What? WashPost Columnist Acts Stunned Charlie Sheen Has HIV, Scolds 'Sick' Society

November 20th, 2015 4:28 PM

Washington Post Style section columnist Lonnae O’Neal sounded almost intentionally clueless on Friday about Charlie Sheen’s admission he’s HIV-positive. “Bipolar disorder, my husband guessed. Yes, or perhaps schizophrenia, I said.”

But he showed up on NBC and announced it’s an STD, and O’Neal is stunned. “My reaction was swift and twofold. First: What!? HIV hadn't even crossed my mind.”

Naturally, this column wasn’t about Sheen’s sexual incontinence. It was about the bigotry of everyone else. The column was titled “Sheen case shows how far we still have to go.” The hobgoblins of “stigma” still haunt society.

O’Neal turned to Neil Kawata of the National Minority AIDS Council, who called the millions in blackmail payments Sheen made “a clear example of the extent to which people will go to cover up the fact that they have HIV.”

There’s still a sense of shame attached to the disease, he said, and it gets internalized.

“I don’t know about Charlie, but at least from my friends who have the disease, there is this sense that they failed,” he said. “That they didn’t practice safe sex, that they did something wrong.” These days, most people know how HIV is transmitted; if you got it, they figure, that means you didn’t follow the rules. “The stigma is, this is a punishment.”

AIDS advocates always place the blame on society, not on the sexual transmitters. O'Neal didn't "waste" a word wondering if Sheen transmitted the disease or properly informed his partners. Sheen may number his recent sexual conquests in the hundreds, but O’Neal can only feel his pain most relentlessly:

My second reaction: poor thing. Poor, poor thing. [Italics in the original.] My sympathy was not just for the diagnosis, but also for the shame and stigma Sheen had been carrying around for years. For how shame and stigma might make a person crazy. For the sheer human hurt of it all. Poor Sheen, I thought. And poor us who can’t muster a safe cultural climate — which would make people more likely to get educated and tested — to save our lives.

Sheen said he revealed his diagnosis after a spate of recent tabloid rumors about his condition. Although he once made nearly $2 million per episode as a star of the CBS hit “Two and a Half Men,” the payouts had taken a toll, he said. It’s money “they’re taking from my children,” Sheen told Lauer. “I release myself from this prison today.”

Prison?

That’s tough.

It’s “prison” to be an actor that settled with his old crew at Two and a Half Men for more than $25 million (and possibly several multiples of that). O’Neal concluded with that notion that “we” across America have so far to go on the "judgment and scorn" front:

We are only as sick as our secrets, the saying goes. Privacy is one thing, but the first time someone tried to blackmail Sheen, he should have felt free to ignore the threat. It shouldn’t have had a years-long hold over him. Here’s hoping he’ll be able to focus just on healing now, and give others burdened with shame a lighter load. And that as a culture, one day we won’t be so sick with judgment and scorn to make that impossible.