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CONCLUSION. Watson and the Shark: The Past and Future of AIDS in North Carolina and the American South
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CONCLUSION WATSON AND THE SHARK The Past and Future of AIDS in North Carolina and the American South At the end of a long hall in Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art hangs John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark. The eighteenth -century painting depicts a young sailor being attacked by a shark while his crewmates struggle mightily to beat back the shark and save him. Art historians tell us that the painting was inspired by a real event in Havana, Cuba, in 1749, when fourteen-year-old Brook Watson was attacked by a shark in the Havana harbor. An orphan serving as a crew member on a trading ship, Watson was swimming alone in the harbor when he was attacked, and his shipmates—men of various ethnic backgrounds and social stations— immediately launched a heroic effort to save him. Brook Watson survived the attack, and after having his leg amputated below the knee, went on to become, among other things, an English baron and the lord mayor of London . Watson himself commissioned the painting from his friend Copley.1 As Richard Rumley journeyed through counties of eastern North Carolina , pleading with various citizen groups not to ignore HIV/AIDS, he carried a copy of Copley’s Watson and the Shark. “When [Copley] did it, it was to symbolize community spirit: government and citizens working together for a common cause,” Rumley explained. “So I used that in my talks, and tried to help with that.” Rumley would conclude his talk with Matthew 25:40 and an impassioned call to action. “I was trying to get them to realize that . . . the thing that tells people that they’re all the same is the pain and suffering that they deal with and that they try to fix as a community. Like my Watson and the Shark picture . . . that’s what brings people together. Yeah, it’s a terrible disease and it does terrible things to people, but it brings people together. It should, anyway. And I think one day it will bring people together. But I think it’s just a long time in the making.”2 128CONCLUSION INDEED, NORTH CAROLINA’S HIV epidemic was a long time in the making, and, at the time of this writing, it continues. In the early years of the epidemic , when the state ranked twenty-third in the number of new AIDS cases diagnosed, few observers would have imagined that by 2007 North Carolina would climb into the top ten states in this regard.3 Yet that has been the trajectory of the epidemic in North Carolina. The epidemic’s course mirrors that in other states in many ways: the first cases appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it disproportionately affected white and black men who have sex with men (MSM) and black intravenous drug users. HIV among white MSM climbed rapidly in the 1980s, plateaued by the early 1990s, and declined thereafter to a stable baseline. HIV among black MSM, intravenous drug users, and their partners likewise rose rapidly in the 1980s, surpassing Caucasians by 1988, and continued climbing into the mid-1990s. While the number of new cases dropped in the second half of the 1990s, they began climbing again in the early 2000s, as HIV proliferated among black MSM and heterosexuals and in impoverished rural communities. As this study makes clear, North Carolina’s HIV epidemic disproportionately affected African Americans from the very beginning, and those trends have only grown worse. At various times throughout the epidemic, regional and national observers have discussed the “changing face of AIDS,” that is, it initially predominantly affected white gay men but increasingly affected women and minorities . In the South, and in North Carolina in particular, however, HIV always disproportionately affected African Americans. In North Carolina and much of the South, activists and health workers were able to rein in the epidemic among white MSM, while the disease continued to flourish among black MSM and intravenous drug users and spread into other black sexual networks. For white gay males in North Carolina, advocates and health workers were largely able to identify the factors driving the epidemic and implement care and prevention strategies that brought the epidemic under some measure of control. African Americans, whether male or female, gay or straight, urban or rural, were not so fortunate. The story of AIDS in white communities and the story of AIDS in African American communities are quite different, but they also...