Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 31, 1993 TAG: 9310300270
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
And, like clockwork, they descend upon the man in the trademark purple jeans as soon as he steps out of his car.
``Hey Anthony, I'm 10 next month!'' one of them is pleading.
``What you got there in your bag today?'' another one asks. ``Can't we come in to your party? Can't we come in this one time?''
``Next time, next program ... when you're old enough,'' Anthony Drakeford says, grabbing his evening's supply of teaching tools - a boom-box with rap music, a bag full of door prizes and a box called ``The Baby Game,'' wherein each player draws their own make-believe baby and welfare stipend. Players lose play-money if they draw a card that says, ``You lose your temper and slap the baby,'' or ``Your baby was born underweight because you drank and smoked.''
Drakeford is teaching Real Life 101 here, full of the hard struggles and harsh realities these kids see every day - guns, drugs, sex, babies. He can recite them like a mantra.
He can spend an hour with a room full of 13-year-olds and tell by their body language which ones are already having sex.
He knows that Jammie Thomas lives with her parents, a brother and two older teen-age sisters - who both have babies of their own. He believes there's hope for Jammie because she's been coming to his sex-ed program for almost a year now - and ``she already knows what it's like to have a screaming baby in the house.''
He knows that when freshman Shanta Kasey says, ``White people say `going steady,' but we say `hooking up''' - and everyone laughs - that no one in the room knows for sure what the term means.
``What if you think hooking up means going together, but he thinks it means going to Motel 6?'' Drakeford asks the group. ``I had some guys at the high school tell me that `hooking up' means no commitment, no relationship, nothing. You just go to a hotel and have sex.''
The group of mostly girls looks puzzled. Then someone laughs, setting off a chain reaction of laughter. It's a red flag to Drakeford, who knows they're not really sure about ``hooking up'' - not yet anyway, not most of them. He continues talking about relationships: aspects of sexual harassment, dating, intimacy.
``Not every guy wants sex,'' Drakeford, 26, says. ``Some guys are virgins.''
``There's some 12-year-old girls having more sex than old people,'' Jammie says. ``It makes you cool so you fit in.''
``I know someone that's 28 and still a virgin,'' Shanta adds.
The room erupts in laughter.
For more than a year now, Drakeford has worked two jobs - one through the Roanoke city Health Department, called ``For Males Only''; the other through Planned Parenthood and the Better Beginnings Coalition, called ``Sex or Not?''
For the Health Department, he canvasses the housing developments, passing out condoms, talking to teen males. Sometimes he just shoots hoops on the playgrounds, checking in on kids he hasn't seen in a while.
Drakeford tries to develop trust and rapport so that when a guy has a question about sex he'll call him instead of asking his friend on the street.
When an 11-year-old begs him for condoms, he tries to talk him into waiting to have sex.
``You're not ready,'' Drakeford tells him.
``Yes I am,'' the 11-year-old responds.
Then Drakeford brings up STDS - sexually transmitted diseases - child support and pregnancy. ``And it's like they've never even heard of these things.''
Still, he's realistic. ``It's hard for me to tell a 17-year-old who's already been sexually active for three years to go ahead and stop,'' he says. ``They see right through you if you're phony.
``These kids don't know or care anything about the statistics, and I'm not into them either,'' Drakeford says. ``Yeah, I know the one about Roanoke's teen pregnancy rate, and yeah, that seems like I'm not doing my job.
``But we need more men tors for these kids, and not just adults but peers. A lot of these kids will listen to other kids, but not to adults.''
That's where the coed ``Sex or Not?'' program comes in. So far, the program has been offered to 10- to 17-year-olds at Lansdowne and Hurt Park, where kids are so eager for after-school activities that often there are 9-year-olds outside Drakeford's door begging to come in.
They see Drakeford with his jeans, sweat shirt and tiny hoop earring, and they think he's cool. They hear the rap music being played - usually a song with a message about AIDS or teen pregnancy. They see the Junior League volunteer bringing in cupcakes, fruit and chips. They hear about the coveted door prizes - a Walkman, a gym bag, a T-shirt or baseball cap.
``I get the kids who wanna do something with their lives,'' Drakeford says. ``Their parents aren't pushing them to come, they wanna be here.'' They see the temptations outside - the drugs, the guns, the hooking up - ``and they want something good to do instead.''
Representatives from the city schools, Planned Parenthood and the housing authority also hold sex-ed workshops for parents at Hurt Park and Lansdowne - hoping to target the parents of the same kids coming to ``Sex or Not?'' so they can discuss the information together at home.
``I 'd been at Lansdowne once doing an orientation, and one lady was bragging to me how a lotta kids in the development came to her for information about birth control,'' Drakeford says. ``And then she says how she tells them the pill and condom are the only two forms of birth control.
``I told Jeanie [Seay, Planned Parenthood educator], `You need to get over there quick.'''
Correcting the misinformation is a slow process. At a recent orientation for parents at Lansdowne, only six parents - all mothers - showed up.
