Once upon a time, before Bob Guccione, Jr. got himself wrapped up in a really ugly sexual harassment suit and let Spin magazine be overtaken by the Forces of Corporate Evil, Spin was singular in providing the best AIDS-related journalism America had going for it. From 1989 through about 1997, Spin's monthly "Words from the Front" column featured the writing of (or writing about) people like Michael Callen, Victoria Brownworth, John Lauritsen, Joseph Sonnabend, Drew Hopkins, Nicholas Regush, and, in particular, Celia Farber, who invented "Words from the Front" and whose work proved she was one of the country's most courageous journalists. If you wanted to know what was really going on about AIDS in those years, you had to see what they were writing in "Words from the Front."
That said, Spin employed some of the nastiest, most incompetent line editors I've ever worked with and had one of the worst reputations in the biz for treating writers like shit. The following piece--the only one of the three articles I wrote on commission for Spin that the magazine ever printed (or paid for)--is reproduced here with silly-ass cuts restored and with bad editing repaired.
"AIDS: Words from the Front: The death of Rudolf Nureyev has refocused attention on AIDS in the dance profession. But why are so many industry leaders tap-dancing around the issue?" © Wendell Ricketts, 1993, 2004. All rights reserved. First published in Spin, May 1993, pp. 71-73.
The homophobia that affects America also affects dance. The desire to live down the homosexual stereotype in dance contributes to a baroque and cagey response to AIDS in which the timid desire not to offend is transmuted into a demanding protocol of invisibility.
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Imagine it is a cold, sunny afternoon in a major American city. In the administrative offices of one of the country's largest ballet companies, the phone rings. After a series of transfers, the caller manages to get through to the company's Executive Director.
"I understand that you told reporters recently that you have no people with HIV or AIDS in your company," he begins. "Is that still your position?"
"Yes," says the Director, instantly suspicious.
"Well," the caller continues, "I'm writing an article about AIDS in professional dance. I have first-hand information that there are four dancers in your company who have told you that they have HIV or AIDS. What comment do you have?"
At the other end of the line there is stunned silence. And then the sound of someone choking back fury: "You have no right to be asking that question."
I confess to being the caller. The identity of the Executive Director is not important(not just for reasons of confidentiality, but because, quite literally, it could have been almost anyone at almost any dance company. For economy, let's just say it was Company X.
My call to Company X wasn't motivated solely by kamikaze journalism—although the administrator probably thought so. Instead, I had just finished a conversation with one of Company X's employees—a lead dancer who happens to have HIV. Like me, Company X's dancer wondered why his boss was lying about whether or not the company had been touched by AIDS.
Perhaps part of the answer is that lying about AIDS in professional dance has become something of a tradition by now.
Consider the case of Robert Joffrey, the artistic director of the Joffrey Ballet and a visionary of American dance who was called the "ultimate ballet director of our time." When the announcement came in March 1988 that Joffrey had been forced to "suspend his day-to-day management" of the company, reporters were told that Joffrey was suffering from "asthma and liver complications." Joffrey died one week later—of AIDS.
Or consider Alvin Ailey, a dancer, choreographer, and director who was arguably the most important African-American dance maker in this half of the century. When Ailey died in December 1989, his death was attributed to a "rare blood disease."
In the dance community, AIDS is widely known to have caused both Joffrey's and Ailey's deaths—but that fact has yet to be "officially" acknowledged.
The most widely publicized AIDS loss in the dance world came in January 1993 with the death of Rudolf Nureyev. Fifty-four at his death, Nureyev first made history in 1961 with his dramatic defection at Paris's Le Bourget airport—literally under the noses of KGB agents—and later seemed to make history every time he appeared on stage. During his life, Nureyev was routinely hailed as the greatest danseur of his generation—if not of all time.
Although Nureyev learned he had HIV in 1984, he remained more-or-less healthy through 1990. As AIDS began to take a greater toll on Nureyev's health, however, the tasks both of caring for him and of keeping his diagnosis hidden from the press fell to an inner circle of friends. According to Sasha Anawalt, a Los Angeles Times dance writer who interviewed Nureyev in July 1992, Nureyev was, near the end of his life, "terrified that he would be 'outed' like Arthur Ashe." It wasn't until after Nureyev's death, in fact, that the true nature of his illness was reported for the first time.
Perhaps one of the most elaborate deceptions, however, was carried off by dancer, director, and choreographer Michael Bennett, whose 1976 A Chorus Line still holds the record as the longest-running show in Broadway history. By the time Bennett died of AIDS in 1987, he had won eight Tony awards and had been nominated for every show he touched.
