Gay man hides his homosexuality; infects wife with HIV.
Ava Gardner-Shipp thought she had found the perfect man: a handsome respected minister who could cook and quote Scripture from memory and adored her and her daughter.
“I met him in Bible study,” she recalled. “We used to go to Sunday school services together. All the things I was looking for, he had. He was perfect.”
But Gardner-Shipp’s storybook marriage unraveled two years later when she learned that her husband had knowingly infected her with HIV. He’d married her to hide his down-low status, she said, and because he “didn’t want to die alone.”
Ava Gardner and Bernard L. Shipp married in 1988 after six months of dating. They moved from Oakland to Sacramento, where he became the youth minister in their new church and she taught Bible study.
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