Sexuality Research & Social Policy Journal of NSRC

June 2005

http://nsrc.sfsu.edu

Vol. 2, No. 2

African Immigrant Damnation Syndrome: The Case of Charles Ssenyonga James Miller

Abstract: The category AIDS criminal arose in the early 1990s with the transference of the innocent victim/guilty carrier binary from theology and epidemiology into the domain of law. The case of Charles Ssenyonga, a Ugandan immigrant who became Canada’s most notorious AIDS criminal, reveals the revival of nineteenth-century racist and heterosexist discourses in the War on AIDS in the late twentieth century. Though Ssenyonga died in 1993 before a legal judgment could be rendered in his case, Canadian journalist June Callwood (1995a) condemned him on moral grounds in her bestseller Trial Without End: A Shocking Story of Women and AIDS. As a Black version of the legendary lady-killer Don Giovanni, Ssenyonga emerged from Callwood’s feminist fable as an incarnation of “African AIDS.” The discursive isolation of Ssenyonga as an exotic “other” in media coverage of his trial corresponded to the biological isolation of his potently African strain of HIV. Key words: AIDS criminal; African AIDS; racism; heterosexism; miscegenation

In the late 1980s, when the polemical phrase AIDS criminal still referred to someone like Ronald Reagan, activists were struggling on various fronts to resist the reflexive separation of people with AIDS into two morally opposed camps: “innocent victims of the virus” versus “guilty carriers of the plague.” Rallying on the academic front to expose the rapid ideological transformation of epidemiological risk groups into stigmatized minorities against whom the War on AIDS was to be fought, cultural critics pointed out that anyone considered at risk for AIDS on the basis of social background or sexual orientation was already in a bad position to plead innocent in the court of public opinion. By potentially carrying HIV and spreading the potently mythical AIDS virus, such a person also became a risk—or risked being represented as such—to the straight White middle-class majority who sought security under the aegis of the general public.1 On the political 1. See the entries for “carrier” and “victim” in Grover (1988, pp. 21-22, 28-30), along with her discussion of

front, not long after the new syndrome received its permanent medical name, activist groups drafted bold manifestos to expose the discriminatory implications of official AIDS discourse. In 1985, for instance, the People with AIDS/ARC Coalition proclaimed the Denver Principles, which became a model for subsequent declarations of the rights of PWAs. In its wake came “An Open Letter to the Planning Committees of the Third International Conference on AIDS” composed by the International Working Group on Women and AIDS (1988).2 Activist leaders strongly objected to the prejudicial representation of HIV-infected infants or media representations of “innocent victims” (p. 34). The moralistic implications of the carrier/victim binary were also exposed by Patton (1985, pp. 6-7); Treichler (1988, pp. 44-46); and Watney (1987, pp. 86-97; 1988, pp. 74-78). For a satiric depiction of Ronald Reagan as an “AIDS criminal,” see Gran Fury’s 1987 poster AIDSgate in Crimp and Rolston (1990, p. 36). 2. For the full text of these important activist manifestos, see Crimp (1988, pp. 148-149, 166-168).

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Professor James Miller, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Western Ontario, London, N6A 3K7, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

Sexuality Research and Social Policy: Journal of NSRC, Vol. 2, Issue 2, pp. 31-50, online ISSN 1553-6610. © 2005 by the National Sexuality Research Center. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissions to photocopy or reproduce article content 31 through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm

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hemophiliacs as hapless innocents caught up in the apocalyptic spread of the plague. The moral mission of many local AIDS organizations was to oppose the widespread notion of the epidemic as an evil brought on humanity by sexually depraved and socially unclean others who had somehow contracted the virus through a perverse or malicious exercise of will. “We condemn attempts to label us as ‘victims,’ which implies defeat,” proclaimed the People with AIDS/ARC Coalition (1985, p. 148). They demanded to know how the creation of AIDS martyrs would ever benefit the sick.3 On the media front, public health officials were beginning to promote the dubious liberal message that AIDS affects everyone by launching safer-sex campaigns explicitly opposed to the scapegoating of risk groups and the scare tactics of religious bigots. The slogan AIDS Is Everyone’s Concern appeared on a series of posters produced in 1989-1990 by the University of Miami. Variations on the same theme included AIDS Affects Us All (fax poster produced for the 1990 International AIDS Conference in San Francisco); AIDS Is Everyone’s Problem (Terrence Higgins Trust poster, 1987); and AIDS—A Worldwide Problem That Everyone Has to Know About (Health and Welfare Canada poster, 1989).4 Counterpropagandists on the artistic front were ready to go a step further. In a celebrated series of graphic works and installations parodying the iconography of medical and media authority, Gran Fury, the artists’ collective associated with ACT UP New York, was striving to collapse the guilty/ innocent binary by proclaiming that All People with AIDS Are Innocent.5 Despite the moral weight of this memorable overstatement, the old binary refused to buckle: it simply shifted its foundations from epidemiology and theology onto new discursive grounds. In the early 1990s, much to the chagrin of AIDS activists across Europe and North America, the hateful division of ranks was compulsively redrawn in the domain of law with the widely publicized emergence of a new kind of guilty carrier—the vicious AIDS criminal who was officially under arrest. Into this category fell an African immigrant to Southwestern Ontario by the name of Charles Ssenyonga (see Figure 1), whose troubling case, more than any other in Canadian law, reveals the virulent persistence of premodern 3. For an affirmation of the notion of “AIDS martyrs,” see Watney (1987, p. 148). For a critique of the same notion, see Miller (1991a). 4. For further examples of this liberal theme, see entries WHO.100.001, USA.130.002, and YU.100.002 in Brunswicker (1992). 5. For a reproduction of this 1988 activist poster, see Crimp and Rolston (1990, p. 54).

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racial and sexual divides amid the postmodern mêlée of competing discourses and deconstructed categories. If Ssenyonga’s case gives the lie to the cheery modernist fable that the Age of AIDS is over in Canada and the United States thanks to safer sex and pharmaceutical ingenuity, it also unsettles the imperialist fantasy—recently resurgent in the Western media—that the epidemic, though still raging out of control among the hapless populations of sub-Saharan Africa, will someday be contained like Ebola fever at its source in the Heart of Darkness. Figure 1. Photograph of Charles Ssenyonga being arrested. Taken by Sue Reeve.*

The allegorical identification of Africa with AIDS (and hence with Death) is likely to remain a commonplace in the mainstream Western media well into the new millennium. In 2001 the allegory of African AIDS was piously proclaimed as a revealed truth by journalist Johanna McGeary in her apocalyptic cover story “Death * Photograph is courtesy of the London Free Press, London, Ontario, Canada. Further reproduction is prohibited without written permission from the London Free Press.

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Stalks A Continent” in Time. “The victims don’t cry out,” she preached. “Doctors and obituaries do not give the killer its name. Families recoil in shame. Leaders shirk responsibility. The stubborn silence heralds victory for the disease: denial cannot keep the virus at bay” (p. 29). Perish the thought that Death might actually be stalking “innocent victims” in the happy realms of the First World where even “guilty carriers” can now enjoy the ambrosial benefits of “AIDS cocktails” (p. 38). The map of Africa illustrating McGeary’s jeremiad (pp. 30-31) was clearly designed to transform the once Dark Continent into an epidemiologically illuminated hot zone with particularly hot spots located in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, and South Africa. Maps of this sort implicitly sustain the Western fantasy of containing AIDS in Africa.6

African Imports How African was Charles Ssenyonga? Was he primarily African in the Western media sense suggested by the xenophobic phrase African AIDS? Born in 1957 near the village of Kanyeguyero in southwestern Uganda, he was the eldest child of Catholic parents, both teachers. Though his mother sometimes spoke to him in her native Runyankole, a Bantu language, his father raised him to regard English as his mother tongue and to distance himself from the primitive culture of the local Banyankole people. As a boy he attended a seminary school. During his formative years his attitudes to sex were probably no more African than the Pope’s. While the exotic sound and totemic significance of his surname (“father of the egret”) may have romantically Africanized him in the minds of the White women he would eventually court in Canada, his youthful passion in Uganda seems to have been for liberty rather than libertinism. Determined to secure a position in the Ugandan elite through Western-style professional training, he enrolled as a law student at Makerere University in Kampala at the start of the 1980s. By the age of 24 he had already made a name for himself in student government by helping to organize large demonstrations against the tyranny of Idi Amin’s successor, President Milton Obote. 6. For a political critique of such maps, see Patton (2002, pp. 51-113). The corpses of African plague victims are anxiously torched in the opening sequence in the 1993 TV movie adaptation of Randy Shilts’s 1987 bestseller And the Band Plays On. As this sequence (based on Shilts’s report of an epidemiological close call in the African prelude to his AIDS chronicle, pp. 4-5) makes gruesomely clear, the Western fantasy of containing AIDS in Africa has been displaced onto the epidemiological narrative of Ebola Fever.

