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Is AIDS still glamorous? - by Mitchel Raphael

“Nobody dresses up to die anymore,” Danny Love told me. It was the mid-’90s and Danny was the first friend whom I watched die of AIDS.

“He can still hear you,” the nurse told me near the end. The body on the hospital bed was puffed out to twice its usual size. Danny had cotton pads on his eyes. I lost track counting the tubes going in and out of his flesh.

Danny Love was a comedy drag queen who always went for the visual joke. When he lip-synched Shirley Bassey’s “I Who Have Nothing,” his dress would slowly fall apart onstage. When he took a bow, a heap of carrots would drop from his skirt. His apartment was a festering swamp of gowns, wigs, makeup and HIV medications. He had a port-a-cath implanted in his chest. It was a device that allowed him to self-administer some of his meds intravenously. This was only a few years before POZ people would be taking just a few pills instead of fistfuls.

In his final weeks, Danny kept working on a grandiose Bette Midler routine. He concocted shiny outfits and spray-painted foam to create a Picasso-esque costume from which he would emerge as the Divine Miss M herself. My close friend Christopher Peterson, who introduced me to Danny, had seen other POZ queens plan similar extravaganzas before dying.

Homosexuals are very good at covering pain with aesthetic anaesthetics. When in doubt, just toss more glitter at it and hope it sticks.

In the early days AIDS activists battled for access to drugs and demanded government action (this was a time when homosexual concentration camps were being seriously considered by some authorities), but AIDS would soon become a glamorous cause. The red ribbon, unlike the many other coloured ribbon campaigns that followed, was seen at every major awards ceremony – at the Tonys (first worn by Jeremy Irons in 1991), the Emmys and the most glamorous event of all, the Oscars. The ribbons themselves would become more and more ornate – porcelain ribbons, beaded ribbons, sequined ribbons.

They were a symbol of compassion morphed into fashion. Even Christmas tree ornaments were crafted in their shape.

At the time, glamour was clearly the most effective (if not the only) weapon in the queer arsenal for attracting mainstream support for AIDS causes. The main industry being decimated by AIDS was a haven for homosexuals: the world of fashion. Designers, makeup artists, hairdressers and stylists numbered high among the people rotting before society’s eyes. These ravaged bodies needed to be covered up to make AIDS more palatable. A “diseased homosexual” was not the image to project to garner support for what was then called a gay disease. But people would support glamour. They always do.
Two patron saints of AIDS would descend and lend their hands.

In 1985, screen goddess Dame Elizabeth Taylor helped establish the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amFAR). The same year, her friend and silver screen co-star Rock Hudson would succumb to AIDS. As amFAR grew internationally, Taylor attended many meetings, always with her hairdresser in tow. The BBC reported, “Taylor’s work for AIDS has grossed almost as much money as her film career.” In 1992, Taylor established the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.

Around the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, the fight against AIDS would be graced by the most photographed woman in the world.

In 1987, six years after she married Prince Charles, Princess Diana visited Britain’s first AIDS hospice. At the time, AIDS was not a topic for polite English society. She would famously go on to shake the hands of AIDS patients and offer words of support like “HIV does not make people dangerous to know, so you can shake their hands and give them a hug. God knows they need it.” In her interview with BBC reporter Martin Bashir, Diana said: “My children must change the monarchy one day.” When asked how she was preparing them for this, she stated: “I visit the homeless and people who are dying from AIDS with the children. I take them with me. I give them knowledge and experience, as knowledge is power. I would like them to be understanding. So they can learn about desperation, hope and dreams.”

In his eulogy to Diana after her death in 1997, Diana’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer, said, “Without your God-given sensitivity we would be immersed in greater ignorance at the anguish of AIDS and HIV sufferers.”

AIDS patients were touched by royalty early in the battle. They were touched by two of the most glamorous women in the world.

Soon came the mega-AIDS fundraisers for which Hollywood royalty, music stars and the fashion elite would gather. Goddesses like Taylor and Princess Diana had paved the way.

I remember talk in the ’90s about out-of-control fashion designers who were being honoured at American mega-AIDS fundraisers in order to attract wealthy guests. My favourite story was Calvin Klein’s wife complaining about the shades of green in the salad to be served.

In Canada, fundraisers like Fashion Cares never seemed to get out of hand with huge egos trumping the real purpose of the event. Still, they were drenched in glamour. They were so glamorous that big companies began supporting AIDS causes, perhaps without knowing just what they were doing or why, just as the patrons at the events seemed not to know why they were there. Fashion Cares is a benefit for the noble AIDS Committee of Toronto, which focuses on prevention and provides services for people with HIV/AIDS – everything from safer S/M workshops to POZ youth support and HIV and spirituality workshops. Yet people at the events would always speak of the hope of finding a cure. The Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research (CANFAR) is the group dedicated to finding a cure. So you wonder whether supporters really knew where the money was going, and whether it mattered if they didn’t. Does The Bay want to support S/M workshops?

Glamorous events have allowed people to support AIDS causes without seeing the yucky stuff – particularly gay sex. This is a good thing. Glamour was gay people’s only hope. And it still is, until a cure is found. It doesn’t matter what they know as long as the cheque doesn’t bounce.

But it matters what gay people know. It matters a lot.

Like I said before, gay man are good at covering up pain. When you are labelled “sick” and “diseased,” beauty and glamour can counter that image. But when it comes to AIDS, we are forgetting what is under all those feathers and sequins.

I’ve always wondered why there is not a moment of silence at Fashion Cares. Why is there no photo wall of proud lives lived? Why do we forget what people with AIDS once looked like? Why do we want to forget?

Gays don’t learn about queer culture as they grow up, unlike members of many other cultural and ethnic groups. There is not a Jew in the world who would not recognize walking skeletons wearing striped concentration-camp uniforms with yellow Stars of David, numbers tattooed on their arms. Most people, one would hope, know what a black person in chains symbolizes.

When Princess Diana died, many were shocked when the old pictures of her with emaciated AIDS patients appeared again in the media. Some of us were reminded of what the disease once looked like; others were seeing these images for the first time. As we were choosing the image for our current cover – a 1989 photo of Diana with an AIDS patient covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions – several people under 30 who were in the fab office at the time didn’t know that that was what a POZ person once looked like. Safer-sex pamphlets should come with a condom, lube and a history lesson.

Today, the AIDS body is the circuit-boy body. Perhaps this is appropriate, since so many circuit parties donate (or claim to donate) a portion of their proceeds to AIDS charities, organizations that many of their revellers will eventually rely on. The big circuit bashes with their spectacular shows continue to inject a dose of glamour into the AIDS cause.

So is AIDS still glamorous? Of course it is. AIDS is glamour now in the case of gay men (look how long it has taken for AIDS in Africa to even appear on the public radar). But it is time to unglue the sequins, brush off all that glitter and remember what is truly underneath all of this. A generation of gay men died in the spirit of sexual liberation.

Glamour is one of the most powerful tools in the queer bag of tricks. It can be used as a way to cover things up, even as a temporary escape. Glamour should be used to fool other people, but not to turn ourselves into forgetful fools.

• Mitchel Raphael is fab’s Editor-in-chief.