Culture Slut: On Derek Jarman, Klaus Nomi and AIDS On Screen
Words: Misha MN
Make it stand out
As a deep, dark, wet December takes over, so do all the annual tributes to togetherness and family; Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and perhaps the most poignant of all, World AIDS Day. Held in some form or other since 1988, World AIDS Day is important as both a tool for continuing to raise awareness around HIV and AIDS, as well as for mourning the estimated 40 million people who have died from the disease. In Brighton, as in many cities across the country, a candlelit vigil is held by one of the few (but gradually increasing) monuments dedicated to those affected by AIDS, where politicians, activists, community leaders, friends and family speak to a hushed audience, and lists of names are read aloud to remind us of those we have lost.
World AIDS Day is something that still affects every queer person, whether they realise it or not. When I first started going out to gay clubs in the mid 00s, we were still very much living in the spectre of AIDS, with bowls of free condoms in every bar, posters with helplines on every wall, and Terrence Higgins Trust nurses offering free HIV tests routinely making the rounds of the gayborhoods. Our teenage sex education in schools was so woefully inadequate, and mentions of the queer kind so totally erased, that all my knowledge came from the bars and the old queens that survived the unimaginable.
It is perhaps a cliche to always bring the discussion back to the lost generations of queer artists, elders, leaders and lovers, and how that affected us all going forwards, but that doesn’t make it less true. Gay kids who lost their homes and found community in queer chosen families stayed lost, with so few left to take them in and bring them into the beauty of queer life. The wild liberationists, the ones who lived unapologetically as faggots fighting and fucking for a new world, all died, and the assimilationists were all that was left. During AIDS, we all became orphans of the storm.
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As AIDS started biting chunks out of the queer art scene, it started becoming enshrined in the art itself. One incredible example of this is the book Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone, by Martin P. Levine. It started out as a sociological study (one of the first of its kind with a focus on homosexuals) of the Clone subculture - a style of dress emulating working class straight men - of the gay populating in New York, LA and San Francisco, but quickly transformed into an archive of the first wave of HIV and AIDS related deaths in the late 70s. The writer starts to report on the mysterious gay cancer affecting big city men, capturing knowledge, suspicions and theories about the illness as they are created. One part lists potential cures or safety measures come up with by the queers who were living in the eye of the storm, creating old wives tales that tops couldn’t get HIV, or that if you sucked an infected dick first then your natural saliva would neutralise the virus and prevent it from spreading. This serious sociological study became an archive of death, loss and witchcraft, the creation of spells to prevent more people dying, spells that worked and many that didn’t. It’s harrowing reading.
Another place where we can see AIDS start to leave its mark is in queer cinema. Derek Jarman was a groundbreaking filmmaker, artist, poet and activist, placed firmly in some of the most exciting art circles in London, or in New York where he would stay with on-again-off-again fuck buddy Robert Mapplethorpe. Starting off as a set designer for Ken Russell’s The Devils, Jarman became a creator of found families, amassing a small army of dedicated collaborators, friends, lovers, clients and hangers-on, from people like artist Andrew Logan (who started the infamous Alternative Miss World pageant, which Jarman actually won in its early years), to nurturing young experimental actors like Tilda Swinton, to providing unforgettable visuals and pop videos for artists like The Pet Shop Boys and The Smiths (before Morrissey was a cunt).
His debut film was Sebastiane, released in 1976, was the first to have dialogue spoken only in Latin, and its joyful depictions of gay sexuality was revolutionary. His second film, Jubilee (1978), holds up today as an icon of punk rebellion and prescient warnings against our increasingly fascist governments. Described as the first (and subsequently, best) punk film ever made, it features such luminaries as Jayne County, The Slits, Toyah Wilcox, Adam Ant and the usual roster of strange performance artists like Lindsay Kemp and The Great Orlando who were part of Jarman’s milieu. Incidentally, Vivienne Westwood truly hated the film, said it wasn’t punk at all, and wrote Jarman an open letter that she printed on a t-shirt where she called him a pretentious faggot, which must have been awkward at the shop SEX because famous punk shop assistant Jordan had also starred in Jubilee as the unforgettable heroine Amyl Nitrate.
Throughout the 80s, Jarman’s work became more political and less narrative focused, bringing awareness to the rising AIDS epidemic and Section 28, the government law that prevented homosexuality being spoken about in schools. The Angelic Conversation (1985) features romantic imagery and a selection of Shakespeare sonnets read by Judi Dench, whereas The Last Of England (1987) was described as wrenchingly beautiful, a burning criticism of Thatcher’s government and the social decay of the era. By the early 90s, Jarman was becoming increasingly sick. His last big production was The Garden (1990), shot in and around his now-famous cottage and garden in Dungeness, which tells the story of Jesus Christ, from birth to crucifixion, but Christ is represented by a gay couple. The work is hauntingly beautiful and increasingly desperate, you can almost feel Jarman worrying that his time is running out, it becomes an allegory for the suffering of queer people at that time, the ostracism and the prejudice.