``Not many people care what their kids are doing,'' said Jamie Booker, a resident member of the housing authority council. ``A lot of them are just here to see the pregnant man,'' she added, referring to the poster for the event, a teaser promising refreshments, fun and the rare opportunity to witness a live, pregnant man.
Sure enough, just as the program begins, in he strolls. It's Drakeford, six months pregnant - swollen belly, breasts and all. He's wearing an ``empathy belly,'' a strap-on, simulated pregnancy apparatus designed so partners of pregnant women can feel for themselves what it's like to be pregnant.
The room erupts in laughter.
The next week Drakeford says, ``Now you know some of those women actually thought a man was gonna come in there pregnant.
``But hey, at least they came. At least they came.''
Drakeford didn't grow up in a development, but the streets he hung out on in Paterson, N.J., were just as rough. ``You were tough, so no one would mess with you,'' he recalls. ``I used to not do my homework and fail tests on purpose so I could be part of the group. If you got A's and B's, people would threaten to beat you up if you didn't give them your homework.''
``Some of the guys here, they think Roanoke is totally city. I tell 'em about New York and New Jersey. Then again, they have their own little war stories around here, too.''
Drakeford's own war story exploded when he was 19, on a football scholarship at Ferrum College - with the dream of one day turning pro.
``Suddenly I was 19, and I was a father, a provider, a husband, a student and an athlete,'' he recalls, his dreams of professional football dashed. ``Things happen, but you have to play the hand you're dealt.''
Although no longer married, he has a 6-year-old son and a 13-year-old adopted son; they live with their mother in Franklin County. With a psychology degree from Ferrum, Drakeford took his first counseling job at the Roanoke Valley Psychiatric Center, where he led both male and family therapy groups, before joining the Health Department.
``My mom, she took two and three jobs when I was growing up. I seen her struggle,'' he recalls. ``I see these kids going through the same things I went through.
``I've seen a lot. And what I teach, it's not all book. Book knowledge ain't gonna fly with these kids. They'll show you that, too, by not showing up.''
Shanta Kasey, a Patrick Henry High School freshman, likes Drakeford because ``you can talk with him about stuff you can't talk to other grown people about . . . like your teachers.
``Like what's that called? Sexual harassing? Sexual harassment? We don't get that at school, and I see a lotta boys doing it there and the girls just be smiling right back and taking it.''
Eighth-grader Tosha Burnette says she comes specifically to learn how to protect herself from getting pregnant. The oldest of three siblings, Tosha says she's ``forgotten everything from sex in health class, it's been so long.''
``At school, you know how some people they talk real real proper, saying big words and all? Anthony, he acts more relaxed, like we're just having fun and talking.
``Anthony, he can laugh with you, he's cool,'' she adds.
``You're not used to seeing black men giving programs like this.''
Drakeford doesn't mince words when asked to name the weak link in Roanoke's teen pregnancy prevention efforts: ``schools.''
For instance, last year he was asked to talk to a group of Patrick Henry students for a school health fair. ``They wanted a program on teen responsibility, but they told me not to mention teen pregnancy or contraceptives. I said, `How do you do that?'''
Drakeford showed the kids a video on sex messages in the mass media, then took questions from the group. A student asked specifically about teen pregnancy.
``I couldn't sidestep it,'' he says. ``I apologized, but I had to tell the truth. I didn't want to come across as a big phony. I didn't want them to think I didn't know what time it was.''
Many sex-ed teachers are uncomfortable with the subject, as are many parents, Drakeford says. ``So no wonder these kids have no idea about things. From the pretests I give, some girls think they urinate and get their period through the same hole. An older woman I know thought the same thing.''
Drakeford is an advocate for young black males. ``The statistics only measure the women, so that's what you see; you don't know who's fathering these kids. A lot of these girls are getting pregnant by older guys in their 20s and 30s, but it's the teen-age guys who are getting the bad rap.''
He tries to get the two sexes communicating more clearly, and sometimes even serves as a go-between. At Roanoke's School for Pregnant Teens, a student handed Drakeford the phone number of her baby's father, asking him to call the guy up.
``He knew she was pregnant, but didn't wanna take the responsibility - or so she thought. But when I talked to him, he said he didn't know how.'' Drakeford ran into the two of them together at the mall later, and they thanked him.
Sometimes it's as simple as talking to people in their own language, he says. Which is why he wishes there were more people hired in Roanoke city to do the kind of work he does. The 20-hour-a-week ``For Males Only'' program operates from an $8,000 grant provided by the city, and the full-time ``Sex or Not?'' program costs $33,955 annually, provided by the Thurmond Foundation, Planned Parenthood, the housing authority, Better Beginnings, United Way and the Health Department.
``I've envisioned it, even wrote up growth plans,'' he says. ``But there's just no available money for it. There has to be more than one person and more offered for them to be interested in the subject.''
Drakeford is thankful, though, that the information is reaching some of the kids. ``We were doing a focus group with a group of them once, and I was watching them from the other side of the glass.
``And the leader was asking them about STDs, and they were saying, `Yeah, that guy told us, the guy in the Escort ... the condom man.'''
by CNB