Life is full of uncertainties. One minute you’re an über-hip zeitgeist visualiser (famous photographer), the next you’re a post-demise press release.
So please. Right now. Before you forget. Run out and secure the services of a publicist who can be trusted to spin that demise in your favour. It’ll be too late after the event. Ensure that there’s a clause covering pre-release vetting of spontaneous “I remember blank” commentary at the wake. Believe me, the whole PR campaign could come unstuck on a wave of “tired and emotionalism”.
Take Herb Ritts. On December 13, Herb was creating the March cover for Vanity Fair. By New Year’s Eve, people were nodding knowingly as they scanned his obit.
“In Los Angeles, aged 50, following complications from pneumonia. Survived by his mother, brother and partner Erik Hyman” — ever-traditional, the London Daily Telegraph obit actually referred to Erik as Herb’s “companion”, though spared us “long-time”, which was considerate of them.
First reaction? Well, being a poof of a certain age, that whole Eighties denial thing! A gay man, a celebrated gay man, dies before his time and They can’t Say The A Word.
There’s a rich mother lode of evidence. Rock Hudson was on a diet, then had liver problems, and Freddie Mercury “got AIDS” pretty much simultaneously with his demise. Such was the stigma around AIDS and gay that the black joke of the period was around blond white guys having to convince their parents that they were really Haitian. Even if people were openly gay, they never did that — so they couldn’t have got it that way. D-Nile.
No. If I’m honest, that more encapsulated my second reaction. My first reaction was amazement that Herb Ritts was only 50. He seemed to have been the gay bar wall print artist-of-record for aeons, and I’m not that far ?? but let’s move on.
Institutionalised AIDS denial was so widespread in the mid-Eighties that the New York Times instructed its obit reporters (is that the journo career fast track or what?) to probe the stated cause of death when the circumstantial evidence suggested that “pneumonia” or “cancer” might have more to do with what the neighbours should think than what about 3,952 queens had guessed already, often from personal acquaintance with the deceased or at least with parts of his anatomy.
The Times — quality press with a K — wasn’t motivated by sleazy tabloid prurience. AIDS denial was all encompassing in the mid-Eighties and cutting through the panic-driven camouflage was an essential part of combating the epidemic. On one level, it was essential to get the word out about the reality of AIDS. On another, men who had lived open, proud, gay lives, against the odds, were deemed to be dishonoured by what looked like a process of calculated re-closeting after they were gone.
But things have moved on — sort of. Enter Herb’s publicist, one Stephen Huvane, doing an obit backgrounder opportunity with US gay magazine The Advocate, a few days after the death.
“Herb was HIV-positive but his pneumonia wasn’t HIV associated,” Huvane informed about five million disbelieving queens. This didn’t really assist our journey to Total Clarification City as far as I was concerned. My doctor, revealing a hitherto-undisclosed penchant for celebrity gossip, was also intrigued.
“If he was on HAART, and responding — and he must have been doing OK because he was working on a major photo shoot right beforehand — it looks a bit bizarre.
“But pneumonia isn’t necessarily Pneumocystis. It could conceivably describe a whole host of things??”
Conscious of AMA warnings about the inadequacy of bulk billing cost/time parameters in general practice, I got him back to the business at hand: describing how you could tell the porn star on the current cover of DNA magazine was of African-American descent. But he had a point.
So did The Advocate’s former Contributing Editor, Michelangelo Signorile. And he made it, thundering righteously, in the US publication Newsday.
“This isn’t just another example of incomplete or deceptive reporting,” Signorile railed. “It’s also a tragic omission at a time when study after study shows unsafe sex and new infections continuing to rise steeply among younger generations of gay men, often because the realities of AIDS are abstract to them – enough to allow them to take foolish risks.”
And there was more: “No longer are many people with HIV walking around rail-thin and gaunt. Many even use testosterone as part of their therapy, building up their bodies and developing bulging biceps, often appearing more fit than their uninfected friends. AIDS becomes increasingly invisible, on the streets as well as in the media, even as HIV infection is an ever-present danger. And clearly, though American fatalities have decreased a great deal, HIV still kills.”
Clearly.
But one whiff of “foolish risks” amid all this diseased wraith nostalgia and suddenly I’m less certain about just where the denial lies here.
A 50 year old, gay, HIV-positive man may — or may not — have expired as a direct result of HIV disease progression. He undeniably died in the presence of HIV infection. But it’s not enough for Signorile. He claims that this lack of exactitude, the absence of forensic detail, is a potential problem in AIDS prevention activity amongst younger generations of gay men. Why? How? Is a 22-year-old gay guy really going to treat the death of a man possibly older than his father as a cautionary gay tale?
Please! That kid is living in a culture that insists on an involuntary sexual and social euthanasia well before 50; he won’t be spending a whole bunch of time angsting about the quality of his senescence. That’s what being young is about.
Herb Ritts’ death will give Mr Gay 22-year-old pause? I don’t think so. Some “gaunt, rail-thin” 23-year-olds — presumably without access to testosterone — might, but I think that HAART looks like stuffing that prospect up for the foreseeable future. Is that a prevention challenge? You bet. But the longer we keep attempting to scare young guys with the imagery of an epidemic time and place that’s behind us, the less likelihood the chance of effective, honest engagement with the different challenge circumstances that confront us now.
For some of us, the passing of Herb Ritts is a milestone event. We were there when Herb’s photos, “Fred With Tyres”, “Jump” and “Dan and Tom” — the dude showering with his boots on — hit every homo hangout from Manchester to Melbourne. He’s an intrinsic part of the cultural backdrop against which we live our lives, and acute recall of the Hyacinth Bucket approach to gay epidemic death in the Eighties is part of that memory. For some of us. His death is way too late to be a moral exemplar for me and too remote from Signorile’s “younger generations” to be much of a moral exemplar there either.
But what we’re left with — apart from the always-intoxicating allure of speculation — is a cautionary tale of sorts.
It’s not the Eighties and it seems improbable that Ritts was either in denial or that he wouldn’t have had some foresight or interest in relation to how his death might be covered. If it was denial — and exactly what, ultimately, is it that’s being denied here anyway? — then it hasn’t worked all that well from the perspectives of you and me, has it?
Guess we’ll have to wait for the trashy unauthorised bio to get the guts.
A successful, out — and HIV-positive — gay man, who gave a great deal to AIDS causes for two decades, has died. If he didn’t want to go into a helluva lot more detail than that, is it really such a big deal? Who wants to be remembered as the sum total of their means of dispatch? Should some perceived “need” for this memorialising to occur have legitimacy over individual wishes? And who decides?
As my doctor observed: “I’m more interested in what became of Fred with the tyres.”
There’s something quite empowering about that.
