Rae Lewis-Thornton: AIDS victim marries and faces life and death

Ebony, June, 1995 by Muriel L. Whetstone

Growing up in suburban Chicago and intent on turning her life into a success story, Rae Lewis-Thornton was a self-described "all-American Black girl." She received good grades, minded he, manners and shunned alcohol and drugs. Against stacked odds, she went to college and graduated magna cum laude before beginning a promising career as a political organizer. She dressed and carried herself like a fashion model and cultivated her sophisticated Black beauty. At 23, she was intelligent, self-reliant, and attractive --the type of woman men stand in line to meet. Eager to embrace life and anxious to overcome its challenges, Rae was determined that someday she was going to be somebody.

And then suddenly, 9 years ago, Rae was diagnosed with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and all her optimistic hopes and poetic dreams of a bright future began crumbling at her feet.

"When we're young, we don't see ourselves at risk," she says. "We think we'll live forever."

Despite the specter of death hanging over her and thanks to a formidable will to live, the sun has not stopped shining in Rae's life. In fact, she often tells people that "the day i stop living will be the day I die."

So Rae, who lives each day as if tomorrow is not promised, married Kenny Thornton, her companion, she says, and lover in the purest sense of the word. And she continues to caution everyone around her to protect themselves against AIDS--a worldplague that has no respect for sexual orientation, race, class or age.

It's been said that life is what happens to you when you're making other plans. On her own since she was 17 years old and the product of what she calls "a dysfunctional family"--both of her parents were heroin addicts, her father was killed when she was three and she was raised by her paternal grandfather's wife in a sometimes difficult relationship--Rae was making other plans when she was diagnosed with HIV in 1986, contracted through heterosexual contact, she believes, in her late teens.

Although shaken, like many newly diagnosed victims, she initially hid her affliction from her family, friends and coworkers. "My life didn't alter that much. For seven years I was pretty focused and I really did not slow down at all," she recalls. "I believed I would be HIV-positive forever, that I would never develop AIDS. I guess I was in a state of denial."

Active, vibrant and HIV-positive, she continued her ascent among Washington, D.C.'s politically influential. In 1984 she worked as the national deputy youth director in the Rev. Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign and served as the national youth director in his 1988 campaign. Later, she worked in Carol Moseley-Braun's senatorial campaign.

Rae's life made a dramatic turn for the worse, however, in 1993 when her infection developed into AIDS. During those first seven years she had visited her doctor once every six months. Soon she was going once a month. Her body began succumbing to AIDS-related illnesses and she began taking as many as seven different medicines a day. Debilitating fatigue became a problem and she began suffering from depression.

Still in denial, she continued to take extraordinary steps to keep her secret hidden. When the burden became too much to bear she decided to go public. The first story on her illness in a national magazine appeared in Ebony in April 1994. "I got tired of hiding it and of how crazy it made me," she says. "I didn't want people to hear about it through someone other than me."

Rae now frequently uses the media, churches, schools--my public platform made available to her--to address children, women and African-Americans, in particular. "I want people to know that if you become infected, it doesn't mean your life will end today or that you have to stop living, that your spirit has to stop living. But the bottom line is you're going to be filled with pain, physical pain. And you're going to have to take pills. And you're going to have to re-group every day because each day AIDS is like the jack that jumps out of the box. "

Each time that jack jumps, it chips a little more from Rae's physical life. She's gone from a size 12 to a size 6 in six months and developed life-threatening pneumonia. The fatigue continues to sap her energy and she is constantly battling herpes, chronic yeast infections and other AIDS-related illnesses. She told a group of high school juniors and seniors recently that, "By the time your freshman class graduates, I will probably be dead or too frail to take care of myself."

But Rae's spirit remains strong.

She gathers much of her strength from her husband of ten months, Kenny Thornton, a quiet man who shies away from the media and microphones. Rae met him in church about a year before he convinced her to go on their first date last February. "He knew that he was asking a woman out that had AIDS .... It really didn't matter to him." Six months later, on Aug. 27, 1994, the Rev. Jackson married the couple a Operation Push in Chicago.

Before Kenny, Rae says her loneliness was almost unbearable. "Some times I would just lie in bed and c myself to sleep because I wanted companionship. It was painful .... I yearned to have someone hold me. I yearned t have someone touch me. I yearned to someone to just wipe away my tears."