But one thing Bennett did not accomplish in his lifetime was to feel comfortable enough about being gay to let that fact be known openly. Indeed, judging from Bennett's comments in the interviews he gave rather freely throughout his career, he took elaborate pains to ensure that "the public" never suspected he was gay. When he was diagnosed with AIDS in December 1985, Bennett carefully disguised that fact as well. In all of these efforts, Bennett was an agile liar.
In late 1976, as Chorus Line fever swept the country, Bennett married the show's star, dancer Donna McKechnie, in Paris. That theirs was a marriage of convenience is not to say it was a marriage of comfort. Bennett and McKechnie were separated after barely three months. Nonetheless, their courtship and marriage were pure Fairy Tale Romance to the press. Bennett assisted in the pretense by telling interviewers such things as, "When all your dreams come true and you're married to the person you love most in the world—everything becomes overwhelming." The gossip columnists gobbled it up, gleefully reporting each time McKechnie was sighted riding in Bennett's 1965 Rolls Royce.
After their divorce, Bennett rhapsodized in the press about the kind of woman he was attracted to, about the way he "couldn't help" falling in love with his leading ladies. In 1980, New York Daily News gossip columnist Liz Smith reported that Bennett had appeared at a black-tie affair with Sabine Cassell, wife of French actor, Jean-Pierre Cassell, on his arm. "At first," Smith reported, Bennett "introduced the lovely lady as 'my wife.' But pressed further, Bennett said, 'Actually, she'll become my wife after she gets her divorce.'"
In January of 1986, when Bennett withdrew from directing Tim Rice's Chess, he immediately began telling interviewers that he suffered from stress-related angina (a painful condition caused by an insufficient flow of blood to the heart). In March, Liz Smith oozed, "Dined with Michael Bennett at Diêche. He looks fabulous. He's treating himself with TLC and hoping to avoid open-heart surgery."
By November 1986, however, Bennett told the New York Times that open-heart surgery was imminent—possibly to cover the hospitalization he knew would come. Nonetheless, Bennett said, all he needed was six months to recuperate. He added, "I think I'll be able to make my comeback at 44 without a problem." But there wasn't going to be any comeback. On the afternoon of Bennett's death on July 2, 1987, his attorney announced that Bennett had died of AIDS-related lymphoma.
Whether or not one agrees with Bennett's view that public life made his elaborate false front necessary, his motives, at least, are understandable. But what about gossip columnist Liz Smith? Why had she assisted Bennett in hiding both his homosexuality and the fact that he had AIDS? Smith deserved a chance to answer that question. Reached at her New York Newsday office, however, she was not, to put it mildly, warm. In fact, a friend later suggested that I commemorate our brief interaction with one of those ubiquitous tourist souvenirs: "Liz Smith Hung Up On Me ... And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt." Like Company X's Executive Director, apparently, Smith felt that some questions had no business being asked.
Rudolf Nureyev's death last January made it obvious that deceptions like Bennett's are as common in the dance world today as they were six years ago. Like Bennett, Nureyev constantly encouraged the public and the press to imagine his romantic involvements with various glamorous women, notably the late Margot Fonteyn, the celebrated ballerina who was Nureyev's counterpart on stage for two decades. But significantly absent from Nureyev's obituaries was any mention of the three men whom he had loved during his life: the late Erik Bruhn, star of Copenhagen's Royal Danish Ballet and Nureyev's lover for nine years; Wallace Potts, a Georgia Tech student who lived with Nureyev for seven years; and Robert Tracy, a young dancer who met Nureyev during a project at New York City Ballet, moved into Nureyev's apartment in the Dakota in 1979, and never left.
During his career, Nureyev was hailed for "making ballet male" again. He was passionate, magnetic, and virile, even "smoldering," according to critics. Nureyev was the antidote to the popular impression that men in ballet were fey, effeminate, somehow neutered. Ironically, given the stereotypes Nureyev was supposed to be countering, he was also a gay man. Nureyev's death has refocused attention on AIDS in the dance world, and on the conditions of the profession that help make secrets so common.
But the renewed interest has made some leaders in the field more than a little testy. Les Schoof, Executive Director of American Ballet Theatre, says, "This is all because Rudolf died. That's why suddenly everybody's looking at it again. I haven't been contacted about this issue (for over a year). All of a sudden, another great name passes from the scene, another time you don't see that four-letter word attached to the death, and I get a call. I think people are writing about AIDS in the arts because it's a hell of a lot more attractive to write about that than about how AIDS is devastating lawyers or accountants down at E. F. Hutton or wherever. Nobody wants to hear about that."
Robert Yesselman, Executive Director of the Joffrey Ballet, agrees. "One of the things that disturbs me (about) all of the interest in AIDS and its effect specifically on the dance world," he says, "(is) the implication that because dancers have always had the reputation for being gay, then it follows that AIDS is particularly going to decimate the dance world.