Jarman’s last ever project was simply titled Blue (1993). Released four months before his death, after he had begun to lose his sight, the screen is saturated with an unmoving blue light as Jarman describes his life and his visions up until that point. It is powerfully moving, I highly recommend it to everyone who has even a passing interest in this period of history. I consider it to be one of the most profound works of what we could call AIDS cinema.
“The work is hauntingly beautiful and increasingly desperate, you can almost feel Jarman worrying that his time is running out, it becomes an allegory for the suffering of queer people at that time, the ostracism and the prejudice.”
It’s not only cinema that can capture an artist’s final moments efficiently. Something I always come back to around this time of year is Klaus Nomi’s recording of The Cold Song, a piece from Henry Purcell’s 1691 opera King Arthur. Nomi was an avant garde singer and cabaret artist most popular in the late 1970s, a countertenor with an incredible range and a revolutionary sense of style, who became an icon of the New York New Wave East Village scene. He dressed like an alien, white faced and black lipped, with a stylised hair cut that flaunted a receding widows peak, and sung the most beautiful coloratura arias that his young audiences had ever heard. Crowds had to be assured that he wasn’t lip syncing, but in fact making the heavenly sounds that left them spellbound. Nomi became one of the first high profile artists in New York to die from AIDS, taking their last breath in August 1983, and leaving all their possessions to fellow icon Joey Arias, who promptly spread Nomi’s ashes all over the East Village.
There is a Youtube video of Nomi performing The Cold Song towards the end of his life, possibly from his last ever concert, and it is captivating. Nomi’s signature dadaist costume has been swapped for a blood red velvet doublet and Elizabethan ruff, which he adopted in his final years because it covered the kaposi sarcoma marks that appeared on his neck. He stands by his orchestra and sings words that despite being from the 17th century seem hauntingly apt. “What power art thou who from below has made me rise unwillingly and slow from beds of everlasting snow? See’st thou not how stiff and wondrous old, far unfit to bear the bitter cold? I can scarcely move or draw my breath, let me freeze again to death.” His face is set, determined, defiant yet accepting of his fate. He may not have known a lot about AIDS at that time, but he knew he was dying. His power radiates from the screen.
For a long time, the spectre of AIDS was confined to queer cinema, with incredibly moving doomed romance films like Holding The Man (2015), 120 BPM (2017), Sorry Angel (2018), The Normal Heart (2014), the list goes on. Gays grieved in private for years, but finally, in the 2020s, we have reached a space in mainstream television where the impact of the epidemic can be explored openly. Ryan Murphy is at the forefront of this movement, producing two of the best examples of mainstream media dealing with HIV and AIDS that I've seen in the last decade.
Pose, starring MJ Rodriguez, Dominique Jackson and Billy Porter as inhabitants of the New York Ball scene had some of the most powerful sequences regarding life and death without being maudlin or emotional torture porn. Pose dealt with both the reality of the diagnosis, treatment, failure and death, as well as bringing focus to the joy, levity, love and belonging felt by the characters in their found families. Some died, but most of the main cast made it to the end of the series, which in any AIDS related drama is a rarity. The second Ryan Murphy production I want to highlight is American Horror Story: NYC. Set in 80s New York, a mysterious serial killer hunts gay men, and a strange new disease is brewing in Fire Island. AIDS isn’t mentioned, it almost doesn’t exist in this world, but both the virus and killer become allegories for the way queers were treated at the time. The story dances the fine line between reality and fantasy, with many characters standing in for real life counterparts, such Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, and even our beloved Klaus Nomi.
AIDS stories will always exist because it was a defining moment for the queer world. After being legislated against for so long, after being downtrodden, hunted, derided, beaten, criminalised, executed, preached against, the epidemic was a time when everyone came together to fight against this latest threat. Queers swapped medications, home remedies, old wives tales, tips on how to keep the strength of affected up, lesbians turned up en masse to care for the gay men who had no one, people who had been shunned by their families found community in the rest of the outcast and the sick. The previous gay generations were decimated by a disease that no government body was particularly invested in stopping, so long as it continued to wipe out the right people. They wanted us gone. But queer people rallied and did what they always do: persist. The one quality all queer people share is persistence. Throughout all of history, through threats both mortal and existential, queers have persisted. I hope all of you be grateful this holiday season for whatever families you have, chosen, blood, and everything in between, but also that you will take a moment to remember all those that have come before us, who persisted long enough to allow us to continue to live our lives as openly as we can, and to keep fighting in their names and ours. We are not truly free until all of us are free.
