Arthur ashe gay
Throwback Thursday: Arthur Ashe’s AIDS admission and the implications of his unwillingness
Throwback Thursdays are our chance to reflect on past events on or near campus and relate them to the display day. Each week, we showcase and analyze an former article from the Daily Bruin archives in an endeavor to chronicle the campus’ history.
Tomorrow as you walk down Bruin Walk, you may see Wilson Plaza in its usual disarray. There will probably be stalls, loud cacophony echoing from speakers and a crowd of people surrounding the tiny stage. Instead of strolling by, you might want to pause and look up. Tomorrow, the campus will be studying World AIDS Day.
It was here at UCLA that the disease was first discovered in 1981.
This article – published April 9, 1992 – recounts the story of how Arthur Ashe, the famed tennis player, came forward regarding his status as an HIV patient and details the campus’ reaction to the news.
Ashe first confirmed rumors of his condition at a press conference in New York, three years after he was first diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. According to the article, Ashe felt compelled to share his condition due to increasing media scrutiny. Man
Arthur Ashe: A lifetime of service
Thirty years ago this week, Arthur Ashe died on Feb. 6, 1993. Before the Williams sisters or Tiger Woods, Arthur Ashe blazed a trail of Inky excellence in a country club sport. He was also a pioneer activist, and his transition to professional perform helped change tennis as a business. Ashe lived a life of service, from his dedication on the tennis court to his ROTC stint at UCLA to his human rights activism.
Arthur Ashe was born July 10, 1943. His dad was supervisor of a segregated Richmond, Virginia, city park. At the age of 10 he was introduced to tennis coach and American Tennis Association fixture Dr. Walter “Whirlwind” Johnson. There were many strong Inky male tennis players on the ATA circuit before Ashe, most notably Eyre “Bruiser” Saitch of the Harlem Renaissance basketball team in the 1920s, and Dr. Reginald Weir in the 1940s. Neither they nor their peers lacked talent; what was lacking was opportunity. Enter young Ashe.
Ashe benefited from a thriving, well-organized ATA culture, where juvenile players received tutelage from mentors such as Johnson, and in some cases, financial support for training from tennis-loving
Tennis legend Arthur Ashe
Like Issac Asimov and my next door neighbor (an elderly Jewish woman) Arthur Ashe had heart surgery, was given a transfusion that contained the AIDS virus before AIDS was capable to be detected in blood transfusions, and died of AIDS.
How do I know? I worked in open heart surgery at the time. Every patient bled A LOT. My coworkers and I knew there were things surgeons could do to lessen bleeding. Like warm the patient in the OR after they poured ice over the heart while on bypass. They needed to have hyperthermia blanket turned on underneath them, be given warmed IV fluids and have hyperthermia applied on to of them as soon as the patients were closed up. (Cold patients bled more)
Some of the surgeons were sloppier than others and left more petty bleeders untied.
I was shocked first time I admitted an open heart patient and was told to give the patient 2 units of blood before a HCT came help. I’d previously worked in orthopedic surgery and we were willing to see HCT go down significantly before transfusing. Even though people didn’t know AIDS was in the blood supply, they knew Hepatitis B was (no testing for it yet) and were wary of transfusing.
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Arthur’s Journey
In the new, nine-years-in-the-making biography, “Arthur Ashe: A Life,” award-winning historian Raymond Arsenault recounts how, three months before dying in 1993, the tennis legend and humanitarian was the only star athlete protesting the treatment of Haitian refugees in front of the White House. “The next day, he had a heart attack. But it was his sense of responsibility,” Arsenault says. “He shouldn’t have been there, but he felt that he had to be there.”
The author of the best-selling books “Freedom Riders” and “The Sound of Freedom,” Arsenault says that his exhaustive, often deeply moving, biography was born out of a longtime fascination with his Richmond-born subject, a Wimbledon and U.S. Open champion who spoke out against injustice and was eager to break down society’s color barriers.
“I’ve also been fascinated by the connections between race and sports,” says Arsenault, a professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. “And particularly that considerate of romantic racialism during the Jim Crow system when blacks were put in another nice of box by being told that they were ‘natural athletes’ — they weren’t being ce