"I would be interested in seeing figures on AIDS in banking and in real estate and in other endeavors as well. In my experience (AIDS) hits the dance world hard because I've been involved in dance for 20 years. But he first three friends I had die of AIDS were schoolteachers. The more we draw attention to AIDS as a dance-specific problem, I don't think does any of us any good."
Schoof and Yesselman are right about one thing, of course: There's not much hard information available about the impact of AIDS on other professions. But their comments reflect one of the biggest obstacles facing the entertainment industry—and, by extension, the rest of America—as it tries to grapple with the realities of AIDS.
As Yesselman notes, the arts generally—and dance in particular—have a reputation for attracting gay men. Other than perhaps in professional sports, paradoxically, the arts are also the field in which the invisibility of gay men and lesbians has been raised to the highest level of institutionalization. We don't know if there are proportionately more gay entertainers and artists than there are gay bankers, lawyers, realtors, and accountants, but we do know one thing: Bankers and lawyers come out. Hollywood celebrities, famous dancers, and rock stars don't. Separating secrecy about homosexuality from secrecy about AIDS, then, is nearly impossible.
But if it has become popular in some quarters of the entertainment industry to insist that the impact of AIDS has been exaggerated, an even more common tactic is to diffuse the specific demographic realities of AIDS by arguing that "AIDS affects everyone."
In the broadest sense of the word "affects," of course, this is undeniably true: Anyone who appreciates art, design, music, dance, and sports in America is diminished by the deaths of Keith Haring, Willi Smith, Freddie Mercury, Rudolf Nureyev, and Shaun McGill. But there's a coded message here, too: "We're all the same." Unfortunately, we're all not. Even if everyone is "affected," it doesn't necessarily follow that everyone is equally like to become infected, and therein lies the rub.
In the entertainment industry in particular, "AIDS affects everybody" has become a way for celebrities to show concern about AIDS without having to talk about the gay people in their midst—or, at least, about the men who are having sex with men. Use that convenient catch-phrase, and there's no need to acknowledge that AIDS still touches gay and bisexual men more than anyone else. No need to confront the messy reality that, among such men, AIDS is almost exclusively a sexually transmitted disease.
To the extent that AIDS is "spreading" among heterosexuals, in fact, their sexual preference is nearly irrelevant to the discussion: Most "heterosexuals" still get AIDS through drug use, not through sexual contact with someone of the opposite gender. (According to the Centers for Disease Control, just under 64 percent of current AIDS cases are among men who have sex with men; 6.5% of AIDS cases, on the other hands, are attributed to heterosexual contact. Among people identified as heterosexual—as distinct from how they got the disease—IV drug use accounts for 78 percent of AIDS cases.)
"AIDS affects everyone" provides a way to talk about celebrities and other public figures without acknowledging the sexual component of their illness—and of their lives—and Rudolf Nureyev is a case in point. Because, although it may be true as Les Schoof says, that "no one is pretending that Nureyev wasn't gay," Nureyev wasn't just gay. He was flamboyantly, deliciously, promiscuously gay. Even Bob Colacello's rather restrained Vanity Fair profile last March mentioned Nureyev's "thousands of boys" and the evenings he spent "cruising Central Park." As Sasha Anawalt put it, "Nureyev loved his sexuality. In that sense, he was as out as you can be."
What, then, of how Nureyev contracted AIDS? It's not unreasonable to conclude that he got it from having sex with men. Consider, however, recent AIDS "celebrities" Arthur Ashe and Magic Johnson. Both of them made it very clear, when annoucning that they had HIV, that being gay wasn't part of the equation. The fact that Arthur Ashe contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion during heart surgery in 1983, for example, was dutifully reported in virtually every article that mentioned Ashe's AIDS diagnosis. And although Ashe was initially bitter and angry about the exposure of his health status in the press, he rose to the occasion with typical grace. Moreover, he found that the public continued to love and respect him without reservation.
Magic Johnson, meanwhile, went to great lengths to point out that, in the time-honored jock tradition, he got AIDS from having sex with large numbers of the women who flocked around the locker room after his games.
Appearing on the Arsenio Hall Show a few days after the press conference in which he revealed he had tested positive for HIV, in fact, Johnson announced that there was "no way" he was any kind of homosexual. The audience stood up and applauded, but it wasn't clear whether they were cheering for heterosexual male promiscuity or against homosexuality. What was clear was that in the hierarchy of "innocent victimhood," Johnson was laying claim (no pun intended) to a high position. He was just a regular horny guy—yes, it was unfortunately true, he had let the little head think for the big head—but at least he was a horny straight guy.
