Author Description

The companion piece to Callwood's 1988 hagiography Jim: A Life with AIDS, this "shocking story of women and AIDS" effectively demonizes its black male subject as the bisexual Don Giovanni of the epidemic. Charles Ssenyonga, Canada's most infamous "AIDS Criminal," was brought to trial in 1993 for having deliberately failed to inform his many sexual partners (mostly young, white, professional women from Southern Ontario) that he was infected with HIV. An immigrant from Uganda, Ssenyonga had run a small African import business in London, Ontario during the late 1980s when the risk of HIV-transmission from men to women was rarely reported and routinely ignored. Though his seroconversion antedated his arrival in Canada, he did not find out about his illness until 1987. He continued having unprotected sex with women through the early 1990s, and was not ordered by local health authorities to stop his sexual "rampages" until several of his partners had been diagnosed with AIDS. A Toronto doctor, Cheryl Wagner, traced their infection to Ssenyonga and helped to organize the legal efforts to convict him of assault with a deadly weapon (his penis). Though lawyers for the women were able to prove during the trial that his peculiarly virulent strain of Ugandan HIV was present in his victims' bodies, Ssenyonga died of AIDS-related complications before legal judgment could be rendered in his case. In 1995 Callwood provided the missing judgment in her moralistic reconstruction of the Ssenyonga story. Like Don Giovanni, Ssenyonga is effectively damned at the end of his transgressively promiscuous life. Despite his biographer's feminist insistence that her work is utterly free of prejudice, its sensationalistic portrayal of Ssenyonga as an African "lady-killer" is direly shaped by Victorian racist stereotypes (e.g. the raging black super-stud, the innocent white maiden) and by the punitive discourse of xenophobia (e.g. the dangerous exoticism of the guilty African AIDS-carrier). Under