![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The result: A remarkable series of seven first-person segments on life with AIDS, each nearly five minutes long - an eternity in TV news - and a team of telephone counselors who fielded questions about HIV until midnight. And last January, the CBS affiliate in Chicago, WBBM Channel 2, featured her in a news story and found her so polished and devastatingly honest that it hired her as a contributing editor. Her blunt, charismatic campaign has landed her on the cover of Essence. Since 1993, Lewis-Thornton has taken a fierce brand of AIDS activism to inner-city schools, conservative black churches and the readers of Ebony. ”By the time you walk across the stage for high-school graduation,“ she says quietly, ”I’ll be dead." ”Like, this very minute?“ It’s true she doesn’t look ill in her size-four business suit. "You mean you got AIDS right now?“ the boys ask. “I ask them, ’How many of you guys would have sex with me?’” Lewis-Thornton says later, curled on a couch in her Chicago apartment, “and they all raise their hands - even some of the teachers raise their hands.” And then she drops the bomb. The 34-year-old former political organizer for Jesse Jackson is sassy, sexy and smart as a whip, and she works it for all it’s worth. "I am fine!" Rae Lewis-Thornton declares, strutting through a classroom full of horny high school boys. ![]()
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