AIDS and the Arts: Behind the Scenes of a Tragedy

Quietly at first and then not so quietly, it became clear that the epidemic of AIDS was stalking America’s artistic community in the second half of the 1980s.

An infectious disease, acquired immune deficiency syndrome took the lives of thousands of artists and entertainers, spurred others to respond with works addressing the epidemic, politicized art exhibitions and grant proposals, and made the 1980s seem like wartime.

More than a few artists and arts leaders, particularly in the dance world, were reluctant to acknowledge the effect of AIDS since the disease initially struck hardest at gay men and intravenous drug users, groups already stigmatized by society at large. But it was hard to ignore the death toll, whatever its sociological implications. A disproportionate number of AIDS victims, it turned out, were poor and anonymous, but there were also a lot who acted, painted, sang, danced and in one way or another contributed to the public creative life of the nation.

“The impact was throughout the whole society, but we were so visible,” said actress Colleen Dewhurst, president of Actors’ Equity, the stage actors’ union that raised $750,000 through benefits and donations to distribute to 600 of its members living with AIDS.

“One tends to morbidly look at the obituary page more and more,” said Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, one of Los Angeles’ leading resident theaters. “And the feeling is that when no one is there, you say, ‘We got through another day.’ ”

The immediate toll at the Taper among staff and performers was relatively small compared to New York’s experimental off-off-Broadway theater company La Mama, which estimated in November that 53 people who had been associated with it had died of AIDS. As a result, the nonprofit theater’s insurance rates went up 400%.

“We’ve lost curators, exhibition designers, conservators, registrars. I don’t think there’s an aspect of museum work that hasn’t been affected by AIDS,” said Harry Parker III, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “My guess would be that nationwide, 100 museum professionals have died of AIDS.”

Assessing the effect of AIDS on the arts, documentary film maker Robert Epstein, who directed the Oscar-winning 1985 documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk” and produced the recent AIDS documentary “Common Threads” for HBO, said: “I think because so many artists have fallen to AIDS and will continue to do so, the impact is going to be felt more strongly in the long term than the short term. It’s an intangible that we can’t even evaluate, but that we have to keep in perspective--that we have lost so many talented people in their prime.”

AIDS was not always listed as the official cause of death, but a generation of choreographers--from Michael Bennett to Arnie Zane--seemed to be dying off at the peak of their creative powers.

Award-winning New York dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, who was Zane’s lover and collaborator and who lost an additional “35 to 40 friends” during the decade, responded to the reticence of some dance professionals to identify AIDS as a cause of death: “I am saddened that these men whom I respect could not have an organizational consciousness that would have made room for allowing themselves to become part of a tragic moment in history. They keep themselves apart, and don’t help us see how many brilliant leaders have been taken from us.”

In Hollywood, the death of Rock Hudson from AIDS in 1985 was just the beginning. Subsequent AIDS-related deaths in the movie and television industries ranged in estimates from 200 to 1,000, with precise figures hard to come by because of the continuing stigma attached to the disease. A comparative study made by Fox Entertainment News (KTTV-TV Channel 11) in conjunction with an entertainment-industry task force suggested that the incidence of AIDS in Hollywood was three times the national average for other industries.

During the initial panic, when it was believed falsely that the virus could be transmitted through saliva, a number of actresses said they would not do kissing scenes with actors they believed to be gay. More significantly, the incidence of AIDS in Hollywood threatened the jobs and health benefits of some studio employees diagnosed as carrying the virus, as studio executives contended with rising insurance premiums.

While the entertainment industry publicly lamented the crisis and raised millions of dollars through highly visible, star-studded benefits, behind the scenes some members of the Hollywood community worried that it was mostly for show.

“I think it has only fostered homophobia in the entertainment business,” said television writer and playwright Joel Kimmell. “To this community, homosexuality equals AIDS, and AIDS equals homosexuality.”

The worlds of classical music and opera were also affected. The worst hit was the New York City Opera, where general director Beverly Sills observed in June, 1987, that the company had lost two dozen members, including singers, musicians and staff.

The Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles calculated it had lost 29 singers to AIDS (out of 150) between 1984 and 1989, which led to the making of a documentary film about the group, “No One Is Alone.”

“It’s certainly on everyone’s mind,” said Michael Morgan, assistant conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, “but it hits the major orchestras a little less hard because the players are a little bit older and tend not to be in the high-risk groups. The biggest impact it’s had on music generally is that all of us have grown accustomed to reading of the deaths of our younger colleagues, which has made the whole community sadder, but also hardened some of the feelings because now you’re almost not even surprised when someone dies.”

