by Olivia Laing
Again, you can conjure it from the vaults. He walks with his stiff puppet’s gait up the steps to the stage, dressed in a scarlet doublet and white ruff, his legs very thin in black stockings and black heeled shoes, his face dead white, even the palms of his hands unnaturally pale: an uncanny figure, stepping straight from the court of King James II. He looks around him like a sleepwalker, like someone beholding an apparition, his eyes staring from his head. And then he starts to sing, of all things, the aria of the Cold Genius from Purcell’s King Arthur, the song of a winter spirit summoned unwillingly to life. Hands raised, his voice climbs stutteringly upward to the accompaniment of strings, a weird mixture of dissonance and harmony.
What power art thou, who from below
Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow?
See’st thou not how stiff, how stiff and wondrous old,
Far, far unfit to bear the bitter cold,
I can scarcely move or draw my breath?
Let me, let me freeze again to death.
I am not the first person to observe that there was a prophetic quality to these words, or a depth of feeling to the performance that went far beyond Nomi’s always sophisticated stagecraft. He sings the last line three times, and then, as the orchestra plays the final bars, he descends from the stage, a small, very upright figure, moving almost painfully in his gorgeous, anachronistic clothes.
It was evident that something was very wrong when he returned to New York at the beginning of 1983. In an interview with Attitude magazine Joey Arias describes his appearance. ‘He was always thin. But I remember him walking into a party looking like a skeleton. He was complaining of flu and exhaustion, and the doctors couldn’t diagnose what was wrong with him. Later he had breathing difficulties and collapsed, and he was taken into hospital.’
At the hospital, Nomi’s immune system was found to be practically non-functioning, making him susceptible to a myriad of normally uncommon infections. His skin was covered in sore and unsightly purple lesions – the reason he’d worn the ruff in Munich. It was diagnosed as Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare and usually indolent skin cancer. Rare, that is, until 1981, when doctors in California and New York began seeing virulent cases among young gay men. Like Nomi, these men were suffering from an underlying immune disease so new that it had only been named the previous summer, on 27 July 1982: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, also known at the time as GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.
Gay cancer, most people were calling it, or else gay plague, though it was increasingly being observed in other populations too. There was no treatment, and the cause, the Human-Immunodeficiency Virus, wouldn’t be identified until 1986. AIDS wasn’t fatal in itself, but left the person susceptible to opportunistic infections, many of them previously unusual or mild in humans. Candidiasis, cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex, mycobacterium, pneumocystis, salmonella, toxoplasmosis, cryptococcosis, bringing with them blindness, wasting, pneumonia, sickness.
Nomi was prescribed Interferon for the Kaposi’s sarcoma, but it didn’t help. He went on a macrobiotic diet and spent much of that spring at home in his apartment on St Mark’s Place, watching hisown old videos on repeat. If they sawmy face, he singsin ‘Nomi Song’, would they still know me now– another linethat shifts its meaning. In the summer he went back into Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Arias again:
He began to look like a monster: his eyes were just purple slits, he was covered in spots and his body was totally wasted. I had a dream that he’d recoverhis strength and go back on stage, but that he’d have toveil himself like the Phantom of the Opera. He laughed, he liked that idea, and he actually seemed to be getting better for a while. That was on a Friday night. I was going to go and see him again on the Saturday morning, but they called me and told me that Klaus had passed away in the night.
The story of Nomi’s short life haunted me. To resist loneliness, to make a joyous art of difference, and then to die in such profoundly isolating circumstances seemed brutally unfair, though it would soon be a common experience in the world he had inhabited. What did it mean to have AIDS at that time, when diagnosis was an almost certain death sentence? It meant being perceived as a monster, an object of terror even to medical personnel. It meant being trapped in a body that was regarded as repellent, toxic, unpredictable and dangerous. It meant being shunned by society, subject to pity, disgust and horrified fear.
