In Errors We See Ourselves

In an image by photographer Clifford Prince King, we see a collage featuring the face of a young Black man, smiling. Underneath, the name Robert Rayford is spelled out in big blue and red letters. Shadow, resulting from a nearby window, divides the collage almost in half. The young man's face is obscured by the light.

Robert Rayford was the St. Louis–born son of Constance Rayford. He died with HIV in 1969. The presence of the virus in his body was confirmed from 1985 to 1987 through tests on tissues that doctors saved from when he died. As of now, I don’t know if he or his family consented to his tissues being saved. And I don't know how Rayford contracted HIV, or much of his history before he checked himself into the hospital in 1968.

In 1987, newspapers in Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and other cities ran stories about Rayford’s case. TV reporter Max Robertson, who later would die with HIV, even went out to St. Louis and did a brief interview with Constance and Robert’s brother George, on the front porch of their house.

All of this was happening as the marketing machine behind And The Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic—the soon-to-be best-selling non-fiction book by journalist Randy Shilts—was gearing up. “The Man Who Gave Us AIDS” ran the New York Post headline on October 6, 1987. It was referring to claims in Shilts’ book that Gaëten Dugas—a gay, white, French-Canadian flight attendant—was Patient Zero: the supposed entry point for clusters of HIV cases in North America. This story is false, and unfair. From films like John Greyson’s Zero Patience (1993) to Richard A. McKay’s book, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic (2017), the story has been mocked and debunked repeatedly.

Amid the release of the Patient Zero story, news of Rayford’s cause of death was neglected. As I suggest in my essay “AIDS 1969,” the media were more interested in pushing an AIDS story that gave the public a promiscuous gay man to blame for the epidemic, rather than digging into the story of a young Black man’s premature death that would have led to more questions.11Theodore (ted) Kerr, “AIDS 1969: HIV, History, and Race,” Drain Magazine 13, no. 2 (2016): http://drainmag.com/aids-1969-hiv-history-and-race/. 

For the last twenty years I have been working at the intersection of art, AIDS, and culture.22Theodore (ted) Kerr, “A History of Erasing Black Artists and Bodies from the AIDS Conversation,” Hyperallergic, December 31, 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/264934/a-history-of-erasing-black-artists-and-bodies-from-the-aids-conversation/. And until 2015, I had never heard of Rayford. A brief mention of his name in a science journal l read that year led me to a Wikipedia article, and then a few blogs. Some of the blogs were very thoughtful, others were conspiratorial at best. While I learned some things online, I knew that if I wanted to find out more about Rayford, I would have to move my search offline. While I was at Union Theological Seminary getting my Master’s, I was able to spend a summer semester in St. Louis, working with a local AIDS and housing organization, and pursuing my own research. I went into that summer thinking I would find a lot of people in St. Louis who were aware and connected with Rayford’s story. I was wrong. One of the few people alive who ever spoke with Rayford is a doctor who is working on her own project about him and not interested in sharing information. The search for school records came up empty, and beyond the story with Max Robinson, there seemed to be no further interviews with Constance and George Rayford, both of whom have since passed away.

Within this void, I walked around the neighbourhood where Rayford grew up, trying to get a feel for the place. Blocks from where he lived is the Gateway Arch. It was built between 1963 and 1965, when Rayford was a little boy. Did he watch from the street outside his house as the two sides of the arch were built to one day meet in the sky?

Towards the end of my first summer in St. Louis, I worked with Maurice Tracy and Joss Barton, two local writers, to organize an event called WISH YOU WERE HERE. It was the summer after Michael Brown was murdered in nearby Ferguson by the police. That same summer, a young man living with HIV named Michael Johnson was in a Missouri jail due to HIV criminalization laws. At WISH YOU WERE HERE, we wrote letters to Rayford, Brown, and Johnson. These letters were a way to reach out to Johnson while he was an inmate, and create a spiritual connection to Rayford and Brown, whose lives were lost too soon.

Around the same time that we hosted WISH YOU WERE HERE, I started making images. The first thing I made was a sticker: a sky-blue square featuring the top of the Gateway Arch with the phrase AIDS 1969 in white letters. I also made two series of postcards using a screengrab from the Max Robinson interview as the background for both: blurry b-roll of the Rayfords’ back porch, sky peeking through trees. For one series, I placed recognizable images from AIDS history: a portrait of Gaëten Dugas, the Silence = Death poster, a copy of Essex Hemphill’s poetry collection Ceremonies (1992). For the other, I collaborated with photographers to use less-circulated images, including a snapshot my friend took of his HIV meds in front of Black Lives Matter protest signs, and a photo of two people attending WISH YOU WERE HERE.

Creating and sharing the stickers and postcards were ways for me to process what I was learning. It was also a way to push against the dominant story of AIDS I had grown up with, a view made up primarily of clips from early-1980s news broadcasts and grainy twentieth-century images of dying young men. As vital as these stories are, they are not all we have. There is more to learn.33Theodore (ted) Kerr, “39 Years Later, The New York Times’ 1981 ‘Gay Cancer’ Story Continues to Distort Early AIDS History,” The Body (2020), https://www.thebody.com/article/new-york-times-1981-gay-cancer-story-distorts-aids-history.

I continue to research the life and death of Robert Rayford, and as I do, I proceed with caution. As I am coming to learn, some things do get lost across time, and in these cases, the history we uncover often tells us more about the present than it does about the past.

