University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Cause of death: AIDS, obituaries, and The New York Times

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Cause of death: AIDS, obituaries, and The New York Times

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Content Copyright 2018 Leah Rosenzweig

CAUSE OF DEATH:

AIDS, OBITUARIES, AND THE NEW YORK TIMES

by

Leah Rosenzweig

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM: THE ARTS)
August 2018

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 1

I: A blackout, a plague 2

II: The long illness 6

III: “Not a crucial story” 17

IV: The writer and the editor 23

V: A long coming of age 27

Bibliography 32

1

Acknowledgements

To Tim Page, my editor and friend, thank you for trusting in my ability to step into the role of cultural
historian. Thank you for encouraging me to take on a crisis that is far from over, whose decades-old
bruises will never fully heal. Thank you for your words, and for indulging mine. And most of all, thank
you for listening.

To Robert Scheer, David St. John, and Andy Campbell thank you for acknowledging the necessity of this
project and for believing in my storytelling.

Thank you to Alison Arngrim, Luis Carle, J.D. Doyle, Matthew Epstein, Samuel G. Freedman, Jeremy
Gerard, Vanessa Gould, Charlie Hamlen, Tom Kalin, Adam Moss, Kestutis Nakas, Steve Nesselroth, Tim
Page, Sarah Schulman, Chuck Strum and Andrew Yarrow for speaking with me about a topic I know is
not easy. Thank you for sharing stories of friends and family members, of journalistic discoveries and
creative losses.

Thank you to the artists and activists who have inspired me since the very beginning. Thank you, Keith.
Thank you, Mapplethorpe. Thank you, Freddie. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Iris. Thank you to Tim
Miller and Holly Hughes for inspiring my first piece of writing on AIDS. Thank you to the writers, those
who catalogued the crisis. To Larry Kramer, thank you for your anger, for your unrelenting ferocity. To
Marsha P. Johnson, Mathilde Krim, Harvey Milk, and Cleve Jones—the ones who came before, who
paved the way for gay rights—and all those still fighting—the quilt-makers, ACT UP members and
wedding cake baker protestors. Thank you, all.

To New York City, thank you for the lives you’ve kept and protected—in barroom signs, in youth
centers, churches, hospitals, temples and art spaces. Thank you for holding them now, and for holding
them then.

And finally, to my family lost to genocide—Genzels and Rosenzweigs young and old—you are in my
heart forever, you are the reason I write, the reason I say never again.

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I. A blackout, a plague

The first lightening strike hit Westchester County at 8:37 p.m. with the second following just
minutes later. Voltages were lowered in desperate attempts to save power as thousands of
megawatts of electricity circuited in limbo. By 9:27, the largest generator in New York City had
completely shut down, and with it the entire skyline. The air quickly began to smell of smoke
and ash as residents stormed and ransacked Manhattan, coursing like mad through embers of riot
fire—many of them hungry, exhausted, consumed by financial ruin, and ready to take from the
city that had long left them for dead.

It was the second Wednesday of July, 1977, a night which would go down as a critical piece of
New York City lore, representing a time when Manhattan was equally alluring and fearsome.
When Jimmy Carter was the non confrontational president and Abraham Beame was the mayor
who couldn’t fix anything. A time when Anita Bryant—a pageant queen conservative on a
mission to “save our children from homosexual recruitment”—was a bona fide threat to
American progress, to gay progress. But it was also a time of liberation, of free love, cheap-
living and transgressive art with the city functioning just as much like an asylum as it did a
battlefield.

The west village kids conga-lined to Donna Summer; and the east village kids bobbed their
blurry heads along to “Parallel Lines.” Diana Ross inaugurated the ’80s with “I’m Coming Out,”
and soon after, punk rock generated a new cultural and musical movement known as
“Queercore.” Misfitted Midwesterners, Buddha-worshipping born agains, and disco-swaying

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queers all flocked to the graffiti-covered apple. “You could hear Television and Talking Heads
play a double bill at CBGB for $4,” Tim Page, a music critic and former culture writer for The
New York Times, told me. “It was a scary place, but for a lot of us, there was no other place we
wanted to be in the world.”

But for many, like Page, who arrived in New York before the outbreak of AIDS, the city’s
grime-speckled allure would soon become overshadowed by a miasma of death.

“Gay people would come from all over the world because there were so many cute guys,” Luis
Carle, who came to New York from Puerto Rico to pursue a career in photography, told me.
Carle, who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, recalled seeing a fellow artist, one of his first
friends to fall ill, for the first time since his diagnosis. “He was completely covered in black
spots—Kaposi’s Sarcoma everywhere. He had been such a beautiful guy, just a beautiful Puerto
Rican guy. He didn’t last three years.” Until mid-1981, AIDS remained nameless, faceless, and
too elusive to spurn any real concern within the public health community. After months of
denying the disease’s development, the Centers for Disease Control published their first report
on AIDS, then sometimes known as “gay cancer.”