By the end of the 1980s, the AIDS obituary list in the arts included theater directors John Hirsch, Wilfred Leach and Charles Ludlam, who was also an actor; actors Seth Allen, Neil Flanagan and Amanda Blake; opera director David Hicks; Robert Jacobson, editor of Opera News; screenwriter-director Colin Higgins; classical pianist Paul Jacobs; entertainer Liberace; theater composer Bill Elliot; photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; painters Carlos Almaraz, Jay Phillips and Don Sorenson; dancer Charles Ward, and art dealer Nicholas Wilder.

Gradually, artists turned their energies and imaginations to address the epidemic, not only through an array of fund-raising benefits, but through art itself, from Cyndi Lauper’s song “Little Boy Blue” to Larry Kramer’s hit stage play “The Normal Heart,” to macabre and powerful exhibitions of paintings and photographs depicting AIDS victims.

Novels about AIDS included “The Valley of the Shadow,” by Christopher Davis and “86ed” by David Feinberg, but the first literature spawned by the plague was more often in the form of memoirs, led by Larry Kramer’s “Reports from the holocaust” and “Borrowed Time,” by Los Angeles poet and novelist Paul Monette, who also contributed the AIDS-related poetry collection, “Love Alone.” San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts wrote a critically acclaimed, best-selling history of the epidemic, “And the Band Played On.”

There was a direct, head-on confrontation with the subject in photography, where Nicholas Nixon and Ann Meredith, among others, captured memorable portraits of the suffering brought on by AIDS. “I think unquestionably that some of this work will endure,” said San Francisco photography gallery owner Jeffrey Fraenkel, whose exhibition of Nixon’s photographs was later seen in a variation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “The best of it ends up being, like AIDS itself, more about life than about death. That was certainly true of Nixon’s work.”

“I think that everyone who’s in the midst of it just has a different sense of what their life span is now,” said Deborah Hoffman, an Oakland-based film editor who edited “The Times of Harvey Milk” and “Common Threads.” “Everything’s kind of moved along a little faster than we expected.”

Tim Miller, a Los Angeles performance artist, AIDS activist and author of the piece “Sex/Love/AIDS,” saw the crisis as a way to refocus art in a positive way. “It’s reconnecting art to the world and to the reality of pain and death and love, which is probably the proper terrain of the artist anyway,” Miller said. “I think it has deeply changed the criteria for how art is going to be judged. Like, is it effective? Can it change the reality that creates pain in the world? This is to me a greater criterion for work than whether the color field is of interest.”

Miller was one of a group of artists who blockaded the Federal Building in Los Angeles in October as part of a national protest of the federal Food and Drug Administration’s slow response to AIDS. Elsewhere, AIDS activists, unsatisfied with artworks that were primarily elegiac, began advocating a more confrontational aesthetic. Members of the group Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) disrupted the opening night of the San Francisco Opera this year by running down the aisles of the opera house blowing whistles.

Across the country in early December, scores of museums closed for a day, observing “A Day Without Art,” designed to recognize AIDS deaths among visual artists. At the Dallas Museum of Art, special programs director Melissa Berry helped put up a temporary wall in front of the museum’s entrance bearing the names of 200 northern Texas artists dead from AIDS.

“I see artists more so than ever taking their roles as artists more seriously,” Berry said, “and through their art trying to bring the crisis to the attention of the public--not only in Dallas but everywhere.”

The theater responded to AIDS relatively early, with the 1985 staging in New York and Los Angeles of “The Normal Heart,” a consciousness-raising drama about the failure of New York City’s government and press and many gay men to take the epidemic seriously. The same year brought William Hoffman’s Tony Award-nominated “As Is,” a sad-funny piece that ended on the up-notes of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from the Ninth Symphony. An adaptation of the play was commissioned by PBS, which ultimately decided the language was too tough for its stations in the South and passed it off to cable.

Subsequently, Harvey Fierstein’s three one-acts, “Safe Sex,” were produced on Broadway; in Robert Chesley’s “Jerker,” two men stood on opposite sides of the stage and had sex by phone.

Hollywood, in contrast, steered clear of the subject, at least directly, on the big screen while working references to AIDS into the story lines of television shows like “St. Elsewhere” and “Trapper John,” and commissioning one TV movie, “An Early Frost” (NBC), about a young man (played by Aidan Quinn) with AIDS hoping to win back the love of a disapproving father (Ben Gazzara).

The networks chose to ignore the statistical realities of the disease, preferring plots that presented hemophiliacs and children as innocent victims who contracted AIDS through blood transfusions (in fact, a relatively rare occurrence). Gay activists directed charges of fear-mongering at the NBC series “Midnight Caller” for presenting a bisexual man as a murderer who planned to spread the virus to unsuspecting women partners.

