Already 90 minutes late, William Brawner pumps the gas pedal of the rental van, jumps the curb and pulls up next to the 10 teenagers waiting in front of a half-abandoned warehouse on East Allegheny Ave., home to HAVEN, the drop-in center for HIV-positive kids.
The kids cram into the white van and let him have it.
“Will, we love you and all but it’s 9 o’clock,” one says as the others groan in agreement. Brawner, who opened HAVEN last January, laughs then turns up the radio and pulls away in the direction of I-95 and Washington, D.C., where in a few hours he’ll introduce Magic Johnson at an event aimed to spark talk about the plague so many have forgotten.
Born in Washington, D.C., in 1979, William Brawner was accidentally burned from the waist down in hot bath water as an infant. He was rushed to Children’s National Medical Center where skin tissue was grafted onto his legs and blood transfused into his tiny body, replacing the blood he’d lost in surgery.
His mother, having just graduated from Howard University, moved him to her family’s home at 49th and Haverford. His grandmother and great-grandmother helped raise him while his mother studied for a master’s degree from Cheyney University before going on to teach at Temple.
In the tough West Philly neighborhood, the Brawner family watched corner drug deals and stepped over crack vials on their doorstep. But the family was admired and well-known in the neighborhood.
Then, when Brawner was three, his mother received a call from Children’s National Medical Center. A longtime blood donor had died of complications from what we now know as AIDS. The donor’s blood had been used in Brawner’s surgery.
At the time, people knew little about the disease. But Brawner’s family knew enough to understand that if his secret got out he’d live as an outcast. His mother and aunt made a pact to tell no one.
Brawner knew something was wrong—his mother told him he was sick—but it wasn’t until he was five years old, with his mother seated nearby, that he was told he had HIV.
Dr. Richard Rutstein doesn’t remember the exact words he used to tell Brawner, but he says telling a child that kind of news always starts with a series of questions. Do you know why you take medicines? Have you heard about HIV?
“It’s different telling a [child] who has no idea what a virus is and telling an 18-year-old who has a clear idea of their future and mortality,” Rutstein says. “His main concern was number one, could he still go to camp. I said yes. Two, could he still play ball? I said yes. Third, would he have more blood tests? I said no.”
Rutstein had just begun practicing at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and back then treatment for HIV amounted to little more than psychosocial support for families, a far cry from the 28 medications offered today. The first medicine to treat HIV—azidothymidine (AZT)—wasn’t available until 1990.
It seemed possible Brawner might not make it through adolescence. Though transfusion patients often had a better chance of survival, the life expectancy of someone with HIV back then was eight years.
His mother made life as comfortable for her son as she could. Friends were allowed to visit whenever he wanted. At Thanksgiving the table was filled with the food he requested. To make life easier, the family moved out of their struggling neighborhood to suburban Wyncote.
At 14, with symptoms that indicated an opportunistic infection—the type that takes advantage of a weak immune system—he was diagnosed with AIDS.
“At 10 or 11 Billy had very low T-cell counts,” Rutstein recalls. “So low that you’d expect his survival might’ve only been a few years. But he kept on ticking. Something about his body kept his virus at bay, which is very unusual.”
Rutstein continued to see his young patient throughout his adolescence but lost touch after Brawner graduated from Cheltenham High School in 1998 and was accepted at Howard.
“Ostensibly, while he was in college he was still my patient,” Rutstein says. “But it was hard for him and I to connect. I can’t go further than that.”
Inside the student center at Howard University, some 130 people fill the auditorium as Brawner prepares to speak.
Looking at ease in a light gray pinstripe suit, a well-kept goatee framing his smile, Brawner chats with his wife and the teenagers from Philly who made the road trip with him. He swaggers to the podium when introduced, sizes up the crowd and begins to speak about a reality few of us will ever know.
“My name is William Brawner,” he says. “I am 28 years old and I have been HIV-positive for 27 years.”
When the crowd reacts slowly, he claps his hands enthusiastically, encouraging their applause, and quotes a statistic from the prior speaker: In the District of Columbia, one in 20 adults has HIV.
“When I heard those numbers, I heard a lot people, like, ‘Ew, ew,’” he says, mimicking the crowd. “Like people with HIV are dirty, or like they did something that most of us in this room didn’t.”
He tells the Howard University audience they should thank God they’re not HIV-positive because most of them had almost certainly participated in some kind of unprotected sexual activity.
Brawner’s been to almost 50 colleges and high schools, raising awareness of HIV and proving by his very presence that AIDS isn’t a death sentence. At the end of his talk, there’s no roaring applause, no standing ovation. But it doesn’t seem to matter to Brawner.