In The Nomi Song, there is a distressing section in which Klaus’s friends discuss the climate that surrounded his diagnosis. Man Parrish, his long-term collaborator: ‘A lot of people took off. They didn’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t know how to deal with it. Is this something I could catch? Does he have typhoid or the plague? You heard rumours. You heard stuff in the underground. No one knew what was going on.’ Page Wood, the art director of Nomi’s stage shows: ‘I remember seeing him at dinner and usually I’d go over and give Klaus a hug, and give him a European kiss on each cheek. And, I was just afraid to. I didn’t know if this was contagious . . . I sort of went up to him and I hesitated, and he just put his hand on my chest and said “It’s alright, don’t worry about it,” which made me start to tear up and I think that was the last time that I saw him.’
These responses were by no means uncommon. The intense fear generated by AIDS was in part an understandable reaction to a new and rapidly fatal disease. This is especially true of the very early years, in which both cause and mode of transmission were undetermined. Could it be spread by saliva? What about surfaces on the subway? Was it safe to hug a friend? Could you breathe the same air as a sick colleague? These are reasonable questions to ask, but fear of infection rapidly became entangled with more insidious concerns.
Between 1981 and 1996, when combination therapy became available, over 66,000 people died of AIDS in New York City alone, many of them gay men, in conditions of the most horrifying isolation. People were sacked from jobs and rejected by their families. Patients were left to die on gurneys in hospital corridors, assuming they’d managed to get admitted in the first place. Nurses refused to treat them, funeral parlours to bury their bodies, while politicians and religious leaders persistently blocked funding and education.
What was happening was a consequence of stigmatisation, the brutal process by which society works to dehumanise and exclude people who are perceived not to fit, who exhibit unwanted behaviours, attributes and traits. As Erving Goffman explains in his landmark 1963 study, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, the word stigma derives from the Greek and was originally coined to describe a system of ‘bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier’. These marks, which were burnt or cut into the flesh, at once advertised and confirmed the bearer’s status as an outcast, with whom contact must be avoided for fear of infection or pollution.
Over time, usage expanded to refer to any signifier of unwanted difference – unwanted, that is, by society at large. A source of stigma might be visible or invisible, but once identified it acts to discredit and devalue the person in others’ eyes, revealing them not only as different but as actively inferior, ‘reduced . . . from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one’. You can see this process at work in the way that Henry Darger’s eccentric behaviours led to his institutionalisation, or in the treatment received by Valerie Solanas after she was released from prison; even in the way that Warhol was excluded from galleries for seeming too camp, too gay.
AIDS, especially in the early years, primarily affected three groups: gay men, Haitians and intravenous drug users. As such, it served to inflame existing stigma, amplifying already entrenched homophobia, racism and contempt for addicts. As these previously discountable populations became simultaneously hyper-visible, outed by the ravages of AIDS-related infections, and apparently lethal, the carriers of a potentially fatal disease, they were confirmed as people to be protected from, rather than people who required care
and treatment.
Then there was the matter of sickness itself. Stigma frequently attaches to disorders of the physical body, especially if they affect or draw attention to regions that are already considered shameful, or that are required to be in pristine condition. As Susan Sontag observes in her 1989 book AIDS and Its Metaphors, stigma tends to accompany conditions that alter physical appearance, particularly the face, the signifier of identity – one of the reasons that leprosy, though notably hard to transmit, has been regarded almost universally with such unconcealed horror, and that the lesions spreading over Nomi’s face had been so devastating.
Stigma is also at work around sexually transmitted diseases, particularly those that spread via what a society has designated as deviant or shameful sexual practices. In America of the 1980s, this chiefly meant sex between men, especially if it involved promiscuity or anal sex, a practice that Reagan’s Health Secretary throughout the AIDS years, Margaret Heckler, was shocked to discover existed, and which the White House press secretary found hysterically amusing to contemplate whenever a journalist did succeed in raising the subject.
