several portraits in a particularly modern form of courage -- living and dying with HIV and AIDS -- have risen to the top of a reading pile otherwise obsessed with the Gingrich who stole Christmas.
Lisa Tiger, 29, is an HIV-positive Native American of Creek, Seminole and Cherokee descent who's become a spokeswoman and activist since contracting the virus. Profiled in the December-January issue of Poz, the one-time athlete, cheerleader and homecoming queen radiates strength, perhaps from having had to deal with the accidental death of her father when she was a young child and the murder of her brother four pTC years ago.
Describing when Ms. Tiger learned she was HIV-positive, Brendan Lemon writes, "More than anything, she felt tremendously strong, a spirit that has left her for only a brief period in the two years since. The day she got her results, she says, was the first time after the death of her brother that she experienced any kind of emotional relief. 'I thought, I can be happy now. I can do a lot.' "
Ms. Tiger works with teen-agers at a center in Tahlequah, Okla., and with groups like the National Minority AIDS Council and Positively Native. Her larger message, she says, is "encouraging good health and self-esteem."
In the same issue, reporter Donna Minkowitz supplies a different portrait in courage: her own. In a self-effacing, surprisingly empathetic account, Ms. Minkowitz writes about her undercover interviews with and the alarming activities of the Rev. Fred Phelps, "whose central mission is to cause pain to people with AIDS, gays and lesbians, and anyone who sticks up for them."
Mr. Phelps and members of his Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., picket funerals of those who have died from AIDS, carrying signs of almost unspeakable cruelty; they mail bereaved relatives letters saying the deceased is a "filthy piece of human garbage." Mr. Phelps and his flock, many of whom are his children and grandchildren, extend their harassment into political and legal arenas, launching smear campaigns against those decline to support him.
Ms. Minkowitz draws a delicate analogy between the emotional, confrontational strategies of Mr. Phelps and a famous AIDS activist group. "A penchant for similar tactics -- fax and phone zaps and, occasionally, personal harassment of some enemies . . . -- isn't all that Phelps and some ACT UP members have in common. They also share a deep reservoir of rage. When I meet Phelps, in a way he feels like a brother -- holding five to 10 demonstrations a day, fighting dirty, hurting his enemies in any way he can."
After commenting, "I don't see rage as evil but I think that unexamined, misdirected rage can be," Ms. Minkowitz notes, "The most egregious violence Phelps has been accused of is also the ultimate example of unexamined, misdirected rage: The severe physical abuse of his 13 children."
Many members of the Phelps clan, including the patriarch himself, have acknowledged his penchant for harsh corporal discipline. Ms. Minkowitz's speculation that Mr. Phelps may have been sexually abused as a child seems well-supported by her analysis of his anger and fixation on sexual references. Her conclusion: "If someone had taught him how to let his rage out on the appropriate target, he wouldn't have to let it out on us."
Pressing on
Like Lisa Tiger, Rae Lewis-Thornton is also the picture of health on a magazine cover, in this case the December Essence. In her "as told to" story inside, though, she writes, "I look great to everybody. But I don't feel great. My life is an endless round of doctors' visits, night sweats, chronic yeast infections, debilitating medications and body-numbing fatigue."
The 32-year-old "quintessential Buppie" learned she was HIV-positive in 1986, and was diagnosed with AIDS in 1992. And like Ms. Tiger, she contracted it through unprotected sex. "Some days I am filled with rage and despair. Other days I am at peace. I am trying to peacefully coexist with a disease that eats away at my body each and every day." She has spoken to high school students about AIDS and "destructive sexual behavior, about taking control of their bodies before it is too late." Now happily married, Ms. Lewis-Thornton says, "Of course I am dying. But I will live until I do!"