The teens from Philly who made the trip with him are the most devoted members of HAVEN Youth Center. For some it’s their first time out of Philly. The hope is that when snapping photos of Brawner arm in arm with Magic Johnson, they’ll see it’s possible to be successful even with the infection.
As a kid, when Brawner could’ve used a little positive reenforcement, there was no such inspiration.
On the second floor of the Allegheny Avenue warehouse—up the dusty, wooden steps and through a door marked HAVEN—teenage boys and girls watch SportsCenter on a 20-inch screen, lob basketballs at an arcade hoop and talk among themselves on a couch near the entrance.
As a sick kid himself, Brawner says he had minimal social support outside his family and he could only dream of a place like HAVEN, where he could be open about his situation.
“Let’s say you’re 14—where would you rather go?” he asks. “You want to be with your friends, hanging out, having a good time in an atmosphere that’s not all about doctors and needles.”
Today—almost three decades after the first acknowledged cases of HIV/AIDS and a decade since medications have changed the paradigm from saving lives to helping people live healthy—more than 16,000 people live with HIV/AIDS in Philadelphia, 79 percent of whom are black or Latino.
And here’s where Brawner comes in: Thirty-four percent of the newly infected are under 29.
Most of the kids referred to HAVEN come from hospitals that rely partially on support-group attendance at places like Brawner’s center for funding. Though hospitals are cautious recommending anyplace for kids, progress at HAVEN has been steady. In April the center had 15 kids; now it has twice as many.
While many organizations provide prevention and treatment for teens, HAVEN is the only center focusing on HIV-positive kids 13 to 24 in the city. Describing it as strictly recreational, though, would diminish what Brawner’s trying to do. HAVEN also provides food and pays for public transportation. Kids can call Brawner’s cell phone in emergencies.
But mainly it’s a place they can go to feel comfortable talking about their situation. Brawner says some of the kids haven’t even told their siblings they have HIV.
Though medicine has made HIV a manageable chronic disease, like diabetes or cystic fibrosis, treatment adherence is critical.
“If you’re told to take a medicine twice a day, seven days a week, and you miss every Saturday, the medicine will stop working for you and you can never go back to those medicines,” says Dr. Rutstein.
Brawner makes sure kids at HAVEN keep doctor’s appointments and take their medication. Two of the teens have been designated “undetectable” since coming to the center, which means the virus is almost invisible in tests.
When Brawner was a student at Howard University his condition was invisible to the outside world. But the virus grew heavier, even-tually sapping his emotional—and moral—strength.
As a college student William Brawner walked to breakfast every morning. Near the cafeteria, on a ridge just across McMillan Reservoir, stood the hospital where he became infected.
In his freshman year Brawner met a guy named Langley McGhee, and the two became good friends. They spent their weekends partying hard, and prided themselves on the number of women they pursued.
Brawner hid his HIV status from McGhee and their other friends—and worse, from his sexual partners.
He bulked up, partied and chased more girls—somehow thinking that now that he was Reds, no one would believe his ex-girlfriend. The more detached he became from his real self, the more reckless he got.
He replaced his medications with alcohol, and he continued to have sexual relationships without disclosing his status.
“It was a mistake. I was so busy trying to disassociate,” he says now, pausing to pick his words carefully. “There’s no word I can give you but ‘disassociation.’ I don’t know what else to tell you.”
Today Brawner avoids discussing the immorality of his actions; he simply says he wishes he could change the past. Still, some of the things he talks about reveal a man struggling with his decisions. He professes his guilt, but then blames the public perception of HIV for stigmatizing the choices he and others—including the HAVEN kids—sometimes make.
Some of the kids at HAVEN think Brawner shouldn’t be telling his story, says Theresa Parrino, family services coordinator at St. Christopher’s Hospital in North Philadelphia. Parrino treats several HAVEN patients.
“When I talk to kids about what’s responsible in terms of disclosing to partners, I’m really torn because I’ve seen lives fall apart,” Parrino says. “I had a kid who had ‘AIDS boy’ written on his locker. He disclosed to his girlfriend and when they broke up, her way of getting back was to disclose his status.”
At Howard, once he became “Reds” and neglected his meds, Brawner’s immune system took a beating. When he returned to Philadelphia after graduating in 2003, Dr. Rutstein told him he had two years to live.
Yet once again, Brawner defied the odds. By summer of 2005 he was thriving. He was pursuing a master’s degree in social justice by telecommuting to Marygrove College. He was taking his medication, working at the city’s Office of HIV Planning, revealing his HIV status to friends, and attending services at Sharon Baptist Church in West Philadelphia.
Bridgette Carter was beginning her doctoral work at Penn, researching HIV prevention, when she got her first glimpse of Brawner at church.
“He was always the loud one making a scene, being silly, riding through the parking lot with his music blasting,” she laughs. “That wasn’t what I was looking for.”