With this dismal material in mind, it’s not hard to see why people with AIDS were the target of so much fear and hatred, such irradiating dislike. Objects of stigma are always understood to be somehow polluting or contaminating, and these fears fuelled AIDS panic, with its fantasies around quarantine and exclusion, its anxieties about contact and spread.
Then there’s the issue of blame. In the grip of this peculiarly malign kind of magical thinking, there is a tendency to believe that the stigmatised condition isn’t random, a matter of chance, but is instead somehow deserved or earned, a consequence of moral failing in the bearer. This is particularly marked when it results from volitional behaviour, from what is construed as individual choice, be it taking drugs, engaging in illicit activities or having non-sanctioned sex.
With AIDS, this manifested as a widespread tendency to see the disease as a moral judgement, a punishment for deviancy (something that is especially visible in the rhetoric around its so-called innocent or blameless victims, the haemophiliacs, and later the babies born of HIV-positive women). ‘There is one, only one, cause of the AIDS crisis,’ Reagan’s former director of communications Pat Buchanan announced in his syndicated column in 1987: ‘the wilful refusal of homosexuals to cease indulging in the immoral, unnatural, unsanitary, unhealthy, and suicidal practice of anal intercourse, which is the primary means by which the AIDS virus is being spread through the “gay” community, and, thence, into the needles of IV drug abusers.’
Considering that stigmatisation is a process designed to deny contact, to separate and shun; considering that it always serves to dehumanise and deindividualise, reducing a person from a human being to the bearer of an unwanted attribute or trait, it is not surprising that one of its main consequences is loneliness, which is further accelerated by shame, the two things amplifying and driving one another. Appalling enough to be critically ill, to be exhausted, in pain and with limited mobility, without also becoming literally untouchable, a monstrous body that should be quarantined, islanded away from what is inevitably designated the normal population.
Added to this is the fact that AIDS stigmatised and made potentially lethal habits of sexual practice that had themselves been the source of intimacy and contact, antidotes to shame and isolation: the world that Wojnarowicz had documented so lovingly in Close to the Knives. Now the piers, which Nomi had also frequented, were increasingly being regarded as a site of danger, a place of contact in the sense not of touch but of infection and transmission. As the critic Bruce Benderson puts it in the essay ‘Towards the New Degeneracy’, in his collection Sex and Isolation:
Then came the sledgehammer. AIDS simultaneously ruined my momentary escape from a decent curtailed identity and smashed the idea I had of promiscuity as an effortless expander of social consciousness. In the early eighties, before it was known exactly how AIDS spread – before safer sex – I was catapulted into a panicked loss of a principal means of self-expression and contact with other humans. Now fucking casually meant more than a flouting of middle-class standards and a mockery of middle class hygiene. It meant illness and death – deterioration . . . Being part of the AIDS risk group made me feel unclean, expendable and marginalized.
Bearing in mind that both loneliness and rejection are stressful experiences, which have ravaging effects on the body, it’s shocking but not exactly surprising to discover that being subject to stigma has a powerful physical effect. In fact, psychologists at UCLA working on the relationship between stigma and AIDS discovered that HIV-positive people who suffer social rejection also experience accelerated HIV progression, both proceeding to full-blown AIDS faster and dying more quickly from AIDS-related infections that those who are not exposed to or who are protected from social rejection.
The mechanism here is broadly the same as in loneliness itself – a decline in immune function due to ongoing exposure to the stress of being isolated or rejected by the group. To make matters worse, the act of being closeted, of needing to conceal a stigmatized identity, is also stressful and isolating, and is likewise associated with a lower T cell count and consequently a greater susceptibility to AIDS-related infections. In short, being stigmatised is not just lonely, or humiliating, or shameful; it also kills.