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When Obote’s army stormed the university to arrest student agitators in 1981, Ssenyonga escaped to Kenya and resumed his law studies at the University of Nairobi. Two years later, having convinced the Canadian embassy in Kenya that he could not return to Uganda for fear of execution as an enemy of the Obote régime, he immigrated to Canada and enrolled in the political science program at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Upon graduation in 1986, he drifted back and forth between Ottawa and Montreal for over a year before settling down in London, a medium-sized city midway between Toronto and Detroit, where he sold African artifacts in a small downtown mall. He called his shop The African Store, with a proud (and perhaps ironic) sense of its cultural incongruity amid the country-style doughnut shops and trashy clothing outlets in its vicinity. Having lived in London myself since 1985, I recall visiting The African Store a couple of times in the late 1980s. It was located in a dreary windowless corridor of The London Mews (later renamed Smuggler’s Alley) down which I would often pass with my children en route to a movie theater located up an escalator at the back of the building. Though I have only the vaguest memory of Ssenyonga sitting behind his cash register, I distinctly recall wondering how anyone could make a living selling shaman’s masks and leopard-print T-shirts to good gray Londoners in the midst of a recession. Though the drums, fabrics, pots, masks, and carvings on sale in his shop were ridiculously overpriced—even by yuppie boutique standards—there was one African import he was passing on for free: a peculiarly aggressive strain of Ugandan HIV. I first learned of his dramatic role in bringing the horrors of African AIDS to the normally placid heart of Southwestern Ontario from the London Free Press reports of his clashes with public health authorities (e.g., Marchildon, 1991). Like many Londoners, I would later turn to Toronto journalist June Callwood’s 1995 bestseller Trial Without End: A Shocking Story of Women and AIDS for the full story of what had gone on, so unexpectedly, in our own town. Though I am indebted to Callwood (1995) for digging up biographical information about Ssenyonga’s youth, education, immigration, business career, dating history, medical record, arrest, preliminary hearing, marriage, trial, and death, I hesitate to label her moral exhumation a biography. Its pulpy subtitle (A Shocking Story of Women and AIDS) places it somewhere between investigative profile and feminist exposé with hints of gothic thriller and murder mystery. Since her primary focus was fixed on the epidemiological sleuthing of her hero,

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Dr. Cheryl Wagner, the narrative interlace of Trial Without End highlights the intersecting lives of the women infected by Ssenyonga. The facts of his life before he became an AIDS criminal were of little interest to her, and her journalistic impulse to flesh out the story of his trial with juicy tidbits of background information about his violent African past and shady finances fails to produce a coherent reconstruction—let alone a clear chronology—of his experiences as an African immigrant in Canada. Her version of his life achieves coherence at a mythic level only, and in this respect she follows the cagey lead of Shilts (1989), whose notoriously Dickensian account of Patient Zero turned the career of gay airline steward Gaetan Dugas into a chilling vector of viral villainy.7 On February 21, 1989, Ssenyonga was startled by a visit from a public health nurse, who urged him to be tested for AIDS because two HIV-positive women had named him as their sexual contact. He had in fact already submitted a sample of his blood for testing on February 17, and on March 2 the results of two separate tests (Elisa and Western blot) confirmed his suspicions—and those of the Middlesex-London health authorities—that he was infected with HIV. Though he assured the public health nurse that he was no longer sexually active, he was lying to her. He was having unprotected sex with several women at the time, and would continue to do so for months to come. Urgent recommendations that he practice abstinence or follow the safer-sex guidelines of the AIDS Committee of London fell on deaf ears. On February 12, 1990, Dr. Douglas Pudden, the medical officer of health for Middlesex-London, issued an order under Section 22 of the Health Protection and Promotion Act forbidding Ssenyonga from engaging “in sexual acts that involve any penile penetration into [his] mouth or anus, or into the mouth, anus or vagina of another person” (Callwood, 1995a, p. 74). Though he faced a fine of $5,000 a day if he failed to comply with this unusual abstinence order—the first ever issued by the health authorities in the city—it cannot have bothered him much. He was broke at the time. The African Store had folded. He knew that the Section 22 order only applied to him within the borders of Ontario, and that defying it— which he proceeded to do—was not a criminal offense since it had not been issued as a court order. In March of 1991, Ontario’s chief medical officer Dr. Richard Schabas had applied for a tougher judicial order under Section 101 of the Health Protection and Promotion Act, by which

Ssenyonga would be compelled to respect the Section 22 order or face jail. Though his danger to the general public had been sighted by the medical gaze and his identity as a menace to public health duly fixed in Dr. Pudden’s meticulous records, he seems to have blocked from his mind—a mind academically fortified with political science—the Foucaultian nightmare of state control over a citizen’s sex life. Can he have failed to see the glaring relevance of Foucault’s (1979) Discipline and Punish to his own case? Despite its panoptical pretensions, the Middlesex-London public health unit seems to have been lamentably inefficient at controlling the erotic anarchist’s desire for penile penetration at any orifice of his choice. Reading Sections 22 and 101 to him amounted to little more than a blustering speech act. The reading of the restraining order to Ssenyonga amounted to an illocutionary act, an utterance designed to have a certain conventional force such as the power to inform, order, or warn. Unfortunately, because Ssenyonga ignored the purely conventional force of the warning, it failed to have the perlocutionary consequences of sexual self-discipline and HIV prevention intended by the public health authorities. Pudden’s admonition might as well have been a maledictory spell cast at a defiant soul who did not believe in magic.8 The medical gaze needed the media spotlight to make life in London uncomfortable for him. After an alarming report about his promiscuity, “Sex Ban Sought in AIDS Case” (Milne & Ruscitti, 1991), was published in the London Free Press on April 2, 1991, he became virtually unemployable in the city. Thanks to media surveillance, he was now a persona non grata in an economic as well as an erotic sense. A ban on sex was a hot item for the local press, of course, but even hotter was the blatant defiance of such a ban by an egregious outsider with the self-esteem of an enfant terrible. Finding no way to defend himself against the rumors of his sexual guilt without the press having a field day—“Man with HIV Virus [sic] Denies He Ignored Sex Ban” read one headline (Marchildon, 1991)—he decided to escape the taboo zone of Middlesex county for the anything-goes anonymity of Toronto. Ssenyonga’s attorney, Fletcher Dawson, was swift to inform the media that his client not only denied the accusation of sexual misconduct but also objected to the press’s portrayal of him as a vicious AIDS criminal. Twisting the rhetoric of AIDS activism to defend himself, he appears to have rejected the “guilty carrier” label while implicitly

7. For a critique of Shilts’s narrative construction of Patient Zero, see Miller (1991b, pp. 257-264).

8. On the perlocutionary impact of speech acts, see Austin (1962, p. 109).

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maintaining his own status as an “innocent victim”—of racism, slander, poverty, xenophobia, feminist revenge, police harassment, rotten luck, and on top of everything, poor health. “He obviously doesn’t want to become victimized in any way as the result of all the publicity that’s associated with this” (Marchildon, 1991, p. B1), Dawson disingenuously explained to the press. Since Ssenyonga had already been victimized by mainstream AIDS discourse, he had little choice at this point but to use it to his advantage by playing for sympathy. On April 29, he fled down Highway 401 with the cops on his tail (in more senses than one) but managed to give them the slip when he reached the Queen and Broadview district in Toronto’s shady east end. Dropping out of sight for the next six weeks, as he had done in Nairobi following his flight from Kampala, he made plans to flee Ontario for British Columbia before the Section 101 order against him could work its tangled way through the courts. The heat would certainly be on when the media hounds got wind of a sealed affidavit in the Section 101 application signed by a certain Jane Doe who claimed to have been infected by him after the first restraining order had been issued. Though the actual identity of this woman has never been revealed, Callwood (1995a) identified her as Patient E, the Hamilton physical education instructor also known as Joan Estrada (p. 98). Ssenyonga’s options at this point were flight or fight, and since there was little to tie him down in Ontario, he promptly drove off to Vancouver with a Ugandan woman who had befriended him in London after the collapse of his business. Taking up residence in a Burrard Street flophouse, he kept a low profile in the hope that he could put his life back together again without the humiliating restraint of Section 22. Had he not been in tight spots before and lived to tell the tale? But freedom did not last long. On June 18, 1991, two Ontario Provincial Police officers showed up at his hotel room door with a warrant for his arrest. “What is this about?” (Callwood, 1995a, p. 172) he disingenuously asked, as if he had no idea that mountains of medical evidence and painful personal testimony had finally convinced the police that he had deliberately infected several Ontario women with HIV. Four charges were laid against him at this time—aggravated sexual assault, criminal negligence causing bodily harm, criminal negligence unlawfully causing bodily harm, and committing a common nuisance. The arresting officers hoped that at least one of these charges would stick when he finally met his accusers in court. He was immediately flown back to Toronto and driven west to London to await a preliminary hearing, scheduled to begin on November 12,

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1991. The hearing was to drag on through 11 court days until April 24, 1992, and even then it took Judge Deborah Livingstone until May 28, 1992, to render her decision that he should stand trial for aggravated sexual assault and criminal negligence. In the eyes of his accusers, he had already got away with murder.

Scene of the Crime A medical report presented to Judge Dougald McDermid on the first day of Ssenyonga’s trial, April 6, 1993, declared the accused fit enough to endure the ordeal that lay before him despite his evident weakness from AIDS. In the report Dr. Dan Gregson reassured the court—as Callwood (1995a) reassured her readers—that the stress of the trial would not be “life-threatening or life-shortening” (p. 278) for the accused. (In retrospect, this prediction proved to be ironic at the very least, for Ssenyonga was to die that summer—only three and a half months after the start of his trial.) Even so, Callwood was willing to observe that he had “lost much weight since his last appearance in a courtroom” (p. 278). The wasting syndrome had taken its toll on his once muscular body, and a look of weary resignation had replaced the cocky attitude familiar to Londoners from a much-reprinted headshot (see Figure 2) originally published in the London Free Press.9 Because his status as a guilty carrier was central to the case, his unhealthy look must have implicitly confirmed the Figure 2. Photograph of Charles Ssenyonga. Taken by Susan Bradnam.*

9. The headshot was reprinted in Callwood (1995b, p. 57). * Photograph is courtesy of the London Free Press, London, Ontario, Canada. Further reproduction is prohibited without written permission from the London Free Press.

