Detroit Free Press – Patricia Anstett
He is a man who has chosen to live his life as a woman.
He likes dresses, Barbie dolls and animals.
He has breast implants.
For more than 30 years, Robert Wray worked as a stripper and female impersonator under the stage name Dee Dee Sharpe.
Wray, or Dee Dee, as he prefers to be known, was in a monogamous relationship with his partner of 15 years.
“He cheated on me,” Wray said of the probable way he contracted AIDS. Most likely, his partner had the AIDS virus and didn’t know it.
When Dee Dee lost 62 pounds and went to the doctor, he was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. That was more than 10 years ago.
Dee Dee is 52 and lives alone in Detroit. The partner “has passed on,” not of AIDS, he said. He has not been involved in a sexual relationship since his diagnosis. “I couldn’t live with the idea I infected someone,” he said. “I’m an old widow; that’s the way it was.”