Less than one month later, AIDS—not yet in name, but certainly in essence—made its first
appearance in The New York Times. The article, which ran with the headline “Rare Cancer Seen
in 41 Homosexuals,” sent shockwaves through the gay community. The “rare cancer” had
referred to the most conspicuous symptom of AIDS: Kaposi’s Sarcoma, or KS. In a single 24-
hour news cycle, KS, a cancer causing purplish legions and bruise-like spots to appear on the

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body, went from an obscure blemish to a surefire sign that someone had AIDS, a surefire sign
that someone was going to die.

Lawrence K. Altman, a medical doctor and member of The Times’ science news staff since 1969,
reported the “rare cancer” story, setting the tone of AIDS reporting for years to come. “When
Larry [Altman] started writing about this thing, it became a science story,” Chuck Strum, a
former Associate Managing Editor at The New York Times, told me. “At that time, it was
considered a far better option than a story about sex between gay men.” After Altman’s report
ran in The Times, things became rather cataclysmic—and fast. More people were getting sick
with a disease that they could now, at least somewhat, identify. That splotch or their hand, that
shortness of breath now meant something—something serious, something incurable.

Kestutis Nakas, a playwright and bygone member of the East Village theater community,
recalled the initial wave of victims with unnerving precision. “You know those old movies of the
Warsaw ghetto, where you see men and women trying to conduct their business but there’s just
people dying all around them,” Nakas asked me, his voice churning with dramatic sincerity.
“Maybe it wasn’t as graphic as that, but there was a similar vapor. You’d just see these skeletal
figures around the Village, and you knew they were infected gay men.”

Following Altman’s 1981 report, the paper remained impressively quiet when it came to AIDS,
publishing just two short articles, each respectively by the Associated Press and United Press
International, between the summer of 1981 and 1983. “[The Times was] setting the tone for
noncoverage nationally,” wrote Randy Shilts in his 1987 account of the AIDS epidemic, And the

5

Band Played On. For Shilts, there was one main reason for the lack of media interest in AIDS: its
main victims were homosexuals. The challenge of covering AIDS, then, was two-fold. The
Times would not only have to report on this new perplexing disease, but also on a demographic
they’d historically approached with and air of bewilderment and perhaps even ignorance.

For the better part of the 1960s and ’70s, The New York Times’ coverage of gay people had been
infrequent and erratic. Gay men and women, many of whom had been seriously closeted, were
rarely at the center of a story, and when they were, they were portrayed with distance. In 1963,
A.M. Rosenthal, then a newly-appointed metropolitan editor at The Times, assigned one of his
reporters a story on the spread of homosexuality in New York City. The story, titled “Growth of
Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern,” resulted in a rupture between a
burgeoning gay community on the brink of liberation and America’s paper of record. Under the
direction of Rosenthal, The Times reported that the predatory and potentially dangerous
homosexual, now an undeniable presence in New York, should be cause for public unease. The
claims made against the gay men were numerous and uninformed, perhaps even to the point of
nudging some further into the closet in fear of their jobs, their livelihoods, their reputations.

By 1983—a full two years after The Times story and 558 AIDS-related deaths later, with
Rosenthal in his sixth year as Executive Editor, AIDS finally made it to the front page. But all
the while, it had been making its way into the very back pages, beyond the science section and
Altman’s increasingly AIDS-related column, with an unknown portion of the 558 sandwiched
right between the Arts and Sports sections, their names inserted into unbylined obituaries,
stitched between evasive phrases, obscurities, and jargon-filled causes of death. Like most

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obituaries, these carried the weight of individual lives, many taken too soon. But unlike other
obits, they were laced with evasions—omissions effectively erasing a person’s life, effectively
erasing AIDS.

II. The long illness

The opprobrium of AIDS was undeniable and spreading quickly. Already coping with a paper
whose coverage of the disease had been slim to abysmal, journalists now found themselves
facing subjects who refused to talk about AIDS—families and sick people who felt disgraced,
who declined to out themselves or those with whom they had close relationships. Rather than
citing AIDS as a cause of death, The Times, by virtue of its own trepidation and that of their
sources—resorted to abstruse and labored terminology. The unstated rule for concealing an
AIDS killer essentially became the more iatric-sounding, the more itis-packed—the better.

Makeup artist and wig designer for both opera and television productions, Charles Elsen (d.
1985), was said to have died of spinal meningitis. Kenn Duncan (d. 1986), a prominent dance
photographer, who went on to capture portraits of huge stars like Lily Tomlin, Ian McKellen and
Eartha Kitt, died of toxoplasmosis. Howard Greenfield (d. 1986), who wrote the lyrics to “Love
Will Keep Us Together,” which won the 1975 Grammy award for best record, as well as the
lyrics for more than 450 other songs, died of heart failure. And sacred music composer and
organist Calvin Hampton (d. 1984) had simply been ill for some time. “It ran with my byline, as
most of my obits did not in those days,” Tim Page, who wrote Hampton’s obituary for The
Times, told me. For Page, who had been hired to cover classical music but quickly became

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steeped in the mire of obituary writing, there seemed to be another factor at play. AIDS, as a
disease, wasn’t necessarily cause for whitewashing. It was more so the connotation of AIDS—
that it was a “gay disease”—which deemed it unmentionable. “I got a very smart but very fierce
letter, which had been copied to my editor, saying: ‘Tim Page’s obituary for Calvin Hampton
was appreciative and intelligent, but incomplete. Calvin made no secret of the fact that he was
fighting AIDS.’”