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necessity for the criminal proceedings and the urgency of its anticipated outcome. For how could an AIDS criminal of his magnitude be found guilty unless he looked the part from Day One? For most days of the trial, details of his declining physical condition and outré fashion choices were grotesquely recorded by London Free Press reporter Debora Van Brenk in a small boxed column labeled The Scene, which appeared alongside her courtroom report. The Scene spoke volumes about the public entertainment value of what Simon Watney (1988) has called “the spectacle of AIDS” (p. 80) unfolding around the accused with dumb-show formality. On April 8, for instance, the newspaper treated its groundling readers to the following minute details of the spectacle from the previous day, details only visible to privileged media observers close to center stage in the courtroom: The Scene Charles Ssenyonga appeared wearing a sweater, black pants and had a long, wide scarf draped around his neck. A brief morning recess was called because Ssenyonga was feeling dizzy and he wore the scarf on his head the rest of the day. After the lunch break, a medicine bottle, decongestant rub and cough drops were on the table in front of him. (Van Brenk, 1991, p. B2) This was only day 3 of the trial. Readers of The Scene were left to imagine how many medicine bottles and cough drop boxes would be piled up on his table by the end of the drama. Surely, by then, he would be buried under the guiltbetraying props of his disease, the litter of futile pharmaceutical products! Participating in the public spectacularization of his symptoms and dubious self-fashionings, Callwood took over Van Brenk’s duties as witness of The Scene with a vengeance—expanding on all the quotidian details, however minute, with an obsessive sense of their significance as clues to Ssenyonga’s mysterious character. His costume on day 3, for instance, comes into much clearer focus in Callwood’s eyewitness account published 4 years later (1995a, p. 283). The accused, we learn, did not just wear a sweater; it was a “loose sweater.” He did not just sport a scarf; it was exotically “fringed.” He did not just enter the courtroom; he entered it in the role of an impolite intruder crashing a stuffy family reunion. “Courtroom A, airless and stale-smelling, already seemed familiar, a timeless airless cocoon enveloping lawyers and journalists and court staff who had become a family,” she moodily recalls, and then, as if cuing an actor in the wings, she ushers him onto The Scene: “Charles Ssenyonga arrived with one minute to spare” (p. 283).

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What possible relevance these details of his costume and entrance had to his case as an ethical dilemma, or to his trial as a legal process, is anyone’s guess. Yet, from an anthropological viewpoint, the very theatricality of these tiny signs was immensely important to the triumphant creation of Ssenyonga’s criminal identity. The loose sweater showed that he really was losing weight because of his deadly disease, or at least was trying to look thinner in order to arouse the court’s sympathy. The fringe on his scarf and his turban-style fashion of wearing it supposedly revealed his devious efforts to look Third World, to present himself as a poor illiterate African who had just stepped off the boat. It was all show. But the show had to go on—the show of justice being done on the panic scene of the plague—precisely because Ssenyonga’s alterations in appearance under the stress of the trial would spectacularly prove that his punishment as a guilty carrier of the virus had begun long before a verdict was ever pronounced in the case. Since the scene of the crime in his case was hidden from public scrutiny behind the modesty curtains of common decency—the bedroom being the very shrine of adult privacy in Ontario—the London Free Press had to construct a crime of The Scene, in effect a fashion crime: the AIDS criminal’s vain effort to disguise his guilty face behind a veil of innocence. Though this act was petty in itself, it could stand in for the horror of what he had done in secret away from the public eye. A fringed scarf on a man? As an accessory, it was perfect for a foreign villain’s costume. It bound his image to several intersecting allegories of transgression by symbolically feminizing him, exoticizing him, enshrouding him like a cadaver, concealing him like a terrorist, and perhaps even outing him as a queer invader of the city’s heterosexual dating scene. The juryless trial would have more surprise twists and turns than the British detective dramas regularly served up to London’s bourgeoisie on opening nights at the Grand Theatre a block away from the courthouse. Finally charged with three counts each of criminal negligence and aggravated sexual assault, Ssenyonga startled those who had hoped for a speedy end to the ritual drama of his downfall by pleading “not guilty” on all counts before a media-packed courtroom on April 6, 1993. On April 30 Judge McDermid abruptly acquitted him of the sexual assault charges but allowed the criminal negligence charges to stand. Though his attorney Fletcher Dawson eventually persuaded him to accept a mens rea defense of “not guilty because not criminally responsible,” Ssenyonga had no desire to enter the heart of darkness as a lunatic. Whatever dementia lay ahead for him in the downward course of his disease, his mind (mens) had been sound enough in his upwardly mobile career as a seducer. The infected women

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from whose accusations no escape now seemed possible glared at him furiously or wept quietly during the trial, hoping that finally the legal system would produce a morally satisfying dénouement for their collective tragedy. His trial spluttered to its final day on July 7, with the weary judge promising to render a decision in the case by August 4. The yearned-for decision never came. To the wronged women’s (and Callwood’s) intense chagrin, the defendant died of AIDS-related complications on July 20—two short weeks before his guilt should have been officially established. It was his final escape from The Scene, a disappearing act that was to leave his victims bitterly frustrated by the failure of the law to bring him to justice. In the absence of an accused who could neither be punished nor vindicated, the judge refused to deliver a verdict or even to set forth his reasons for reserving judgment. According to Dr. Iain Mackie, who had testified at the trial as a medical witness for the prosecution, justice was not simply not done in the Ssenyonga case. It was “undone” (Mackie, cited in Van Brink, 1993, p. A4). The subsequent branding of Ssenyonga as an AIDS criminal who escaped justice by beating the system is a peculiarly disturbing instance of the resilient moralization of sex in the context of viral transmission and racial transgression. It is so because, however clear Ssenyonga’s guilt still appears in the court of public opinion, he was never proven guilty in a court of law—and maybe never would have been, even had he lived until judgment day, given the difficulty of finding a suitable legal charge that could stick to his dastardly deeds and their dire consequences. The charge that he had committed homicide by injecting a noxious substance was abandoned by the prosecutors before the preliminary hearing began in 1992 because they could not prove that he ever regarded his semen as poison or intended to murder his sexual partners with it. The charge that he had committed aggravated sexual assault was dropped by the judge midway through the trial in 1993 because the three complainants confessed that they had consented to having unprotected sexual intercourse with the accused. And the charge that he had committed criminal negligence causing bodily harm, even if it had not been suspended because of his death, might not have resulted in a guilty verdict because he had stubbornly stuck to his not-guilty plea. He was never charged with committing a crime against humanity, which is what many London Free Press readers still vehemently feel he was guilty of and got away with, despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on the public health orders and police investigations and judicial proceedings that led to his futile arraignment. It is a charge that puts him on an infernal par with the war criminals at

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the Nuremberg tribunals, and perhaps, in the long run, when the casualties in the War on AIDS surpass those in World War II, such a comparison may not seem wildly hyperbolic to the eyewitnesses at the trial who were originally impressed by the stoic hauteur of Ssenyonga’s “impassive, dignified figure” (Callwood, 1995a, p. 235).

Judge His Black Soul In the spring of 1995, profoundly disenchanted with the Ontario Ministry of Health and the Canadian criminal justice system for failing not just the women whose testimony was supposed to have put Ssenyonga away for life but all women whose lives were endangered by sexual predators in cahoots with Death, Callwood (1995a) published her shocking story of women and AIDS. What was shocking about her version of the Ssenyonga case was not the lesson that women could get AIDS from unprotected sex with men—hardly hot news by then—but the chilling moral that AIDS was primarily a man’s disease transmitted to women through sexual violence. While the blurb on the back cover of Trial Without End promised “a rivetting account” of who nailed whom in court, the front cover with its red-lettered subtitle A Shocking Story of Women and AIDS left little doubt that readers would be mainly interested in who nailed whom in bed. A triumph of target marketing, the story was packaged in the tastefully suggestive style of yuppie bedroom fiction à la Hollywood Wives (Collins, 1983) with a sinister touch of The Stranger Beside Me (Rule, 1980). The dust jacket of the hardcover edition featured a full-cover photograph of rumpled sheets with two pillows, one clearly untouched and the other bearing the passionately pressed imprint of a head. Even the most bored and listless browser in an airport bookstore could tell at a glance that a dashing lothario had seduced yet another poor career woman on that bed of pleasure and turned it into a bed of pain. The photo had an intriguingly violent subtext readable at forty paces. Whoever the mysterious stranger was, he had disposed of his lay and vanished without a trace, leaving Callwood (whose grandmotherly face smiles grimly on, despite the shock of it all, in an author photo on the back flap) to lure the voyeurreader past the salacious cover into the respectable sheets of the book. Under her moralizing scrutiny, all the gory details behind the erotic scene of the crime may be safely revealed with a comforting liberal regard for the educational value of the case. Though Ssenyonga did not know Callwood personally and never granted her an interview, she got to know many of the women he had dated, duped, and dumped between 1988 and 1991. From their heartrending stories of love and betrayal, she pieced together his dark tale with

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the objectivity of an avenging Fury. When she was done with him in her book, his life was fortunately over, but his afterlife was just beginning in the annals of sexual infamy as a legendary AIDS criminal who had committed what a feminist columnist in the Toronto Star called “slow murder with his penis” (Landsberg, 1994, p. G1). When a decree issued in January 1994 by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board reduced the amount of compensation (from a requested $25,000 down to $15,000) awarded to most of the surviving “Ssenyonga-infected” women, it was explicitly justified on the legal grounds that each “applicant’s behaviour in engaging in unprotected sexual intercourse was behaviour which contributed to the injury she sustained” (Callwood, 1995a, pp. 375-379). The Board’s implicit condemnation of the women on moral grounds added more than insult to their injury. It added further shock value—further marketability—to Callwood’s feminist fable. An open ending was unthinkable, unbearable, in a scandalous story that had interlaced scores of decent Ontarian lives for at least 6 years and intensified toward a precedent-setting climax in the 12-year legal history of the epidemic in Canada. For the three female complainants who had accused Ssenyonga of knowingly infecting them with HIV during consensual sex, and for the dozen or so other reported victims of his lethal charm who had to live with his virus for years to come, some significance to their tragic suffering had to be recognized in the end; some point to their valiant struggle for justice had to be made beyond the frustrating arena of the law; some verdict had to be set down in the records of the nation’s conscience. To Callwood fell the authorial duty of bringing Ssenyonga’s fateful but appallingly unresolved case to some kind of acceptable moral closure. Since she could not portray him as Ssenyonga Agonistes, the pitifully weakened victim of his own heroic strengths, she had to find some other, darker, legendary lover to serve as his evil model. But who would fill the bill? That the spirit of a great erotic villain did indeed rise up from hell to possess Ssenyonga’s body in Callwood’s (1995a) tale, moving his limbs anew in a feverish dance of death and sweeping innocent ladies into the vortex of his mysterious lusts, is apparent from the heavy trails of sulfur she follows through the thickets of legal logic and scientific evidence to get at his elusive spiritual core. Who this slippery incubus became in her mythic understanding of the case will be revealed in due course, but for now we must appreciate her unflinching artistic determination to re-create him in all his ignominy. Against the simple objection that Ssenyonga was once a real person with a messily real life and not a fictional construct with an artfully

