HIV & AIDS: Rising Infection Rate in the African American ...
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Eleven medicines
help Ava Gardner-Shipp maintain her heal... Ava Gardner-Shipp was ... Two years into their marriage,
Gardner-Shipp learned she had HIV. ...
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Beginning Of Article:
HIV & AIDS: Rising Infection Rate in the African American Community Fear of homosexual stigma keeps men on the 'down low'
THE STUNNED WIFE: Preacher husband infected her with HIV -- knowingly
Jason B. Johnson, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, May 2, 2005
Ava Gardner-Shipp thought she had found the perfect man:
a handsome respected minister who could cook and quote Scripture from memory and adored her and her daughter.
"I met him in Bible study," she recalled. "We used to go
to Sunday school services together. All the things I was looking for, he had. He was perfect."
But Gardner-Shipp's storybook marriage unraveled two years
later when she learned that her husband had knowingly infected her with HIV. He'd married her to hide his down-low status,
she said, and because he "didn't want to die alone."
Ava Gardner and Bernard L. Shipp married in 1988 after
six months of dating. They moved from Oakland to Sacramento,
where he became the youth minister in their new church and she taught Bible study.
At first things were fine. But about a year into the marriage,
Gardner- Shipp said, her husband started to become withdrawn and moody.
He began bringing paper bags home from doctor's appointments
but wouldn't say what the medicines inside were for. One day she looked at the prescriptions and called his doctor. He told
her she had to talk to her husband about his illness. At first he refused to tell her what he had. But when his health began
declining, Bernard Shipp told his wife he had AIDS. It was a shock for the naive young woman who had been raised in the church
and knew little about the disease.
"I thought he had cancer," she said. "AIDS was the farthest
thing from my mind."
"I said to him, 'AIDS is a gay disease.' "
He denied contracting HIV through sex with other men. But
looking back, she remembered him introducing her to men from other churches and Bible study groups. Eventually, she would
learn that some of those were men her husband had been involved with sexually.
Two years into their marriage, Gardner-Shipp learned she
had HIV. Only then did her husband begin to reveal the truth.
He told her she was only the second woman he'd slept with.
The last time they were intimate, he stopped in the middle,
looked into her eyes and said "I can't do this, I prefer men," she recalled.
"That just about tore me apart," she said. "When he realized
he was dying, that's when he told me the whole truth."
Gardner-Shipp cared for her husband until he died. When
he lost the use of his legs, she lifted his 6-foot frame into a wheelchair and took him for walks. She bathed and fed him.
She changed his adult diapers.
"Before he died he told me he infected me purposefully
because he didn't want to die by himself," she said. "That was the cruelest thing he could have done to me."
Still, she didn't leave him -- in large part, she said,
because he threatened to tell people she had infected him if she filed for divorce or exposed him to family and friends.
"I had to go to church with him, live a lie in public,"
Gardner-Shipp said. "I kept that secret because of who he was."
When Bernard Shipp died in 1993 at age 34, she continued
to lie for him. At his funeral she told people he had died of cancer. She then threw away their wedding pictures and everything
that reminded her of him.
"I didn't hate him, I hated what he did to me," she said.
"I stayed with him. I buried him. I forgave him for what he did to me."
It took Gardner-Shipp two years after her husband's death
to come to grips with what had happened to her. At first she had thought AIDS was some kind of punishment.
In 1997, she decided to come forward and tell the truth
to friends and fellow parishioners in her new church. When word spread, she was surprised to get calls from women who feared
their husbands were on the down low, secretly having sex with other men. She also got calls from men who had AIDS and wanted
help in telling their wives.
Now 44, Gardner-Shipp has a small ministry called Heaven
in View in Elk Grove (Sacramento County).
She does counseling and speaks before church groups, high schools and health seminars. Her health is good, although she must
take medicine and closely watch her condition.
"I've met other women who say, 'Your story is my story,
but I can't tell it,' " she said
"I know what it's like to be rejected, to live in the dark.
It took me many years to get my self-esteem back." END OF ARTICLE
