In Their Own Words

Kenny

Kenny is a 25-year-old fashion consultant who moved in 2011 to the United States from Kano, Nigeria where his father was a two-star general in the Nigerian Air Force and where his beloved mother still lives. She is the mother of four boys. Kenny opens his episode and the story of his secret with the line: "I love my mom." We see her in colorful garb with photos of Kenny when he was young and when grown. We see her joyful and smiling at the camera, at Kenny, who we might guess from the look in her eyes, took the photo. Kenny's telling of his secret circles round the difficulty of the revelation of his secret to his mother.

Kenny's secret is that he is HIV positive. Kenny, who came to the United States in 2011, has been HIV positive since 2012. For two years Kenny has lived with his secret.

He is a gay African man, who loved monogamously but was betrayed by his partner who did not tell him he had AIDS. Kenny discovered that he was HIV positive, ironically, when he went for a medical exam to obtain his Green Card.

So layered here and unspoken are the issues of color and immigration, a subject this episode of Secret Lives of Americans explores with all its personal and political ramifications.

Kenny's first-person story intersperses surprising facts: more than 1.2 million people in the United States live with HIV and 1 in 7 of HIV positive Americans are unaware of the infection, an illness that strikes someone in the states every 9.5 minutes. Those facts alone should give pause to anyone who today is sexually active even in a monogamous relationship.

Kenny makes those facts personal. He is afraid he'll not find love, that he'll be rejected because he carries the virus.

But the fear of otherness goes deeper because of the stigma that HIV carries, the sense that we the viewer might be saying to ourselves, "This can't be me," the misunderstanding of how HIV is transmitted, the fear that a piece of Kenny's silverware could give the disease to you or me and the belief that the illness itself is a death sentence—and indeed it might be but not because we won't find a cure—instead because the isolation of otherness can lead to feelings of desperation that end in suicide.

News reports, one that includes a cut line with a quote from Magic Johnson who has long lived with the infection and who fights the good fight on behalf of others, help us understand how deep the stigma runs: Children with HIV banned from school, just one example. And this alarming fact: 36 percent of people with HIV report that a medical provider has shunned them.

It is not facts, though, that drive the power of Kenny's story. Kenny's narration, his loving girlfriends who include Ariel and Sisi, and Gaby, who is Sisi's daughter, a rambunctious affectionate child who adores Kenny and showers him with hugs and kisses and the lovely Ana and Tess. Gaby, the young child, presents the challenge for Kenny: the deep fear that her mother Sisi might not want him near this child he loves.

Kenny tells his secret to beautiful Ariel first. The humorous, loving exchange is so worth watching.

Then, Kenny, with Ariel, visits Tess, Sisi and Ana. Ana defines the power of trust and the force of revelation when she says to Kenny, holding him in her arms, "You're not living in silence anymore. Do you understand this?"

Kenny is renewed but still faces telling his mother. Here the story layers itself more deeply because Kenny's deeply loving mother in Nigeria does not know he is gay.

It is important to understand that Kenny is healthy because his HIV was caught early and will likely never become full blown AIDS.

More important is the way Kenny's story humanizes the disease because we know him from his narration. We love him for his courage, for his candor, for his fear of what his mother may think and we have hope.

Kenny's arms outstretch and we think, Fly!

If anyone could be a voice for living positively, for keeping the search for a cure high on the priority list, for the resounding fact that a cure is inevitable and that "we are all affected by HIV AIDs, no matter where we live or who we are," to quote President Barack Obama, it would be Kenny.

Now with Secret Lives of Americans, Kenny is that voice.

Kenny has been betrayed by a lover and a virus. Jack has been afflicted by addiction. Both show us the yellow brick road to hope, even if there is no wizard behind the curtain.

The series Secret Lives of Americans reminds me of the novelist Milan Kundera's words in his book Testaments Betrayed. Substitute the word "novel" with the word "story" and you have life advice: "Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding."1

Secret Lives of Americans deals with intimate secrets that if revealed can change lives. This series will change you.

1. Kundera, Milan. Testaments Betrayed, New York: Harper Collins, 1993, page 7.