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developed character, her portrayal of him as an aggressive malefactor with an insidious afterlife must be defended as a literary conjuration of breathtaking fantasy requiring more nerve than his wily attorney Fletcher Dawson ever showed in defending him as a hapless victim of posttraumatic stress disorder. Dawson had relied on Dr. Roger Langevin’s expert testimony that Ssenyonga’s misdoings were the result of stress stemming from his traumatic political experiences in Africa and his subsequent shock at learning his serostatus (Callwood, 1995a, p. 311). While this psychiatric assessment of his innocence would have been groundbreaking only in a dull legal sense as a precedent in the Canadian annals of the last-ditch insanity defense, Callwood’s moral assessment of his guilt breaks ground the way God does when the earthquakes and the damned are hurled into hell. Stealing some thunder from the storm clouds of hyperbole swirling around the tabloid coverage of the case, she no doubt chose the title Trial Without End as much for its apocalyptic resonances as for its legal implications. Like the liturgical phrase “world without end,” it requires an “amen” for completion. Callwood was not new to the task of moralizing the epidemic for the general public. In 1988 she had given the frightening new disease a human face by bestowing the meek features of an AIDS martyr on the publicity stills of Toronto actor James St. James in Jim: A Life With AIDS, already a classic of AIDS hagiography.10 Trial Without End (Callwood, 1995a) is the demonological flip side of that previous work, its infernal complement, its dark (as in Dark Continent) side. What its villain clearly deserved was the inhuman face of AIDS, the diabolically seductive visage of the AIDS criminal from Africa. Little did Londoners realize in 1987, when The African Store opened on Dundas Street, that its spunky proprietor was none other than the legendary seducer Don Juan—in blackface— whose chief delight was ruining the lives and reputations of respectable ladies. The earliest known record of the Don Juan myth dates from 1630 when Gabriel Téllez (1630), a Spanish monk who used the pen name Tirso de Molina, published a play about a wily aristocratic libertine entitled El Burlador de Sevilla. By 1789, when Lorenzo Da Ponte adapted the farcical plot of The Practical Joker of Seville for the libretto of Mozart’s tragicomic opera Don Giovanni, the three essential aspects of the original Don Juan type were already firmly imprinted on the erotic imagination

10. For a critique of Callwood’s (1988) hagiographical treatment of James St. James, see Miller (1991a, pp. 65-73).

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of the West. The Don’s enduring infamy lay (as it still lies) in the shocking excessiveness of his appetites, the fatal deceitfulness of his seductions, and the arrogant stubbornness of his impenitence.11 Like Mozart’s avenging heroine Donna Elvira, who exposed Don Giovanni’s evil to the world with her ringing condemnation “Da quel ceffo si dovria/la ner’alma giudicar” [From this face you may judge his black soul] (Da Ponte, 1789/1983, p. I.12), Callwood was determined to see through Ssenyonga’s skin, to get behind the mask of his handsome face. A media headshot of Ssenyonga showing no signs of his lurking disease was teasingly reproduced in an extract of her book under the title “A Date With AIDS” in Saturday Night (Callwood, 1995b, p. 57) so that her morally alerted readers could glimpse the demonic blackness of his soul from the viewpoint of the women whose lives he had destroyed. “You don’t know me,” Ssenyonga once complained to Jane Campbell, an ex-girlfriend whose wildly jealous nature was perpetually challenged by his defiant infidelities. “You don’t know the man I really am,” he insisted, and the aggressive defensiveness of tone made her suspect “that he was referring to his secret homosexual life” (Callwood, 1995a, p. 36). His secretiveness also provoked Callwood’s suspicions. From her politely stalwart position of common decency, innocent of Foucaultian panopticism, she simply could not understand why an obscure little man commanded by the state to cease from sexual intercourse should have screwed himself silly for months afterward without latex protection for his partners. It just wasn’t socially responsible of him. It just wasn’t done. Why would a private citizen not comply with the law when it sternly imposed, through an absurdly unenforceable edict, a régime of abstinence on his rebellious genitals? Enthralling in his excesses, shameless in his deceptions, and perverse in his denials of guilt, the mythic Ssenyonga easily stands out against the gray background of WASP Ontario. Fascination with his exotic excessiveness, a leitmotif throughout the book, is usually the first danger sign that an unsuspecting lady is about to have a Date with AIDS—a sign fatally unheeded by his first known victim, the anonymous Patient A of the medical records. An acquaintance of Patient A’s, Linda Booker, fell under the spell of Ssenyonga’s African otherness even before their first date. Linda worked as a researcher for a Toronto electronics firm before she had the fateful encounter with Ssenyonga that irrevocably transformed her into Patient B. She “found him fascinating company” (Callwood, 1995a, p.21) not only 11. On the Don Juan myth in literary and operatic history, see Russell (1993).

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because of his dashing good looks but also because of his thrilling anecdotes about the violence he had witnessed back in Uganda. He didn’t just live through troubled times during his youth. He endured “a reign of terror” (p. 21) that had forced him to flee, penniless and without a passport, from his homeland to Kenya. “Linda was enthralled,” gasps Callwood as if she had been right there beside her—so close to the danger!—drinking in the exciting tale as it poured from his lips: “After so many years of living abroad she found most Canadians of her age an uninteresting lot. By contrast the exotic Ssenyonga was mesmerizing on such subjects as African culture and philosophy” (p. 21). Like his sinister African doubles, Amin and Obote, Ssenyonga emerges from obscurity here as a charismatic political animal with a will to dominate the weaker sex—a mini-tyrant whose reign of terror was just about to begin at a viral level. Clearly what he would later sell at The African Store was something more than a collection of tribal drums and shaman’s masks: it was a neo-Victorian romance of primitive patriarchy in all its violent and erotic invincibility. Promiscuity on a grand scale was not the only exotic excess that made him fascinating to the virtuous career women whom he savaged in bed. Callwood (1995a), for all her professional scruples about factual reportage, throws caution to the wind in her gossipy inventory of Ssenyonga’s sexual partners. “Little lady, here’s a list of his conquests,” the Don’s servant Leporello reports to an astonished Donna Elvira, “the Spaniards number already one thousand and three” (Da Ponte, 1789/1983, p. I.5). If the tally of Ssenyonga’s conquests does not quite match the Don’s Spanish record of mille e tre boastfully advertised by Leporello, it is large enough by Callwood’s hazy reckoning to shock all good monogamous parents who have daughters on the marriage market. “What is fascinating and frightening about Ssenyonga,” Callwood (1995a) reported, citing the testimony of Dr. Cheryl Wagner whose epidemiological sleuthing led to the discovery of Ssenyonga’s fatal link with Patients A through G, is that he managed to infect every woman with whom he had unprotected sex. Every one of them, including a woman who slept with him only once. Either his virus was shedding, multiplying like crazy, or his strain of the virus was especially contagious. (p. 61) Though this statistic is drummed up with the impressive weight of Wagner’s clinical authority, and driven home with the full force of Callwood’s Victorian italics, it can only be a sensational rumor: the fact is that nobody knows for sure—or ever can know now—how many women (including those in Africa whom Wagner never examined) had unprotected sex with Ssenyonga during his reign of terror, nor of those, how many were infected by him in Uganda,

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Kenya, or Canada. The frightening effect of this rumor is to inflate Ssenyonga’s potency as a hyper-viral carrier by conflating it with his potency as a hyper-virile seducer. The excessive width of the sexual swath he cut through the female population of Southwestern Ontario was imaginatively matched only by the excessive length of the organ he used for the kill. To Wagner’s medical explanations for Ssenyonga’s contagious allure, Callwood (1995a) ups the phobic ante by adding the following speculations by a male doctor who got to see the goods: Dr. Iain Mackie speculates that the reason Ssenyonga infected women so readily was that intercourse lasted so long. Ssenyonga was able to sustain an erection for hours. Also, Ssenyonga’s penis was larger than average. Did this result in fatal rips to vaginas? (p. 61) Though this question is clinically unanswerable, it is raised here for the sole purpose of spreading the myth-bolstered rumor that Ssenyonga was sinisterly well hung and supremely endowed with sexual stamina. The African male was evidently driven by his hyper-virility to rip open vaginas and to spread virus with fatal abandon—a fact that would not have surprised Dr. Philippe Rushton, a notorious psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario in London, who at the time of Ssenyonga’s sexual marathon had just published an article (Rushton & Bogaert, 1989) predicting that HIV transmission rates in sub-Saharan Africa were doomed to soar because of the genetically induced lasciviousness of Negroids.12 Though no epidemiological studies have ever demonstrated that penile length and erectile durability are causal factors in increasing the transmissibility of HIV during unprotected sexual intercourse, Callwood evidently felt no qualms about passing on Dr. Mackie’s speculation as if it were more cool quantitative evidence piling up against the accused. Flogging her book (Callwood, 1995a) on a visit to the University of Western Ontario in the spring of 1995, she took the opportunity to flog the dead Ssenyonga—as if the dissoluto could never be sufficiently punito.13 During the question period following her reading, I had an opportunity to ask her why she was perpetuating the myth of Ssenyonga as a Doomed Libertine. “I’m just a journalist” was her humble reply. I then challenged her to bring forward any evidence to prove that the length of Ssenyonga’s penis was a factor in the transmission of HIV to any of his 12. For a critique of Rushton’s (Rushton & Bogaert, 1989) evolutionary analysis of AIDS in Africa, see Miller (1992, pp. 25-39). 13. The full title of Mozart’s opera is Il dissoluto punito, ossia Il Don Giovanni [The Dissolute Man Punished, or Don Giovanni].