They first spoke at a church event where Brawner was offering HIV information pamphlets to passersby. He invited Carter to a monthly roundtable. Their relationship quickly turned into more than business.
Six weeks later, sitting in her home, Brawner told her his story: how he’d been burned as a child, the subsequent blood transfusion and HIV diagnosis. He told her his behavior in college should’ve killed him, and that God spared his life so he could change the face of HIV.
“It was attractive to see how much he wanted to be a better man,” she says, “to fulfill the purpose that God put him on this earth for.”
A year after they met, they married. Brawner says he wavered on the decision to go public with his HIV status, but his pastor’s sermons helped give him a clearer understanding of himself. He wanted people to understand the dangerous balancing act of being a sexually active HIV-positive person.
“I feel like other people get strength from my story when they hear it,” he says, “especially positive people. I try to be the role model I wish I had.”
As more people found out, he warned his wife of the consequences.
“Which of his ex-girlfriends would have a boyfriend who was going to try to shoot him?” Carter says. “Whose dad was going to want to beat him up because he had sex with their little girl?”
In 2006 Brawner went on Philadelphia radio’s 100.3 The Beat and told his story. He says the decision to do so wasn’t about becoming famous or being a martyr for the cause. It was about reaching out to people like himself.
“Martyrs are owed something,” he says. “I’m not owed shit.”
After the show, rumors began to circulate that he’d infected partners. An anonymous MySpace page was launched telling visitors he was still having sex and not telling partners his status.
But the majority of the responses he received were supportive.
“He even had people who he did have relationships with in the past who contacted him and said, ‘What you did was wrong, but I respect the fact that you’re coming out and owning up to it now,’” says his wife.
Brawner says none of his sexual partners has contacted him to tell him they’re HIV-positive.
“The people that had the potential of being infected by me I’ve communicated with—with the exception of one person,” he says. “And that one person—from what I’m told—is living happily in Atlanta with her family.”
Brawner was already planning his youth center when he started working as a youth outreach coordinator at St. Christopher’s Hospital last year.
He had plenty of contacts. His participation in events in the HIV/AIDS community had etched his name in the hearts and minds of many leaders: State Sen. Vincent Hughes, Rev. Dr. Alyn Waller of Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church, the AIDS Law Project’s executive director Ronda Goldfein, and Siloam’s co-founder Sister Bernadette Kinniry.
“Everybody goes through adolescence feeling different and isolated. To have [HIV] to deal with on top of it shows huge character to be where he is now,” says Goldfein.
Brawner’s story began getting play in the media. He was showcased on buses dressed in a white suit and white sunglasses for an international HIV/AIDS campaign, and he was featured in an MTV documentary for the 25th anniversary of the disease’s first diagnosis.
He wrote a business plan for the center he wanted to open. He wanted a building that wouldn’t stand out as an HIV facility—that would look anonymous—which is why he decided on the warehouse on East Allegheny Ave.
But grants he’d hoped for fell through, and he began to wonder if there’d be enough money to open the center. He and his wife were able to live comfortably in suburban Delaware County with the help of income from two rental properties, but he didn’t have enough of his own money to open HAVEN.
“It was like, ‘Which one of us is going to sell their soul first and go big corporate or jump to the pharmaceutical companies?’” says Carter, laughing. “But when you do what God wants, you’re covered.”
Finally, Brawner received a grant for $10,000 from a pharmaceutical company he prefers not to name.
“The space is 2,300 square feet,” he says, walking through the warehouse with a visitor. “We could play half-court basketball here.”
On a late summer day the warehouse still looked uninhabited, save for the contractors smoking cigarettes out front.
Walking up the stairwell, the heat is stifling. Fans noisily attempt to cool the vast space and high ceilings. Down the hall Diddy blasts from the other side of an open door.
At 1 p.m., the room is empty except for HAVEN’s employees—one part-timer and an intern. Drop-in hours are short: from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays. When someone comes through the door, Brawner loudly proclaims their arrival by name.
Today, though, Brawner is late.
Hustling through the door, messenger bag in tow, he says he’s finally ready to talk. “Just one call,” he says.
Behind his desk sits a community service award from the city and a plaque from The Philadelphia Tribune proclaiming him one of “10 People Under 40 to Watch.”
He recently received a grant to buy some wheels, and on the phone he asks the car dealer if the van in question is new or used.
Brawner is planning trips. Maybe he’ll go to D.C. again, down I-95, the route he and his old college buddy would sometimes take on their way back to Howard from a night of trouble.
Sitting sternly behind his desk, his voice rises as he addresses the mistakes in his past and what fuels him to continue telling his story.
“I’m tired of being quiet,” he says.
Little wonder.
Originally published in Philadelphia Weekly on September 10, 2008.
Post a Comment