Wisdom Wednesdays with Lynn Richardson: Diva Living With AIDS, Rae Lewis Thornton Outlives Death Sentence

GlobalGrind’s financial coach, Lynn Richardson, had a 5-hour sister-girl visit with Rae Lewis Thornton, the Emmy award winning AIDs/HIV Activist, the internationally renowned motivational speaker and ordained minister, and the unknown beauty who graced a 1994 cover of Essence Magazine with the headline, “I’m young, I’m educated, I’m drug-free, and I’m dying of AIDS”, and here’s what she had to say.

GG:  People often say life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond.  You responded boldly to your HIVs/AIDs diagnosis at a time when AIDs was like the plague and you made and lost a lot of money along the way.  How did you do it?

Rae:  When I was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, I was on my way to becoming a major force in the political arena.  I worked with the likes of Donna Brazille, Alexis Herman, and Dorothy Height . . . so I had no doubt that I would be successful.  But at the age of 23, after a ‘relationship’ with a well-known personality whose name I have not publicly revealed to this day, I was diagnosed with HIV.  So one time when I was speaking at an event . . . I got on stage, said what I had to say, told the women in the audience how many phone numbers had been slipped to me by their husbands, partners, and dates . . . then I said ‘And I have AIDS’ . . . and I walked off the stage.  Susan Taylor gave me her card, and the rest is history.  Within a year of appearing on the cover of Essence magazine, I was doing anywhere from 5 to 15  speaking engagements a month on HIV/AIDs awareness and I was making anywhere from $2500 to $3500 each time.  . . but I had no sense of a future back then.  The life expectancy when I transitioned from HIV to AIDs in 1992 was three years, so in my mind, I didn’t need money for the future – my money was for the present.   I spoke on college campuses and I would say to the freshmen ‘by the time you graduate, I’ll be dead.”  So I had a good time with my money, and so did my husband.  In fact, when I DIDN’T die, his ass had the nerve to cop an attitude because his plan b was to start his speaking career by telling everyone how he took care of me up through my death!  Times were tough.  I shit on myself in restaurants, and cleaned myself up.  My dress size was a zero, my T-cell count got down to an 8 out of 1,000, and my viral load when up to over 400,000 . . .  I was staring death in the face.  But sometime around 1998, the medications got better, my T-cell count and my life expectancy went up, but my money went down, and after nine-eleven, the speaking engagements completely dried up.  I was in the hospital one time for three months straight, very sick, and the money was going out faster than I could bring it in to pay my medical bills and support my extravagant lifestyle.  

Stay Tuned for More from Rae Lewis Thornton on Next Week’s Wisdom Wednesday . . .

Rae’s website www.raelewisthornton.com

Lynn’s website:  www.lynnrichardson.com/Work_With_Lynn.html