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sexual partners. Her response betrayed a reflexive deference to medical authority surprising in an investigative journalist who had spent many years crusading for Casey House, Ontario’s showcase AIDS hospice. She simply begged the question by hailing the unimpeachable source of her information, who happened to be sitting in the audience a few rows ahead of me. Dr. Mackie dutifully rose, turned to face me, and declared, in a solemn tone that silenced any further challenge, that he had personally measured the scoundrel’s organ and could attest to its abnormal length. Sadly, for all her zeal, Callwood failed to make the strong feminist points that should have been made about the Ssenyonga case. In her book as on her book tour, she had little to say about the sexist (and heterosexist) indifference of the male-dominated Ministry of Health to the need for safer-sex education specifically designed for women who play the field with Cosmo-style assurance under the mistaken assumption that AIDS is a gay man’s disease. That need, desperately unaddressed in the late 1980s, would be morally addressed in the late 1990s by a campaign promoting abstinence throughout Ontario’s high schools via a teaching package supplied to health teachers by the Conservative Ministry of Education. By organizing the narrative of Trial Without End around this mythic Ssenyonga, whose virile potency was nightmarishly increased through his symbolic identification with the wildly “shedding” and crazily “multiplying” AIDS virus, Callwood (1995a) cleverly relieved herself of the burden of having to explain why so many bright, educated women failed to use condoms during sexual intercourse with him. She could easily have blamed the Sexual Revolution for creating the social conditions for their unguarded wantonness or blasted the public health system for failing to provide them with adequate safer-sex information. She could even have accused many of the women (as they often accused themselves) of throwing their lives away on the flames of promiscuous desire. Evidence was mercilessly presented at the trial that the three complainants had slept with a total of 20 men in the 18 months leading up to their encounters with the accused. After telephoning Ssenyonga’s girlfriends to urge them to get tested for HIV, his fourth victim, Francine Dalton (Patient D), formed an informal support group for those who took her advice and found themselves facing the death sentence of AIDS. She also joined forces with Dr. Wagner in aiding the police in their complex investigation of Ssenyonga’s erotic history. Though at first reluctant to divulge the details of their affair, a detailed chronology of which she was drawing up for the purposes of publishing a cautionary tale of her own, she handed over all her notebooks to the police in

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March 1991. “Her initial tremulousness,” reports Callwood (1995a) approvingly, “had changed to a cheerful relish for the task of convicting Ssenyonga” (p. 105).

Far Gone in Rage and Despair Exposing the master deceiver, a moral mission essential to all Don Giovanni plots, is given an exciting new twist in Callwood’s (1995a) version of the legend. While the prosecutors only succeeded in proving that Ssenyonga had lied about his serostatus to the complainants— whether through cunning malice or crazy denial no one will ever know—Callwood bursts through the constraints of legal proof to convince her public that he had also lied about his sexuality. The most shocking disclosure in her tale is that Ssenyonga the super-stud must have been a closet case. Though opera queens may be bored by the heavy irony of a queer Don Giovanni, it was too delicious a fantasy for Callwood to keep to herself. She simply had to pass it on to her public, particularly to her good gay readers who had cried through Jim: A Life With AIDS (1988) but still needed reminding of their collective guilt for spreading the plague from its exotic origins in the African jungles to the bedrooms of Middlesex County. The mythic identification of African maleness with homosexuality is a relatively recent development in the history of racist discourse. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the notion of the noble savage, an uncivilized Caliban-like creature blessed with animal magnetism and driven by primitive instincts, favored an identification of the Black African buck with heterosexuality in its purest state. If he was closer to nature than his dandified European counterparts, then his sexual desires were bound to be more natural than theirs—and naturally more violent. His bestial passions may have been unbridled, but at least his human objects of desire were women. In 1853, Arthur de Gobineau, the forefather of modern racism, associated the boundless mojo of the Negroid male with amorality and violence: We might even say that the violence with which he pursues the object that has aroused his senses and inflamed his desires is a guarantee of the desires being soon satisfied and the object forgotten. Finally, he is equally careless of his own life and that of others: he kills willingly, for the sake of killing. (Gobineau, 1853-1855/1967, p. 206)14 This caractère eerily anticipates Callwood’s (1995a) portrait of Ssenyonga as a super-sexed lady-killer who was 14. On homophobic continuations of the traditional association of black African maleness with “natural” heterosexuality, see Murray and Roscoe (2001, pp. xi-xviii).

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equally careless of his own life and the lives of his girlfriends. “Ssenyonga’s most compelling feature was the powerful sexuality he projected,” she fantasizes in a Gobiniste vein (p. 3), as if her own libido had felt the pull of his animal magnetism. Though Callwood was here reporting the impressions of Patient A (Jennifer Anderson), the racist stereotype of the sexually charismatic Negroid also seems to have shaped her own memories of Ssenyonga in court “projecting a magnetism that filled the room” (p. 321). But this hot voodoo image of him did not quite fit the facts. Many of his girlfriends reported that, far from being a savage horndog humping to the beat of jungle drums, he typically came across as a cosmopolitan gentleman, an eloquent conversationalist, a cool charmer. As Watney (1994) has compellingly argued, mainstream AIDS discourse of the late 1980s shifted the mythic erotic power of the African male from its once healthy foundations in heterosexuality into the diseased domain of homosexuality. The reason for this shift goes beyond the convergence of analogous alterities. The vectoring of the virus from rampantly promiscuous Negroids in Africa and the Caribbean directly into the anuses and bloodstreams of White gay fast-laners and size queens in the West forged an epidemiological link between the animal origins of AIDS in the Dark Continent and its eruptions in North American gay meccas like New York, San Francisco, and Toronto. “Just as the figure of ‘the prostitute’ is habitually regarded as a source rather than a victim of disease,” Watney observes, “so we may trace out the patterns of displacements which offer us a carnal Africa as the ‘source’ of AIDS, transported home to the bosom of the white Western family via the ‘monstrous passions’ of ‘perverts’ and ‘the promiscuous’ ” (p. 116). The Western media’s compulsively allegorical identification of Africa with AIDS, and AIDS with gays, was evidently too powerful for a mainstream journalist like Callwood to withstand, for behind it lay the double fantasy of the supreme moral value of the White Western family and its shocking vulnerability to attack from immigrant infiltrators in viral and virile form. The press (Landsberg, 1994) represented Ssenyonga as “seducing and infecting a whole series of women with a rare and virulent strain of AIDS” (p. G1). Though virologists have identified various strains of HIV according to geographical provenance, there are no strains of AIDS— rare or otherwise—recognized by medicine. What the media detected in Ssenyonga can only have been the ideological symptoms of African AIDS, the imaginary strain made especially virulent by its association with murderously uncontrollable Black male lust in combination with rampant homosexual desire. Though Callwood (1995a, pp. 3-4) sets her readers up to gain a first impression

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of Ssenyonga as a charismatic heterosexual, she cannot resist the media-generated pressure to detect African AIDS in his semiotically magnetic body. A deep current of libidinous homosexual irony predictably surfaces in her initially heterosexualizing portrayal of him as a rakish scoundrel. How else could the sexual “intensity that took her breath away” (p. 3) make sense in such a profoundly mysterious character as Ssenyonga except as a sign of internalized homophobia, a vestige, perhaps, of his Catholic education? As usual, the House of Rumor supplied her with plenty of journalistic evidence to convict Ssenyonga of being not just a bad guy but a bad gay—a bareback rider, as gays now call men who enjoy unprotected sex for the purpose of infecting others or becoming infected themselves. The clues to his secret identity were there all along. It just took a woman with amazing gaydar to put the clues together so that the public could finally see through the villain’s heterosexual mask. The first clue was provided by the gay community itself, which, as Callwood (1995a) solemnly reports from her privileged position as an observer admitted deep behind their lines, “has tales of men far gone in rage and despair who don’t care what happens to lovers and brag about how many men they have infected” (p. 80). Hadn’t Ssenyonga bragged to his gay friend John Webster about the men as well as the women he had seduced (p. 24)? Wasn’t he morally and psychologically pegged as a “nasty” character, a “master at deceiving others,” a “rascal” of “insatiable vanity coupled with insufficient ego” (pp. 24, 65)? If the good gays wouldn’t inform on the bad gays, then somebody had to do it, and Callwood could be counted on for the job. It was one thing for those hell-bent libertines to infect their own kind. It was quite another for them to infect innocent women by sneaking through the latex-thin boundary between Us and Them. If Ssenyonga was truly one of Them, as his psychological profile fatefully indicated, then he had committed the cardinal sin of ignoring the traditional gender divide and sexuality borders that were supposed to contain the epidemic within the gay ghetto. The second clue was planted in his psychological profile by Callwood (1995a) herself, who attributed his preening ways—a stereotypical symptom of gay male identity—to the arresting of his emotional development at “an elementary stage of narcissistic self-gratification” (p. 65). Ask any psychoanalyst what that means. Considering that Callwood never actually interviewed Ssenyonga—let alone heard him bare his soul on the couch—one can only marvel at her telepathic powers of Freudian diagnosis. Subtle as her reading of his character may sound here, its blatant hollowness as an explanation for male homosexuality

