Page 2 of 4
So by the time R. Kelly got into trouble with his infamous video tape, no girl alive could tell him that he couldn't have her panties, with or without a condom on. Are you kidding me? When you've sold 50 million albums, or won six NBA championship rings, or taken home three undisputed heavyweight title belts, or gotten two Oscars, or produced a billion dollars worth of intellectual and creative property, or can ride out of your gated mansion in a Bentley to make it to your private jet for a business trip out of the country, regular, protected sex becomes boring. You start thinking about all kinds of unorthodox ways of getting your freak on, and I do mean freak!
Even if you do wear condoms, if you're screwing up to four and five different folks a week and enjoying a hot celebrity career that expands over several years, an accident is bound to happen. I mean, we're talking major Russian roulette here. The more sex you have, the more opportunities there are for something terrible to happen to you. But does that stop the celebrity from fucking? Hell, no! The reality is that most celebrities are willing to roll the dice on life to begin with. And if you're cautious with your passions, chances are that you're not going to have what it takes to become a celebrity.
The concept is very similar to the criminal mind. Once folks make up their minds that they're going to rob and kill people for a living, there ain't no going back. These jokers do what they do, and they get caught and arrested for it. Then they go out and do the shit again. Then they go to jail, serve time for it, get out of jail, and go do the shit again. I mean, once you make it a habit to do what you wanna do, it's hard as hell to break, especially when you've been successful at it.
Great, kinky, and raw sex with people you don't really know becomes an insane high. Why else would so many girls camp out for celebrity men, and why would so many celebrity men make themselves available to them? And we're not talking about just America here -- we're talking about a worldwide acceptance of once-in-a-lifetime, on-the-edge sexuality. These women are willing to throw their sanity, health and morals in the wind for a roll in the hay with a wanted man. Then AIDS came ... and nothing changed.
WHOA! MAGIC JOHNSON HAS WHAT? FROM DOING WHAT? WITH WHO, AND WHO, AND WHO, AND WHO?
Folks were scared straight, and everybody watched the press conference. I was in my senior year of college at Howard University at the time, staring at the small color TV in the recreation room of my dormitory with at least 25 other young college brothers. We all couldn't believe that shit. AIDS was a gay white man's disease for butt-fucking and such -- not for straight, black male athletes. That shocked the shit out of all of us. So we all stopped and thought about it for a minute. Then we went right back to fucking, but only more cautiously.
I can honestly say that the Magic Johnson issue brought the facts home to a lot of folks who continued to have sex recklessly, but over time, the message wore off. The concerts were still turning out the groupies, and the ballers were still inviting anxious broads to the after-parties.
It didn't make the situation any better when Magic Johnson went on to continue living -- which is not to say that we wanted to see the brother die. Magic Johnson has turned over a new leaf for African-American entrepreneurship on a major level. I'm quite proud of him, personally. But as he has survived HIV infection in a very public way, folks have found a way to convince themselves to go back to business as usual, fucking like there's no tomorrow.
By the time gangsta rap mogul Eazy-E died of AIDS-related complications in 1995, he was no longer as popular as he was in his NWA days, so the 'hood pretty much viewed him as an unlucky dude at the time. But aside from Eazy and Magic, can the black community even name 10 major black celebrities who have either died or been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS? And trust me, they are not all consistently protected as Madonna claimed to be. Nevertheless, by and large, the tragic disease continues to attack the unknown victims of unfortunate behavior and not famous people. Kanye West, on his album Late Registration, alluded to Magic Johnson, a wealthy athlete who has apparently survived the disease, as just another knock against poor people who can't afford the expensive medical treatments that he can.