Sheryl Lee Ralph Talks with Diane Goettel About Bringing the
Stories of Women Affected by AIDS to the Stage, Working to
Educate Communities of Color & Promoting Self-Esteem and
Self-Empowerment as Part of HIV Prevention
Sheryl Lee Ralph is not only an actress; she is also a philanthropist and an activist. For the past two decades, Ralph has poured a great deal of time and love into the HIV/AIDS community. Most recently, through her one-woman show Sometimes I Cry: The Loves, Lives, and Losses of Women Infected and Affected by HIV/AIDS, she has reached out to the American population that currently has the highest rates of new infection: her own population, African-American women. Ralph based the play on the stories of real women whom she has met, interviewed, and come to know. Through evocative and emotional monologues, she presents the life stories of women who, through a variety of circumstances, became infected with HIV.
But Sometimes I Cry does not encapsulate Sheryl Lee Ralph’s work to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS. Ralph has borne witness to the ravages of the illness for over three decades. A Broadway veteran, she was in the first cast of Dreamgirls, which opened on December 20, 1981. While the show and its cast racked up armloads of awards, the mood behind the curtain was somber. “I had friends dancing alongside me one night,” says Ralph in an interview with A&U, “who were dead or dying the next.”
Throughout the eighties, Ralph watched numerous friends and colleagues fall ill and pass away due to complications related to AIDS. For her, the worst part about what was happening was the silence and stigma that surrounded it. In order to break this silence, Ralph founded the nonprofit Diva Foundation (home of the stage benefit Divas Simply Singing!) in 1990. The Diva Foundation has served two purposes; it has memorialized the friends that Ralph has lost to HIV/AIDS, and it has worked to get the word out about the virus. “My friends were good, kind children of God...,” says Ralph, “...they deserved a memorial.”
In 1990, when the foundation was in its infancy, many people still believed that HIV/AIDS was a symptom of homosexuality and intravenous drug use, and that institutions like the nuclear family were impervious to it. But Sheryl Lee Ralph knew better; she knew that AIDS does not discriminate. Upon founding the Diva Foundation, she voiced her concerns that, if HIV/AIDS was not addressed as a universally human problem, soon women and children would be affected. Furthermore, she worked to remind people that, despite their feelings about any particular population in our society, every person with HIV/AIDS is a human being. “What is OK about letting gay people suffer?” she asked. People told her that she was crazy, that she was going to Hell. She became accustomed to receiving hate mail.
In the summer of 2002, she received a call from Phill Wilson of Black AIDS Institute. He requested that she consider speaking about HIV/AIDS to women in communities of color. During these engagements, a creeping sense came over Sheryl Lee Ralph. She felt as if she was watching a rerun of what had happened to her dear friends in the eighties and nineties. “The same silence that shrouded over my friends’ death and dying was back again. It was over women of color.” Ralph found that the stigmas attached to HIV/AIDS were incredibly strong in the communities that she spoke to. And the stigmas were coupled with perilous silence. By the time she had completed her speaking engagements, she knew that she wanted to do something more. “I was absolutely fed up,” she tells A&U. “The silence [surrounding HIV/AIDS] in the African-American communities was unacceptable. And silence has always equalled death.”
Sometimes I Cry developed out of those first speaking engagements in two ways. It is both her response to the terrifying silence that she witnessed and a way for her to help those silenced women find their voices. They are at once “everywoman” characters and representations of real people. In the process of her work, Ralph continues to meet African-American women who are HIV-positive. With each woman that she meets, she learns a new story. Thus, the show is constantly evolving as Ralph brings new voices into the performance.
Throughout the process of creating and performing Sometimes I Cry, Ralph has discovered some very upsetting trends in the stories of the women who she has interviewed. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said to herself. ‘There is something much more here than women talking about HIV/AIDS.’ In many of the cases that Sheryl Lee Ralph has studied, there is a looming subject related to the women’s suffering. “There is always a sub-subject,” she shares, “such as lack of healthcare, education, or finances.” Many of the women who she has worked with also struggle with low self-esteem, and many have been subject to at least one form of abuse. Lack of resources and lack of agency, Ralph has discovered, create a breeding ground for infection. She hopes that, through Sometimes I Cry, she will be able to educate African-American women about HIV/AIDS; empower them to have frank conversations about it; and, most importantly, get tested and practice safe sex.
This year, Sheryl Lee Ralph was appointed as the celebrity spokesperson for National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, which is February 7. Although Ralph was pleased to serve in this capacity, the experience was bittersweet. Her friends started dying three decades ago and she has been talking about HIV/AIDS for nearly that long. She is glad to see the dialogue moving forward, but, ultimately, she wishes this kind of attention had been paid to HIV/AIDS long ago. Twenty years ago, she was regularly told that she was going to Hell. Now people are telling her that she will go to Heaven for her work. She feels that now that HIV/AIDS has become understood as a virus that does not discriminate, that its face includes women and children, people are starting to take note.
Having functioned as an activist and advocate for two decades, Ralph has certainly earned the right to criticize how the HIV/AIDS pandemic has been addressed and managed by our society. She feels that the most important thing is to stay with the basic messages: Practice safe sex. Get tested. Talk to your sexual partner or partners about your status. For Ralph, AIDS activism isn’t a trend, it is a major part of her life’s work. Simply showing up for a fundraiser or filming a commercial isn’t enough. The only way to beat HIV/AIDS is to fight it on a continual basis. “We need to keep up with this brilliant virus that is doing everything that it can to survive,” she tells A&U.
Sheryl Lee Ralph continues to perform Sometimes I Cry in order to promote dialogue about HIV/AIDS within the African-American population. But she has a number of other projects in the works as well. She and her husband, Pennsylvania Senator Vincent Hughes, are currently working on a campaign that urges couples to get tested together. She is also putting together an international conference for women to discuss HIV/AIDS, the first of its kind. The conference will be called “Sisters Circle” and will be held annually around the globe. This year, the sister-to-sister event will be held in South Africa. “Women and girls need to save themselves and be involved in their own well-being,” Ralph notes. It is this message that is the driving force of “Sisters Circle.”
Ralph is also continuing to take on acting roles and will appear on the third season of the popular VH-1 show Flavor of Love, a reality show in which the rapper Flavor Flav brings a gaggle of women into a mansion and puts them through various tests in order to try and find true love. “I wanted to bring some sense to this nonsense,” she says. “These women need to own that ‘ho’ and ‘bitch’ are not their names.” (In fact, Flavor Flav ignores the given names of the women and creates new names by which they are addressed on the show. He even went so far as naming a set of identical twins “Thing 1” and “Thing 2.”) Through her many years of activism, Ralph has found that empowerment, self-esteem, engaging in difficult dialogues, and education are the best ways to prevent infection. This is the message that she brought to the women on Flavor of Love.
Despite many backlashes, Sheryl Lee Ralph has persevered with her work to educate people about HIV/AIDS and to halt the spread of infection. She has relied on one fact and one mantra to see her through on this journey. She regularly reminds herself that AIDS is 100 percent preventable. And she tells herself that she must be the change she wants to see. Her work and her message are truly inspirational. She is most certainly one of the reasons that we are going to overcome the pandemic.
Diane Goettel is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor of The Adirondack Review as well as the managing editor of The Black Lawrence Press. E-mail: diane@blacklawrencepress.com.
April 2008
|