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echoes down from Freud’s (1914) essay “On Narcissism” through decades of torturous therapy sessions designed to cure homosexuals of their emotional immaturity.15 Callwood did not expand her mini-diagnosis into a full-fledged Freudian narrative, but the details in the suppressed psychodrama are easy to fill in from her initial suggestions. Not having enjoyed the benefits of Freudian analysis back in Uganda, Ssenyonga was presumably so “far gone in rage and despair” during his Canadian years that his infantile ego, erotically fixated on same-sex objects of desire as cathected reflections of himself, took out its libidinous frustrations on women who must have represented for him the Domineering Mother who had kept him bound to her as a pre-Oedipal love-slave. To prove his fragile manhood to himself, he had become heterosexually promiscuous. He pounded every woman he could lay his hands on. He expelled “his lethal semen” (Callwood, 1995a, p. 61) into Francine’s body. He “date-raped” (p. 64) an unnamed college student. He even went so far as to steal two girlfriends from poor Chris Karuhanga, his assistant at The African Store (p. 65). The third clue to his secret identity was his penchant for covering up his off-the-charts promiscuity. When a doctor politely asked him during a medical exam preceding an HIV test whether he was sexually active, Ssenyonga’s response—unlike his serostatus—was mendaciously negative. “No,” he lied, as he always did when anyone in authority asked about his sex life, since an admission of his promiscuity would invite disapproval (Callwood, 1995a, p. 42). Of course, by 1989, when this examination purportedly took place, an admission of promiscuity to a doctor would not only have invited disapproval. It would have invited an invasion by public health authorities into the confidential relationship between doctor and patient. That the patient here happened to be a Black African immigrant and the doctor a White man “speaking with a trace of South African accent” (p. 41) evidently did not strike Callwood as a sufficient political explanation for the lie. Counting on the virtual identification of the term promiscuity in the late 1980s with the fast-lane gay lifestyle exposed in hundreds of alarmist media articles as the chief social cause for the spread of AIDS from Africa to North America, she could insinuate that Ssenyonga had lied about his promiscuity to avoid a particular kind of disapproval: heterosexist backlash against the contagious gay community. She was out to out her villain, and the easiest way to do so was 15. On the transformation of the “homosexual libido” into a “sense of guilt” and a “dread of the community” through the dissatisfaction arising from the nonfulfillment of the ego ideal, see Freud (1914, p. 123).

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simply to represent his deceptive behavior as an inevitable reflex of his closeted secret self, a defensive reaction to the homophobia underlying AIDS phobia. In the process she could also place him in the grand old McCarthyite tradition of homo traitors to the health and welfare of the Straight Establishment. The dramatic prototype for the guilty carrier as self-deceiving, sexually aggressive, socially dangerous closet case is Senator Joseph McCarthy’s henchmanlawyer Roy Cohn, the villain in Tony Kushner’s (1993, 1994) two-part history-as-mystery play Angels in America, which premiered on Broadway 2 years before Callwood published Trial Without End. Like Ssenyonga, Cohn remains an outsider to the bitter end of his life. Where Kushner literally plunges Cohn into hell in the dénouement of Part Two (Perestroika, Act V, scene 7), Callwood recoils from the brink of the inferno and politely refrains from theological comment on Ssenyonga’s postmortem torments. Callwood (1995a) was provided with her final piece of evidence of Ssenyonga’s closetry from the Southern Ontario police, always a reliable authority on the secret workings of the gay male mind. That evidence consisted of their own suspicions that Ssenyonga was playing for the other team. The Hamilton police, for instance, “were confident from interviews with people close to Ssenyonga that he had infected at least three women and one man while he attended McMaster University” (p. 147). One of their chief informants, Francine Dalton, claimed to have gone on a date with him in Hamilton because he wanted to show her around the city he knew from his university days. “To her surprise,” Callwood (1995a) disingenuously relates, “their first stop was a gay bar, where Ssenyonga seemed to be completely at home. They danced— Ssenyonga was a wonderful partner on the dance floor, she says—and became aroused” (p. 64). How could a straight man be completely at home in a gay bar if he were completely straight? As the world well knows, no gay bar in the history of post-Stonewall capitalism has ever welcomed paying customers who weren’t deeply and irrevocably in the life. Straights with their dates are automatically detected by special sensors installed on gay dance floors: as soon as they fail to dance to the rhythm, they’re promptly ejected from the premises with a shower of queeny abuse. But if they’re aroused by disco, well, that clinches it. Ssenyonga’s lascivious agility as a dancer might have impressed his dates as a sign of his exotic tribal background, or, if they had been reading Dr. Philippe Rushton, as a mark of the male Negroid’s genetic predisposition to wriggle erotically in public. Would Callwood have been surprised to learn from this University of

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Western Ontario psychologist that “in Africa, dances have been invented which emphasize undulating rhythms and mock copulation” (Rushton & Bogaert, 1989, p. 1216)? The social customs of Negroids thus betray their genotypical lack of sexual restraint, which in the Rushtonian (1989) worldview accounts for the primarily heterosexual character of AIDS in Black Africa. So beware of those jungle drums.

Daughter of the Virus Recalling how a poor anonymous social worker with “the face of an angel” (Callwood, 1995a, p. iv) wept as she recounted her fall into AIDS hell, Callwood concluded that no official charge against the African immigrant who had dragged so many women down with him “described the real reason he was in court, which was for crimes against humanity and common decency of failing to wear a condom during sexual intercourse and not informing his sexual partners that he was infected with HIV” (p. vii). Bathetic as the secondary charge of violating the unwritten code of common decency may sound in this apocalyptic context, Callwood’s insistence upon it is worth considering as a clue to the deep-seated social anxieties—of a peculiarly Anglo-Canadian character, like the phrase common decency itself—that the transgressive case with its unwritten conclusion stirred up in the very White world of London, Ontario. Callwood’s (1995a) narrative solution to the frustrating lack of judicial closure in the case, as we have seen, is to damn Ssenyonga symbolically as an avatar of Don Giovanni. His public refusal to admit any degree of guilt in the tragic fate of his inamorate, or in his own tragic downfall for that matter, completes his identification with the mythic prototype of the Damned Libertine. For blaspheming against the holy gospel of safer sex, he is perpetually condemned in Trial Without End to an afterlife of infamy. Though Callwood does not go so far as to imagine hell swallowing him up at his last meal, or sulfurous flames engulfing his deathbed in Listowel hospital, she implicitly damns him in the mythic trajectory of her plot and in the punning title to her book. When he took the stand to speak in his own defense on day 16 of the trial (June 16, 1993), his attorney asked him to describe what it was like to learn that he was HIV-positive. “It’s like someone shooting you dead,” he replied, lowering his eyes, “but you are not dead. Like being a ghost” (p. 324). That’s more or less what he becomes at the end of Callwood’s (1995a) conjuring act in Trial Without End. Like Death stalking the Dark Continent, he looms over The Scene as the Ghost of African AIDS, a spectral presence neither dead nor alive, whom Callwood has raised

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before the horrified public eye in order to carry out the simple curse—“Damn you” (p. 217)—hurled at him by the furious Patient E, Joan Estrada, at the emotional climax of the preliminary hearing. Here was a woman’s speech act that for once did not fall upon deaf male ears. Bruce Long, the regional crown attorney for Southwestern Ontario, was so shaken by the malediction that “he found himself fighting to keep control, his fists clenched” (p. 217). But what did the clenched fists of the Good (Straight) Guy in Callwood’s tale signify, finally, but the impotence of Canadian manhood in the face of African AIDS? How do you punch a ghost? Ssenyonga’s subsequent trial had no end literaliter because the judge never delivered a verdict. But the guilt of the Libertine, as the chorus of seduced women insisted, had to be proclaimed across the land. By assuming the operatic role of the Commendatore, the agent of moral judgment who looms large outside the Libertine’s deceptive plots, Callwood effectively captured Ssenyonga’s ghostly presence within the body of her text and condemned it to a trial without end spiritaliter: an eternal punishment through literary revenge. That the Prince of Darkness happened to be a Black man in this case is not ignored by Callwood (1995a) in her moral judgment of how the clumsily interconnecting systems of law and public health treated him in Ontario. “Though relations between the races in the nineties are at a sensitive stage,” she concedes with a delicacy worthy of a memsahib, “and [though] police often are accused of prejudice against Blacks, the long investigation, the arrest, and several trials and hearings involving Charles Ssenyonga seemed to most observers to be mercifully free of racism” (p. vii). Having been accused of racism herself, a groundless yet embarrassing charge that for a time tarnished her public image as the very embodiment of common decency in Ontario, Callwood knew all too well what it was like to be mercilessly bogged down in bad race relations. On May 1, 1992, she had resigned from the board of Nellie’s (a women’s hostel she had helped found in the early 1970s) after she was labeled a “racist” for dismissing a staff member’s concerns about racism in the administration of the shelter. Her agonizing confusion over the label and her sense of betrayal as a socially sensitive White woman with impeccable credentials as a liberal activist were widely discussed in the Canadian media, though she had suffered this kind of insult before. In 1989, after brusquely advising some picketers at the International PEN Congress in Toronto to “fuck off,” she was taken aback when Marlene Nourbese Philip, a local poet and woman of color, accused her of racism for failing to acknowledge the exclusion of visible minorities from the

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conference.16 To be mercifully free of prejudice was an ideal state toward which she had—ironically—pushed her less progressive colleagues and less privileged friends for many decades. So when such a witness has declared the Ssenyonga case uncolored by color, it must have been so, and not just in the courtroom but in the media as well. That the London Free Press should have impressed Callwood (1995a) with its blessedly unbiased coverage of the trial is not surprising given the circularity of her argument that the media reported no racial or racist dimensions to the case because the case had no racial or racist dimensions to report. Thus exonerating herself and her reporter friends from considering race in the case—on the dubious grounds that the story itself (not their telling of it) somehow canceled race from its moral significance—she could focus attention on Ssenyonga’s crimes against heterosexuality. But if, as she claims, “the Ssenyonga case would have made prime media copy whatever his colour” (p. vii), why did the London Free Press continually harp on his Ugandan origins, his shady dealings at The African Store, his exotic strain of virus, and his malicious disdain for White middle-class family values? On Saturday, April 17, 1993, following the seventh day of the trial, a feature article on the evils of postcolonial Africa, “Middle Class May Be a Continent’s Last Hope,” (Manthorpe, 1993) shamelessly appeared in the international news section of the paper—though its relevance to local news could not have been missed by many readers at the time. Accompanying several columns of smug First World commentary on the collapsing economies, soaring mortality rates, crumbling education systems, and absurdly grandiose titles assumed by corrupt Black political leaders (e.g., Cock of Cocks) was a map of the Dark Continent spotted with little symbols of its huge problems: a bent wheat stalk for famine; an armed terrorist for civil war; a crossed-out water droplet for drought; a frowning skull for AIDS (Manthorpe, 1993). All the symbols in this calamitous legend pile up around Uganda and Kenya, as if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had opened a ranch there. Since these were the two countries important in Ssenyonga’s mysterious preCanadian history, his homeland is virtually identified with Death. He, in turn, becomes indistinguishable from AIDS at its African source.17 In another London Free Press feature, published only four days after Ssenyonga’s death, Debora Van Brenk 16. On the impact of these incidents on Callwood ‘s media-hallowed reputation as “Canada’s Conscience,” see Freedman (1993) and Dewar (1993). 17. On the mythologization of Africa in mainstream AIDS discourse, see Watney (1994, pp. 104-120).