That is not Robert Rayford hanging on the wall in the Clifford Prince King photo. It is Robert Rochon Taylor, who was an architect, activist, and chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority. He died in 1957. His father was the first Black graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his granddaughter is Valerie Jarrett, who was a senior advisor to President Barack Obama. I remember seeing this photo of Taylor back when I first started researching Rayford online. It was used on one of the many blogs that had existed, with keyboard sleuths debating the origin of Rayford’s infection. I remember discounting the photo’s attribution to Rayford right away. While there are no publicly circulating photos of Rayford’s face available, I knew the photo I saw on those blogs couldn’t be him. Taylor looks nothing like Constance or George Rayford, and the clothing he wears in the photo looks more like the stylings of a 1950s man, not that of Rayford, who was sixteen when he died in 1969.

I was surprised then, years later, when I saw the image used in a 2018 op-ed published online and in print by HIV Plus magazine and the Advocate entitled “The Whitewashed History of HIV: A Black Teen Died of AIDS in 1969.” The piece uses Rayford’s story to highlight the need for diversity within the AIDS response. I, and maybe others, reached out to the publication and let them know the error they made. The image on the website was eventually changed, but it was too late for the print edition. The wrong image was already in circulation.

Something similar happened a few years later. In summer 2021, an academic journal published an article by two leaders within the gay men’s health movement in which they use Rayford as an example of a Black gay person living with HIV. There is only one problem: we don’t know if Rayford was gay. We don’t know his sexuality. He left no journals, and almost nothing is known about his personal life. The one thing he told doctors at the time—that is on the public record—was that he had fooled around with a neighbourhood girl.

In these two cases, smart people with authority made mistakes that are not without impact. Assuming Rayford into a sexual orientation, and publishing the wrong photo of him, generate false certainty. As much as knowing information can be powerful, knowledge, once thought to be acquired, can also foreclose curiosity. There is a danger now: that people who only saw that magazine image, or read that academic journal, will think they know something about Rayford, but they don’t. For these people, what’s at risk of being lost is the generative power of asking questions, of wrestling with the unknown.44Theodore (ted) Kerr, “Embracing What We Know and Don’t Know About Robert Rayford,” The Body (2021), https://www.thebody.com/article/embracing-what-we-know-and-dont-know-robert-rayford.

At the same time, these mistakes tell us something concrete about the present: we are so desperate from not having, or not being able to see, the stories we crave and feel we need, that we are willing to shoehorn in stories we almost have and make them fit. With both the magazine photo and the academic article, there was a desire to share Rayford’s story—as a young Black person with HIV—to shed light on the ongoing HIV crisis and how Black people, and other minoritized people, are still impacted. There is a bond with Rayford, a hope that by sharing his story from the past, we can better see the ongoing injustice in the present. So strong is that bond that facts, or lack thereof, were ignored.

Early in my Rayford research, a friend warned me about making it too easy to picture Rayford as the new Patient Zero, the boy who started the US AIDS crisis. This advice has saved me from producing a body of work rooted too concretely in certainty, and has kept me mindful that while I am respectful of Rayford and his family, my allegiance is with people in the present. Over the last six years I have come to ask a specific question before sharing my research: What impact might the version of Rayford’s story that I am about to share have on people living with HIV now?

This is why I keep bringing other people into the work. I see my process as a kind of ongoing assemblage of voices, ideas, and inputs; a refusal of a claim-based space that instead makes room for confusion, wonder, and projection; a place where the living and the dead can co-mingle in exploration. To keep this process going, over the years I have continued to go back to St. Louis, to do research and share information about Rayford’s life and death. This has resulted in many things, including IMPACT AIDS, an exhibition created by the Griot Museum of Black History in St. Louis, in which founder Lois Conley committed to including Rayford’s story in the city’s narrative around HIV.55Theodore (ted) Kerr, “51 Years Ago, a Black Teen Died of AIDS in St. Louis. Now, a Museum and Black Women Activists Will Honor His Legacy,” The Body (2020), https://www.thebody.com/gallery/article/st-louis-impact-project. That was in 2018, that same year I interviewed Conley—and other Black women impacted and living with HIV—about their work on the grassroots level, and their thoughts on the impact of sharing Rayford’s story in the present. I wanted to be thinking in public with people for whom Rayford’s story matters and could have material consequences.

I think about this when I look at Clifford Prince King’s image that features Rayford’s name but that picture of Robert Rochon Taylor from the blogs and magazine. I see this artwork as an assemblage, a surface where the past, present, and future collide, where identity, ideas, conceptions, mistakes, questions, and feelings of yearning intermingle to make a vibe, or dare I say it—an archive, a mash-up of history, Black queer life, privacy, transmission, and a safe space to hold the unknown. The distance between the image of Taylor and Rayford’s name in red and blue letters is the placeholder of HIV before 1981 and everything we still don’t know about what came after.

In Prince King’s photo, below the Rayford collage there are two men in their underwear, lounging in silhouette. One man is sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched over in what I would say is a posture of contemplation. The other man is lying down, a hand casually at his crotch, a leg outstretched. There is a sense of dissipated erotic energy in the photo, as if we are seeing a moment of intimacy and uncertainty. This, I think, is a hallmark of Prince King’s work: slices of Black queer life, where sexuality, kinship, HIV, domesticity, history, and beauty are cast within worlds of soft light and shadow. There is a consistent tenderness to the work, a sacredness in seeing the many expressions of gentleness that exist between Black men. Into this world, Prince King brings Rayford, whose life may hold meaning to the boys and men who find themselves in his footsteps, young, Black, and living with HIV. Staying with the photograph for a while, one begins to see that the man lying on the bed is looking up at the collage. He, I think, is us, in the present, in our intimacies and entanglements, wanting to know more about Rayford.