Thank you, Elizabeth Taylor

Photo copyright Walter Healy. All rights reserved.

With the passing of Elizabeth Taylor, I have been reflecting back on living through the initial period of the AIDS epidemic in New York as an adolescent, albeit one who was preternaturally professional in the ballet world. I signed a senior principal contract with the English National Ballet when I was fifteen years old, which situated me firmly in an adult professional world. The first one of my close friends died of the disease on my seventeenth birthday. By the time I was about twenty-seven, I had lost twenty-six people to HIV and AIDS. They were people I knew, had worked with or in some cases, was particularly close to. I deliberately stopped counting after that because counting them in trying to remember them hurt my brain. I would rather think of the people I lost by name than by numbers or quantity. There is a theological concept of embracing someone’s essence by “naming” them, so I wrote down their names on a small green sheet of paper and taped it up to my wall. It is almost filled on the second side of the sheet now. It wasn’t when I put it up first. Mercifully, the rate slowed after that. It has transmogrified into people who are living with HIV/AIDS as a condition that can be managed.

At the time, AIDS attached a dark cloud to the rest of us in the business. I experienced, in some measure, the same stigma as a gay man, because such was the ignorance of the disease that when I came up against “civilians,” they assumed anyone in “the business” might have it. I saw and felt firsthand much of the prejudice and fear gay men faced from people outside their community. Everyone was scared in the early eighties in Manhattan when there was so little information about the disease. I was scared, too, for myself, because at that point in the trajectory of the epidemic, no one understood exactly how the disease could be contracted.

But the worst part for me on a personal level came later. I was most terrified at the thought of losing people close to me. I lost several of them. I feared the potential loss of one of them in particular. I prayed every single night for years that he would be okay and I made several bargains with the Lord on that one. He is still living. I don’t think he survived because of my prayers and bargains (although I am grateful that he did), but rather because he was able to hang on long enough to get the stronger drug cocktails they have now that control it. There is some perverse irony and humor in my friend being an ornery personality. I have no doubt whatsoever that if he had suspected I was praying for him and making “survival” bargains on his behalf, he would have gone right ahead and died just to spite me.

Another excruciating aspect was the good-bye conversation. I had several of those, where people I had known for years bade me farewell, making pronouncements that took on apocalyptic tones in retrospect. “You have to try to do everything, Katherine, don’t let the bums get you down,” one of my friends admonished me in one such parting conversation. Another one observed in painful, slowed speech in the hospice where he was spending his final days that what he liked about me best was that “you are always a lady, and always so kind to everyone.” I seemed to lose my ability to verbalize at moments like that when I could have used it the most. And always, always, there were the people who were left behind. There was one practice where the coach who was rehearsing me had valiantly come in to work right after losing his lover. He started to cry during the practice session, and we both just gave up. I sat next to him and held his hand while he cried, and that was the rehearsal. I wished I could have made it better. Maybe I helped a little bit, because where we were (not New York City anymore) was not a place where you could easily bring up the topics of either homosexuality or AIDS, which immeasurably complicated the grieving process.

I remained mute for decades about the whole experience of losing that many people and living through a plague. No one understood if I did talk about it, even after the epidemic had subsided. They would still look at me funny, as though I might have it myself. If someone had a cold during the eighties in my little corner of the world, it was not uncommon to hear that they had died shortly afterwards. I had terrible hypochondria for years because I was traumatized by the suddenness and repetitiveness of those disappearances, which were possessed of the flat finality of granite. I came to forget what had triggered my hypochondria, and when I remembered again one day out of the clear blue, I got a shock.

What is awful now is that young people today have no conception of what it was like or what was lost: the people, the talent and the teachers. They also, perhaps not least, have no idea of how much trauma there remains in those of us who lived through it and didn’t die, those of us who are still walking around and remember all the people who did die. I don’t want anyone else to suffer through that the way we did in the eighties and well into the nineties, but it is important to comprehend what happened to us, too. It is also of paramount importance to understand certain things about this disease, in order to prevent it from happening again. Just because HIV/AIDS is considered a manageable condition now, doesn’t mean it is much fun to have, or that one should be careless about getting it. The light at the end of this sulfurous tunnel was a massive paradigm shift. A shift to a happier place (all relative, of course), where you can have normal everyday disagreements with a friend who has HIV, instead of being horribly aware that they might not be around for long and must therefore be treated with kid gloves, like angels-in-waiting hovering around a hellish airline gate.

Thank goodness for people like Elizabeth Taylor and Princess Diana. In the darkest hours, they made it less frightening. They showed everyone that you could interact with people living with HIV and AIDS, and they brought the disease out into the open so that there could be progress and research.

Some stray feral kittens and cats adopted me eight years ago. There is a theory that sometimes people reincarnate as animals, and I have often wondered if any of my cats are the souls of people I knew who have come back to me. I hope they are. Perhaps it is not quite as glamorous and “happening” as their previous go-round, but they have a loving and quiet life with me and they could have fared a lot worse.

As for myself, I walk around with an army of ghosts. I am like that kid in "The Sixth Sense.” I see dead people.

--Katherine Healy

   April 2, 2011