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(1993) allegorized his appalling impact on family life in the First World—the Four Horsemen having immigrated en masse with him to Southwestern Ontario. A tender interview with one of his unnamed victims (recognizable as Patient G, Nancy Gauthier) leaves the impression that Ssenyonga’s Cock of Cocks had poisoned a good mother with bad African juju. Mom’s murky nights as a Toronto hooker are discreetly forgotten in the teary neo-Victorian sentimentality of Van Brenk’s portrait of a ruined family coping with Hard Times. Valiantly Mom tries to put the Heart of Darkness behind her and her young son. “He’s dead,” the boy blurts out, pointing to a newspaper photo of Ssenyonga. “Now it’s over” (Van Brenk, 1993, p. A4). But of course it isn’t over for his mother, since the memory of her demon lover will “haunt” her for the rest of her short life. (Ssenyonga may become even scarier dead than alive— a Black counterpart to the sepulchrally White specter of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s 1902 Heart of Darkness.) How the good mothers of London must have wept on learning that the soon-to-be motherless child would never draw with a red crayon now, since red “means blood, and blood means death”! And what does death mean? Any child could extend this series of semiotic equations to its implicit Rushtonian (1989) conclusion: death means AIDS, of course, and AIDS means Africa, and Africa means Ssenyonga, and Ssenyonga means bad alien Negroid blood. “Nobody told me there was hell on earth” is Mom’s ultimate complaint, indicating that she had unfortunately missed the newspaper’s crypto-theological map of Africa as the locus of all human woe. Press photos of a Crayola box spilling its contents down over the page (a bourgeois emblem of childhood innocence) and a broken crayon labeled “red” (an omen of innocence lost) expose the racially embittered subtext of the interview with visual confirmation that the allegory of AIDS as a disease of color had proven devastatingly true in a nice White London household. It was no longer the vile racist fantasy of a University of Western Ontario psychologist. It was a local fact. It was prime media copy. Glossing over these and other media representations of Ssenyonga as a violent sex-crazed Black man bent on dragging White women (“fine ladies . . . the finest,” according to Mom [Van Brenk, 1993, p. A4]) down into the inferno of African AIDS, Callwood (1995a) smoothly reassured her readers that he was tried for what he did, not for who he was, and that who he was could be summed up in a few unbiased words: “a scoundrel who happened to be black” (p. vii). Thus is race conveniently dismissed as a mere contingency, a remote epiphenomenon, in the heterosexually moralized universe of Trial Without End (Callwood,

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1995a). Implicitly dismissed with it is Ssenyonga’s own reading of his experience as an African with AIDS in North America—a counter-narrative in which race looms far larger than sexuality as the shaping force in his social destiny. His hyperbolic but defensible thesis that “AIDS in North America is just a conspiracy to discredit blacks, especially blacks from Africa” (p. 8) is instantly discredited by Callwood as a whiny complaint, a distracting ploy to draw attention away from the scoundrel’s black soul toward his black skin. The few caviling observers who detected a racist bias in the case—like London AIDS activist Clarence Crossman who wondered whether Ssenyonga’s treatment by the media and the police “might have been different had he been a white, middle-class man born in Canada” (Callwood, 1995a, p. 173)—must have been barking up the wrong tree in a fit of political correctness or postcolonial cynicism. Of course, as a media liberal who happened to be White, Callwood felt no little discomfort at the thought of blackening the reputation of an economically disadvantaged African-Canadian. It went against her instincts as an old-time advocate for civil rights. It exposed her to further slanderous charges as a covert racist. It disturbed her idea of Canada. But to tell the myth, the whole myth, and nothing but the myth, she was determined to punish Ssenyonga in her omniscient narration of his seductions as well as in her eyewitness account of his trial. Her purely literary choice of a viewpoint at once humanly personal and divinely impersonal is masked as no choice at all: the immutable facts in the case supposedly compel her to tell the shocking tale exactly as it was told to her by the women whose voices she amplifies through her own into a universal condemnation of Unconstrained Male Desire. She thereby ran the risk of confirming Crossman’s point that “there seemed to be a punitive dimension to everything [the police and the media] were doing” (Callwood, 1995a, p. 173) in their combined efforts to capture Ssenyonga as a suspect—and as a story. Her story, however, is different from all the police reports and tabloid exposés insofar as its punitive dimension is inherent in its mythical organization rather than imposed by any extraneous prejudice. Don Giovanni has to be punished at the end of his tale. Tradition decides it. Morality demands it. Conscience desires it. And as a White antihero, the old Libertine can hardly be seen as a racist stereotype imposed on Ssenyonga! By absorbing his individual peculiarities into the universalist implications of the Don Giovanni myth, Trial Without End manages to play down the vigorous European countermyth (locally revived by Rushtonian, 1989, “science”) of the Black Man as subhuman sexual predator. Despite his enormous erection, which could easily have

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turned him into Mandingo with a bad case of jungle fever, Ssenyonga remains ever the gentleman between Callwood’s textual sheets. The wish-fulfilling elimination of race as an issue from her reading of his criminality has a further convenient effect on the mythic simplification of the narrative: it cancels the complex political and psychological possibility that Ssenyonga might have been a reverse racist, that his motivation for knowingly infecting one White woman after another may have been connected with his anger at the North American conspiracy against Blacks, “especially blacks from Africa” (Callwood, 1995a, p. 8), exacerbated by the AIDS epidemic. Reflecting on his infection of Patient D, Francine Dalton, Callwood permits herself to think the unthinkable: “Perhaps he cared nothing for her life because she was a woman, a white woman” (p. 65). But this possibility is instantly dismissed on the dubious grounds that he had been dutifully raised by his parents to admire White culture and to integrate himself into it professionally and economically! His failure to do so at The African Store, even with the capitalist advantage of a White university education, does not factor into her strictly moral account of his promiscuity. Might he have been trying to integrate himself into White culture matrimonially? Though he finally succeeded with his eleventh-hour marriage to his nurse Connie Neill, it was only after he had tasted the bitter rejection of a string of independent career women who may have wanted hot sex with an exotic Other but not a lifetime of social freeze-out in a mixed marriage. Could he have interpreted their post-affair coldness toward him as part of the conspiracy? If so, might he have resolved to wage a race war (and a class war) of One—mobilizing his conspicuous sexual equipment and covert viral allies— against the cultural dominance of the Many? If his aim was to be the viral avenger of his race, he would have emerged from the trial as a rather less gentlemanly, certainly more politicized villain than Don Giovanni the closet case. At odd unguarded moments in Trial Without End, when the sexual excitement of the tale becomes too much even for a hard-nosed investigative journalist from the Big City, Callwood (1995a) allows the suppressed issue of race to seethe up and surface in the cool flow of her reportage. A rupture of erotic othering heats up her note-taking on day 15 of the trial: That day [Tuesday, June 15, 1993] it was evident to spectators why so many people loved Charles Ssenyonga. Projecting a magnetism that filled the room, he was eloquent, graceful, and passionate. His blackness in a room peopled only with whites, as it had been almost every day of the trial, emphasized his exotic isolation. (p. 321)

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Desdemona-like, Callwood sounds as if she had never set eyes on a Black man in London before this amorous éclaircissement—even though she must have seen many people of color in public during her stay. The old black magic momentarily seduces her into viewing Ssenyonga from the romantic pre-AIDS perspective of his White girlfriends. But only momentarily: the very virtues that set him above all the inarticulate, clumsy, and passionless White guys on the singles scene must now be seen as masking the vices of a scoundrel who was more evil than anyone could have guessed on Day One. Ssenyonga’s isolation as a Black man is permitted to be observed only as a quaint sexual turn-on, an external sign of that animal “magnetism” appreciated by nineteenthcentury Gobinistes in their condescending psychological profiles of the African races. “The negroid variety is the lowest [in comparison with the white and yellow races], and stands at the foot of the ladder,” observed Gobineau (1967) with chilling matter-of-factness: If his mental faculties are dull or even non-existent, he often has an intensity of desire, and so of will, which may be called terrible. . . . What he desires is to eat, to eat furiously, and to excess, no carrion is too revolting to be swallowed by him. It is the same with odours; his inordinate desires are satisfied with all, however coarse or even horrible. To these qualities may be added an instability and capriciousness of feeling that cannot be tied down to any single object. And which, so far as he is concerned, do away with all distinctions of good and evil. (pp. 205-206) The horrible allure of Callwood’s (1995a) villain is that he combines the traditional sensuality and amoral willfulness of the Gobiniste (1967) Negroid with the keen intelligence of a university-educated Rushtonian (1989) Caucasoid. His character is described as “exotic” because the voodoo force field of his otherness supposedly emanates from him, a social outsider, even though it is actually projected onto him by the collective White gaze of the social insiders gathered around him in the courtroom as controlling spectators of The Scene. Ironically his Blackness is said to emphasize an isolation already presumed to characterize his relation to those spectators: they have already witnessed his exclusion from their society by virtue of his mythic stature as a defiant libertine, a sexual predator, a plague-carrier. But from his perspective, as his frequent complaints about North American racism might have suggested to anyone who took them seriously, it was his Blackness that had isolated him in the first place from the White mainstream of Anglo-Ontarian culture. The reason so few Black people