Hollywood films did make concessions to the epidemic. By the time the 1985 Los Angeles-originated play “Casual Sex” had been transformed into a Universal movie in 1988, the title had become “Casual Sex?” Likewise, in the 1987 Universal comedy “Dragnet,” Tom Hanks made it clear he wouldn’t have sex without a condom; in the James Bond film “The Living Daylights” (United Artists), Bond suddenly confined his amorous attentions to one woman instead of bedding the usual three or four.

Film critic and historian Vito Russo, author of “The Celluloid Closet: A History of Homosexuality in the Movies,” observed changes wrought by AIDS in Hollywood: “One would say that Hollywood’s alleged sense of moral values has altered in response to the AIDS crisis. Films like ‘Fatal Attraction’ and ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ are metaphors for AIDS, about the dangers of promiscuity, about a return to family values, responses to the existence of AIDS. ‘Fatal Attraction’ is a sort of AIDS horror movie, what can happen if you cheat on your wife once.”

“As Is” playwright Hoffman, who was later hired by Warner Bros. to write an AIDS movie, explained that the film would center on a black woman who gets the disease, which was one way he believed the subject could be deemed acceptable for a Hollywood feature. “The largest number of people with AIDS are gay men,” Hoffman told a writers’ symposium in Los Angeles, “and studio executives have a hatred and fear of gay men and find them unacceptable as characters.”

Kramer, author of “The Normal Heart” and a former Hollywood executive, also took the movie industry to task for avoiding the topic: “I remember in the Second World War when F.D.R. had a crisis and wanted the world to be educated about it, he called up the head of a movie studio like Jack Warner and said, ‘Make a movie about it.’ And he would. And he didn’t expect to make a lot of money on it but saw it as an educational tool.”

Kramer was also critical of his fellow writers. “Artists have not done their share on this one. It’s that simple. None of the best gay writers has written about AIDS. In my estimation, they’ve ducked the issue.”

Besides spreading despair and “the silent fear when people are dropping around you,” as La Mama executive director Wickham Boyle put it, AIDS seemed to further politicize the arts, which carried a potential negative economic impact as well at a time when publicly funded arts groups were already under attack by conservative forces in government. With cultural institutions and performers’ unions facing higher insurance premiums brought on by expensive care needed to treat the disease, many of the same nonprofit institutions also began to worry about a backlash from funding organizations. Such organizations, they believed, were uncomfortable with the link between AIDS and homosexuality and wary of AIDS activism in the arts.

Most conspicuously, the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, John Frohnmayer, in November suspended a $10,000 federal grant approved by the endowment last May as part of the sponsorship of a Manhattan gallery exhibition of paintings, photographs and sculptures aimed at depicting the emotions felt by AIDS patients. The chairman’s explanation was that the show’s catalogue contained derogatory references to political and religious figures--among them, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who led the campaign in Congress earlier in the year against the public funding of art he viewed to be obscene.

The executive director of one New York dance company, who asked not to be identified, pointed to the endowment controversy and said, “That’s why people in dance are being so quiet about AIDS. We’re all worried about our funding.”

Others like Tim Miller saw the rising political stakes as evidence that the arts were entering a fresh era of excitement, reminiscent of the late 1960s, when art took to the barricades of American culture, infused with the energy of various liberation movements and protest against the Vietnam War.

“It’s not unlike the generation of assassinations we lived through,” said Gordon Davidson, recalling the 1960s in a different context. “John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X. You can’t eliminate that many leaders from the world without paying a tremendous price, because talent doesn’t come along in equal doses.”

In the land of MTV and cosmetic surgery, AIDS brought a rude awakening, which dancer Bill T. Jones chose to compare to the wave of tuberculosis that swept Europe in the 1830s. “The early Romantics were concerned with some of the topics that we’re concerned with now,” Jones said. “There was a preoccupation in the arts community with early death, and also a connection between sex and death.”

To cope with his “overwhelming sense of loss,” Jones devised a recent dance work, “Absence,” on a Berlioz song cycle, “Nuits d’Ete,” written during the same tuberculosis epidemic that informed Puccini’s operatic tale of tragedy among young artists in Paris, “La Boheme.”

“There’s an uncanny parallel to our own era. Young people who before had no notion of death now deal with mortality every day. Not just those of us in the gay community, but in general I think we’ve been forced to look at the issue of mortality, and it’s reflected in the work that’s being done. We are not superhuman. Some of us are going to die very soon.”