In her book Deuils cannibales et melancholiques, Catherine Mavrikakis gives each of her characters victims of AIDS the first name of Hervé, which refers to Hervé Guibert. In the 1980s, with his biographical texts and his cult book To the Friend Who Didn’t Save My Life, Guibert immortalized the ravages of AIDS among the homosexual community in France.
Shortly before the publication of Mavrikakis’s work, in 2000, AIDS was still seen around the world as a shameful disease; and its victims, perceived as “bad deaths.” And Deuils cannibales… is surrounded by a “sulphurous perfume”, says its publisher on the back cover.
It must be said that at the time, many parents and families of AIDS patients refused to pronounce the cursed word. At the hospital, at funerals, in obituaries, this awful word is obliterated. We thus find a way to deprive the disappeared of their history, of the end of the story of their lives. The mourning is even heavier for loved ones excluded simply because they are not part of the legal family…
During his two terms in the White House, President Ronald Reagan led the country most affected by the epidemic in the West… without ever uttering the four-letter word! AIDS was the disease of others, of deviants, of drug addicts, of the marginalized. It took the arrival of the activist group ACT UP to break this wall of silence and shake the indifference of public authorities in America and Europe.
At the height of the crisis, I remember a colleague who criticized the AIDS recovery of Hollywood artists and famous designers. In his eyes, AIDS was a fashionable disease, a cause for Elton John or Elizabeth Taylor to be photographed with a red ribbon pinned to their gala outfit. Hello, compassion!
I also remember sharp judgments: “The people with AIDS ran after them. They just had to put on a condom before making love! These healthy people believed that AIDS caused less harm than cancer, for example. As if there were some pathologies more noble than others…
I am the same age as Catherine Mavrikakis.
My friends left at an age when their lives should flourish. At the start of promising careers, burying couple or family projects with them. The virus was devastating. It contaminates the entire body within a few months or even weeks. The patients aged prematurely. To the point where a person suffering from HIV, before triple therapy, looked like a corpse, long before their death.
With each death, I felt like “the cemetery of my dead friends,” as Mavrikakis writes. I could also have given them an identical first name. I would have chosen Klaus, in memory of Klaus Nomi, the first personality to be cut down by AIDS in 1983, two years before actor Rock Hudson.
The first time I saw Nomi was during a television appearance alongside my childhood idol, David Bowie, on Saturday Night Live. Then, her career was propelled by the success of her breathtaking rendition of an aria from Purcell’s opera, The Cold Song.
Klaus Nomi is a UFO in the rather eccentric musical landscape of the early 1980s. Both a lyrical singer and a new wave performer, the young artist exiled himself from Germany and the classical world to evolve in the New York underground . And, unlike the androgynous singers and ambiguous sexuality of the 1970s, he is openly gay. And without compromise. Dyed, slicked back hair, painted face, bulging eyes: his killer look will inspire many new wave artists.
Klaus Nomi influenced the life of the young outsider that I was at 18 years old. Not without some collateral damage… I remember physical and verbal attacks. In the metro or downtown, near the gay bars on Stanley Street. In the early 1980s, the price of being openly gay was quite high.
Then, on August 6, 1983, the news of the death of Klaus Nomi, suffering from “gay cancer”, as they used to say, turned everything upside down… The danger was no longer just in the street, but everywhere. Even in the bedrooms. The following decade will be a battlefield that I crossed, thank you life, thanks to the strength and solidarity of my community.
“The friend who didn’t save anyone’s life was me. And I hope my dead friends love me enough to harbor resentment against me,” Mavrikakis writes. As if to illustrate his guilt at having survived the virus, despite and against his sincere friendships.
Why them, why not me? This guilt, unfortunately, never leaves us.