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ever appeared in that scene “peopled only with whites” is not hard to guess: London’s tiny Ugandan community did not want to be publicly associated with a high-profile criminal (let alone one with AIDS) for fear of unleashing a flood of racially motivated discrimination in the wake of the trial. The exotic isolation of Ssenyonga as a Black man is symbolically paralleled by the genetic isolation of his virus as an extremely rare strain of HIV. Rare, that is, in North America: it is all too common around its mythologized source in the Dark Continent. Just as Black immigrants from Uganda are socially rare in Canada, the analogy goes, so viral invaders direct from the source are biologically rare in Canadian bloodstreams. Underlying this spurious but allegorically potent correspondence between the micro- and macro-levels of the epidemic is Callwood’s virtual identification of Ssenyonga with the aggressive African strain of HIV that supposedly menaced heterosexual lovers with particular ferocity. The chorus of his victims accordingly emerge from the tragic scene not as HIV-infected women merely but as “Ssenyonga-infected” women (Callwood, 1995a, pp. 265, 271)—a specialized epithet of shame implying that he had stamped them with his own genetic imprint, invaded their White DNA with his mutant Blackness, destroyed their heterosexual immune systems with his queer bug. He had, in effect, Africanized their bodies, just as if he had brought the Dark Continent into his shop in the London Mews. After detailing how each of the complainants was brought to ruin by unprotected sex, Callwood gives no thought to the origin of Ssenyonga’s infection—who gave him the virus, and under what circumstances, and on what continent remain unasked questions in Trial Without End—because as the villain he must bear the semiotic burden of embodying the first cause of all their woe. He is the infectious origin in its clearly isolated state, not a mere link in an indefinite chain of transmission. “I isolate individual molecules which have been amplified,” explained Dr. Michael Montpetit during his testimony at the preliminary hearing, “and I look at them individually” (Callwood, 1995a, p. 232). Thanks to Montpetit’s technological breakthroughs in molecular biology, Ssenyonga’s rare virus was conclusively matched with those of his victims during the trial and the prosecution was able to isolate the magnetic African from the complainants’ other sexual partners as the indisputable cause of their infection. Hugely impressed by the scientific story told by Montpetit on the eighth day of the trial (April 19, 1993), Callwood sought to impose its clarifying conclusiveness on the inchoate details of the social and psychosexual narrative she was taking notes for in the

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courtroom. Like him, she would “isolate” and “amplify” her subject as if Ssenyonga were an individual molecule of Black male depravity. With the moral equivalent of Montpetit’s powerfully objective scientific gaze, she would look at her villain “individually” as an exotic strain of evil that had to be contained—closed up in a hot-zone romance—lest it spurt out again into the intimate hollows of heterosexuality and further weaken the failing systems of criminal justice and public health. At no point in the trial did racial anxiety surface more tellingly, or erupt more intensely with the odor of racist outrage, than in an ugly little episode on the sidelines witnessed by Callwood (1995a) during Montpetit’s technically impressive three-hour “dance through the outer reaches of biochemistry” (p. 296). In an effort to clarify the complicated results of his DNA analysis, Montpetit testified that he had detected not only Ssenyonga’s virus in Francine Dalton’s blood sample but also the “daughter of the virus” (p. 296). This curiously allegorical phrase proved to be all too pregnant with meaning for the chorus of “Ssenyonga-infected” women. Literally it referred to a mutation of the original virus that was still so similar to its “parent” that their genetic relation could be easily established. Figuratively, however, its jolting implications pushed the women back through the inner reaches of their despair: Francine began to cry softly. Nancy, furious to see her friend in pain, looked around and spotted Connie Neill. She scribbled a note, “You must be one dumb cunt,” and passed it to her during the next recess. Connie gasped in shock and managed to sputter, “I don’t think this is any of your business.” Nancy explains, only slightly apologetically, “I felt so bad for Francine, this ‘daughter of the virus’ thing. I just had to do something.” (Callwood, 1995a, pp. 296-297) This episode, as Callwood blankly reports it, is merely a Dionysian undersong to Montpetit’s serenely Apollonian performance—a crash of romantic cymbals behind the flow of scientific testimony. As such it adds a note of passion to The Scene. It keeps the heteroerotic tension up. But if its social implications are considered beyond the psychodrama of Don Giovanni and his girlfriends, or behind the foregrounded wonders of biochemical technology, it becomes the moment of anagnoresis in the tragedy when the appalling depths are laid bare. Common decency is shattered by the cymbal crash, and The Scene suddenly collapses into an underworld of profound cultural anxieties that cannot be expressed in legal or biomedical terms.

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Montpetit’s metaphor (a commonplace in the gendered discourse of genetics) must have hit the women like a demonic Annunciation, a shocking parody of Gabriel’s divinely authorized message to the Virgin. If Ssenyonga was the Father of the Virus, then Francine was carrying his viral child just as Milton’s Sin carries Death in her womb; but since Ssenyonga was also the Virus Incarnate, she was also incestuously pregnant with him as well as with his “daughter.” Nancy shared Francine’s procreative fate as the mother of innumerable deadly spawn. How could she sustain her media image as Good Mom with alien offspring in her blood? As if to deepen the primitive maternal agony of the women, Callwood (1995a) strategically hails her medical heroine Dr. Wagner for giving birth to a happy (human) daughter in August, 1992, while “the Ssenyonga trial still gripped her” (pp. 254-255). Though this blessed event is irrelevant to the case as a legal or medical story, its occurrence in the allegory of racial transgression is gallingly relevant to the damnation of the villain. The nightmare of his alien paternity was intensified by the tragic irony that most of the “Ssenyonga-infected” women desperately regarded themselves as cursed with barrenness by the Father of the Virus. No honorable man would want to sire a baby on them now that they were guilty plaguecarriers, they believed, and as they were given to lamenting throughout the book, they would never dream of passing on the virus to a baby in utero. Connie had shocked them all during the preliminary hearing by actually conceiving a child with Ssenyonga—and not bothering to request an HIV test for herself or her baby. Though the pregnancy had “fortunately” ended in a miscarriage after 11 weeks, Connie’s transgressive audacity as a mother-to-be would not be forgotten by the infected women: the “daughter of the virus thing” evidently triggered a violent displacement of Nancy’s jealous anger as mother-to-be-no-more along with her vengeful wrath against Ssenyonga onto his wife. No wonder Connie appeared to her as “a dumb cunt” in the grossest gynecological sense. This vicious metonymy reduced all the pregnant women in the allegory to the silent mindless condition of hellholes for receiving the viral father and his brood of mutant daughters, the Furies of African AIDS. His damnation was not only figuratively imposed on the souls of his victims. It was genetically contained within their bodies. So they became the daughters of the virus, too, since the villain’s virulent strain of HIV had irrevocably bound itself to the DNA in their own cells. What their passionate reaction to Montpetit’s metaphor ultimately exposes is the deep-seated taboo against miscegenation that their sexual union with Ssenyonga had privately violated. The mixing of races

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was the worst nightmare of nineteenth-century ideological racists like Gobineau (1853-1855/1967, pp. 208-212), who argued that it could only occur when the crossing of color lines through sexual intercourse resulted in offspring of mixed race—high yellers, octoroons, mulattoes, métis. “No limits, except the horror excited by the possibility of infinite intermixture, can be assigned to the number of these hybrid and chequered races that make up the whole of mankind,” he shudders to relate. “If the three great types had remained strictly separate, the supremacy would no doubt have always been in the hands of the finest of the white races, and the yellow and black varieties would have crawled for ever at the feet of the lowest of the whites” (p. 208). Interracial affairs were accordingly discouraged along the heavily policed social borders between Whites and Blacks for fear that miscegenation might dilute the supposedly inherent virtues of both stocks. So strong was the fear of racial dilution among European colonists that miscegenation was forbidden by law in many parts of North America until well into the twentieth century: it was not declared unconstitutional in the United States until 1967.18 If Ssenyonga committed any crime against common decency in his affairs with White women, it was a violation of the now unwritten code of racial purity that persists in North American culture at the level of the unspeakable, the level of taboo. The deepest issues stirred up by his case are literally “unlawful” in the sense that they lie outside (or beneath) the explicit legal foundations of the criminal code. The pious secrecy veiling the women’s identities even to this day—long after the sexual assault charges were dropped by the judge—speaks volumes about the ritual shaming they would surely face if they were found out to be the mothers of Ssenyonga’s evil brood. The stigma still attached to being a person with AIDS, even on the innocent victim side, may account for some of their reluctance to be named. But much of it has to do with a fear of parental reaction to their sexual history. One of the women confessed that her parents would never have allowed her to shake hands with a Black man, let alone sleep with one (Callwood, 1995a, p. 115). However exotically isolated from the anthropological context of his crimes, Ssenyonga’s Blackness symbolically sullied the Whiteness of his women. When Francine, Nancy, Connie, and the others consented to have sex with him, that was a relatively minor transgression compared with the siring of children upon them—whether the offspring were human or viral. Callwood’s (1995a) romantic narrative of the African Don Giovanni could neither 18. On the history of miscegenation laws in North America, see Sickels (1972, pp. 64-110 and Pascoe (1999).

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contain nor explain the unspeakable horror of a “dumb cunt” (p. 297) confronting its racially alien progeny in a London courtroom “peopled only with whites” (p. 321). Thanks to the authoritative witnessing of science, the unlawful issue of their union as well as the breaking of the miscegenation taboo itself continue to appall the public eye as the most outrageous revelation of The Scene.

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