Klaus Nomi died on 6 August 1983, a few weeks shy of his fortieth birthday. Six weeks earlier, on 20 June, New York Magazine had run its first AIDS cover story, ‘AIDS Anxiety’ by Michael Daly. It described the climate of the time, the kind of reactions occurring across the city. A woman whose husband had been diagnosed, and whose child was being shunned at school. People who were asking if they should wear plastic gloves on the subway, or avoid public swimming pools. Among these anecdotes is a description of a police officer who ‘found herself frightened as she assisted a homosexual who had injured his head in a fall’.
She remembers, ‘At first, you feel itchy. The blood was the same color red, but I thought, “Oh, wow, I wonder if this guy’s got it.” Then I thought, “Oh well, I can’t let this guy bleed to death.” It was like a leper or something. You don’t treat people like that, but the fear is there. I found myself scrubbing with peroxide.’
This was not, to reiterate, a person with AIDS, but rather a person from a population that had become doubly suspect; a member, as Sontag put it, of ‘a community of pariahs’. In the same article another woman described the death of the male model Joe MacDonald: how he’d wasted away, how all the gay men she knew were thinking of going straight, how her model friends planned to avoid contact with brushes belonging to make-up artists they knew to be gay.
Fear is contagious, converting latent prejudice into something more dangerous. That same week, Andy Warhol recorded in his diary that at a photo shoot, ‘I used my own make up after reading the AIDS piece in New York.’ He’d known Joe personally, though their acquaintance hadn’t helped to dispel the gathering frost, the outcast status. Back in February 1982, Andy had avoided Joe at a party, telling the Diary: ‘I didn’t want to be near him and talk to him because he just had gay cancer’ – the past tense a painful reminder of the brief period in which no one even knew that the infection was permanent, the disease incurable.
Warhol’s diaries of the 1980s are full of scenes like this, manifestations of the poisonous currents of paranoia that were circling the city. Always a mirror of society’s concerns, his entries reflect back the ways in which homophobia and hypochondria had begun to intertwine.
11 May, 1982:
The New York Times had a big article about gay cancer, and how they don’t know what to do with it. That it’s epidemic proportions and they say that these kids who have sex all the time have it in their semen and they’ve already had every kind of disease there is – hepatitis one, two, and three, and mononucleosis, and I’m worried that I could get it by drinking out of the same water glass or just being around these kids who go to the Baths.
24 June,
1984:
We went and watched the Gay Day parade . . . And there were guys in wheelchairs being pushed by their lovers. I’m serious! It looked like Halloween but without the costumes.
4 November 1985:
You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if they started putting gays in concentration camps. All the fags will have to get married so they won’t have to go away to camps. It’ll be like for a green card.
2 February, 1987:
Then they picked me up for the black-tie dinner at the Saint . . . And we were all afraid to eat anything because the Saint has the gay taint from when it used to be a gay disco. It was so dark there and they were serving the food on black plates.
Lest it be forgotten, Warhol was himself a gay man, and in addition a major supporter of AIDS charities. But his personal reactions demonstrate the ways in which stigma spreads and gathers momentum, affecting even fellow members of a stigmatised population.
Warhol was particularly susceptible to this process because of his lifelong terror of sickness and disease, his obsession with contaminating bodies and the dangers they present. In the grips of this peculiarly paralysing hypochondria, he acted in ways that seem actively cruel, refusing to see or even contact acquaintances, friends and former lovers who had or might have AIDS. When he was told on the phone about the death of Mario Amaya, the critic who was with him when he was shot and who insisted that the doctors at the hospital restart his heart, he tried to make light of the news. And when his own former boyfriend Jon Gould died of AIDS-related pneumonia in September 1986, he absolutely refused to discuss the subject in the Diary, announcing only that he would not comment on ‘the other news from L.A.’
In some ways his reaction is unique, a product of a fear of death so intense that he didn’t attend his own mother’s funeral or tell even his closest friends that she had died, saying instead whenever he was asked about her that she was shopping in Bloomingdale’s. But it also encapsulates the way that stigma functions to isolate and separate, especially when death comes out of the dark and begins to serve its black plates.