What's the difference between Nureyev and Johnson? What made one hide—not just his appetite for sexual recreation, but also his AIDS diagnosis and his significant long-term relationships with men—while the other announces publicly that he has HIV, receives an invitation to serve on the President's AIDS Commission, and is cheered on national television when he talks about all the women he's screwed. (And why is no one concerned that Johnson might have given some of those women AIDS—only that one of them must have given it to him?)
If, as Anawalt says,"Nureyev loved his sexuality," one suspects that Magic Johnson did as well. So all we're talking about here is good old-fashioned homophobia.
After actor Brad Davis (Midnight Express) died of AIDS in
1991,
his wife released a letter that
Davis had written before his death. In it, Davis excoriated Hollywood for its
hypocrisy regarding people with AIDS. If his HIV status had been known, Davis
said, he could not have worked—despite all the star-studded AIDS fundraisers,
the Friends of Oscar, and enough red ribbons to sink a battleship.
Micheal Milligan, a modern dancer and choreographer based in Columbus, Ohio, doesn't find Davis's experience unusual. "People in the arts and humanities generally consider themselves informed, and consider themselves enlightened, and consider themselves sensitive, caring, and compassionate," says Milligan. "When it comes to dealing with AIDS in the abstract, or as a political issue, that may be true. But when it comes to actually working and interacting with someone who has HIV, ARC, or AIDS, it just doesn't translate."
Still, if the situation in dance is no worse than it is in the rest of the entertainment field, it's certainly not any better. The homophobia that affects America also affects dance. The desire to live down the homosexual stereotype in dance contributes to a baroque and cagey response to AIDS in which the timid desire not to offend is transmuted into a demanding protocol of invisibility.
According to John Munger, who is currently undertaking a census of American dance companies for Dance/USA, a national trade group of dance administrators, managers, and funders, there are less than 5,000 professional ballet dancers in the country; professional modern dancers make up a group of about another 3,500. Even if Munger is wrong by half, his figures suggest that dance is a tiny field. How many AIDS deaths, then, will be "enough" for industry leaders to acknowledge that AIDS is, in fact, hitting them harder than "bankers, lawyers, accountants, and realtors"—if not necessarily harder than the rest of the arts?
The point isn't just "doing the right thing" for the cause, either. Dance companies across the country have regularly participated in major AIDS-fundraising efforts in their communities. But they have rarely turned an eye inward. Only a handful of dance companies in America, for example, have adopted any sort of HIV/AIDS policy, let alone any provisions for dealing with chronic illnesses, disability leave, or flexible rehearsal and performance schedules for dancers who have HIV (or other illnesses or injuries) but who can still perform more or less as they did before diagnosis. Dancers in general have very little job security, and only a tiny minority have health insurance.
Company X's dancer was one of three talented young ballet dancers from three different companies who would only agree to talk about having HIV if they could remain anonymous. As far as they were concerned, their careers depended on secrecy. Rightly or wrongly, in fact, many dancers feel they cannot tell their employers that they have HIV—not because they fear blatant discrimination (dance companies must comply with state and federal anti-discrimination laws), but because they fear that other dancers will be afraid to work with them or that they will be unofficially relegated to warming the bench.
For these reasons, if for no others, the tendency toward secrecy and self-protection in dance is hurting the profession. But what of the "hard numbers" that administrators like Yesselman hope will clear up the question of whether dance is disproportionately affected by AIDS? Well, for what it's worth, here's at least one "hard number": Between 1985 and the present, slightly more than 25 percent of the deaths of male dance professionals reported in Dance Magazine, one of the industry's leading publications, were attributed to AIDS. One additional irony: Although Dance Magazine printed a "coming out with AIDS" story by recently retired Pittsburgh Ballet dancer Ray Ricketts (no relation) in December 1992, the magazine has yet to commission a single article on the phenomenon of AIDS among dancers as a whole or that surveys AIDS' impact on the profession. When Ricketts wrote his story for Dance Magazine, his editors admonished him to "keep it upbeat."
Even ABT's Les Schoof, who would still argue that dance is not disproportionately affected by AIDS, has no qualms with the assessment that AIDS has devastated the field and the art form. "We don't even know how bad it is yet," Schoof says. "What if we've lost the next Balanchine? Or the next genius designer, dancer, administrator? And if real genius comes along only every 50 years, does that mean we have to wait another 50 years?"
And what about the openness of dancers and others with AIDS within the profession? In a March 1992 interview for the Dance/USA Journal's special issue, "Dance and AIDS." Schoof put it this way: "There were and are names in this business who could have had a (positive) effect on their constituencies and chose not to. And it was a final, very large disservice to the business—and, unfortunately, to the larger AIDS community."
"Pardon my grammar," Schoof concluded, "but there ain't no Magic Johnsons in ballet."