It is a very disturbing case, but here is the gist of what happened. A gay college wrestler Michael Johnson who goes by the Tiger Mandigo is HIV Positive.
He hooks up with several man on campus, who say he never alerted them to the fact he had HIV, once that knowledge was made known the police were called and Johnson was arrested. Not alerting someone about your HIV or AIDS status is a crime, but Johnson is saying he wasn’t aware at the time of these sexual encounters.
There are some racial overtones to the story because Johnson is black and the majority of the men he was with were white.
In January 2013, a white male college student in Missouri noticed a profile on a gay mobile hookup app for a black guy with ripped abs and a chiseled chest with the username “Tiger Mandingo.”
The student at Lindenwood University in the St. Louis suburb of St. Charles quickly recognized that in real life, Tiger Mandingo was also a student at his school: Michael Johnson, a recent transfer student on Lindenwood’s wrestling team. They hooked up later that month in Johnson’s dorm room, where, the student said, Johnson told him he was “clean.” He gave Johnson a blow job.
They didn’t hook up again until early October. This time, they had anal sex without a condom. “I let him come in me,” the student said. He wanted bareback sex, he said, because Johnson was “huge,” “only my third black guy,” and — as he said Johnson told him yet again — “clean.”
The student’s nonchalance changed when he described a call he got from Johnson a few days after their second hookup: “He calls me and he said, ‘I found out I have a disease.’ And I asked, ‘Is there a cure?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know.’ And I was like, ‘Are you f*cking kidding me?’ I got pissed. I had asked him several times, and he’d said he was clean, and I trusted him! And I got mad at him, and then he got mad at me for getting mad, and then he said, ‘I gotta go.’”
That same day, Oct. 10, Johnson was pulled out of his class and led away in handcuffs by the St. Charles police. He was later charged with one count of “recklessly infecting another with HIV” and four counts of “attempting to recklessly infect another with HIV,” felonies in the state of Missouri.
News of Johnson’s arrest, coupled with reports of more than 30 videotaped sexual encounters on Johnson’s laptop, rocked St. Charles and lit up local broadcasts and international headlines.
This issue seems very clear cut to me, doesn’t really matter if he is white, black, yellow or whatever. If he knew he was HIV positive and not telling the guys he was having sex with, he needs to stay in jail for a long time.
With that being said, people should be more careful with they have unprotected sex with, doesn’t matter if they are gay or not.