Page was not alone. As the death toll continued to multiply, virtually every critic and culture
reporter was made a quasi-obituary writer. It was a necessary move for The Times obituaries
desk, as it faced an unprecedented number of deaths among people living with AIDS, most of
whom were not individuals with decades-long careers, but were instead emerging figures,
practicing painting, acting, or composing behind the black boxed walls of any number of
Manhattan cultural spheres. They were rarely the sort to be exhibited among the pages of
Broadway playbills, nor to be shown in upscale galleries or museums. Their names were not yet
public knowledge, and the details of their lives certainly did not yet exist in the trench-like
recesses of The New York Times’ filing cabinets. And so, AIDS obituaries were assigned to the
critics—those whose very job it was to follow the careers of artists from inception.

One of those critics was Jeremy Gerard, who during his tenure as a theater reporter at The New
York Times, wrote two page-one obituaries for individuals who died of AIDS, both of which
stated AIDS as a cause of death. The first was for Charles Ludlam, a lesser known figure of the
theater avant-garde—and a playwright, parody actor and significant player in East Village
underground arts scene. And the second was for acclaimed choreographer, director and creator of

8

A Chorus Line, Michael Bennett. Despite a deep admiration for Bennett and his body of work,
Gerard has long felt a greater sense of accomplishment for Ludlam’s obit. “He [Ludlam] had
long been a favorite of The Times’ culture writers. . . .our sort of theater intelligentsia,” Gerard
told me in a phone interview. “He was just becoming a larger figure in the cultural world and had
been a superstar in the world of avant-garde theater. When it was announced that he was
withdrawing from Titus Andronicus, I, like many people, assumed he had AIDS.”

Having indeed just withdrawn from a Central Park production of Titus Andronicus, Ludlam, in
the Spring of 1987, went silent. On sheer instinct alone, Gerard called St. Vincent’s hospital, the
first and largest AIDS ward in New York City and virtually the only hospital treating people
living with AIDS at that time. “I asked for Charles—and to my astonishment, they patched me
right through to him.” By Gerard’s account, Ludlam was optimistic that he would get better. But
Gerard thought differently. “It was pretty clear to me—he sounded terrible.”

Later that May, Gerard received a call from Ludlam’s publicist announcing that he had died of
pneumonia. It was true—to an extent. HIV/AIDS diagnoses often resulted in a defenseless
immune system, and the principle target, more often than not, was the lungs. Ailments such as
pneumonia and lung cancer, along with the more indiscernible, meningitis, toxoplasmosis, and
the ever-evasive long illness, then, became cryptographs for the unspeakable, the contemptible.
Ludlam had died of pneumonia—pneumonia resulting from AIDS.

9

Well aware of the cover up taking place, Gerard demanded the truth. “I said to the publicist,
‘Please don’t do that, don’t lie about this. It’s too important.’ And he told me, ‘This is what the
parents want, so it’s the way it’s going to be.’”

Determined to publish an accurate cause of death, Gerard contacted Ludlam’s parents himself.
For what seemed like a matter of hours, he went back and forth with the Ludlams and their
lawyer, desperately attempting persuasion, hopelessly coming up against the same, ostensibly
impenetrable wall. “They were working class Catholics from Long Island, as far as they were
concerned, their son had died a shameful death.” But Gerard wanted to tell the truth. Charles
Ludlam was a massive figure in the realm of avant-garde theater, and rising ever higher in more
mainstream scenes. He had only just begun to reach his creative peak—just that summer, he was
supposed to begin filming for his first starring role in a feature film. Already an inimitable artist,
Ludlam was on the verge of something even greater. For Gerard, hiding the cause of death,
would not only be false reporting, but would further enable the stigma of AIDS.

“Charles didn’t deserve that,” Gerard paused, then delivered an impassioned, yet sober plea, the
same I imagine, he’d issued to Mr. and Mrs. Ludlam 40 years earlier: “Charles deserved nothing
but acclaim for what he had accomplished in the theater. His loss was a tragedy.” Both parties
hung up the phone. By Gerard’s account, he had failed.

“And then,” Gerard’s voice beamed with the memory of surprise, “about 15 minutes before my
deadline, I got a call back from the lawyer.” The Ludlams had changed their minds.

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On Friday, May 29, 1987, Jeremy Gerard’s obituary for Charles Ludlam ran on the front page of
The New York Times. The first obituary which named AIDS as a cause of death to run on page
one, Ludlam’s was an unprecedented intervention, intimating the pervasiveness of AIDS in the
arts community, untangling the artist’s shifting battle with the notoriously erratic illness,
expatiating the indiscriminate quickness of a disease still largely a mystery—and doing so all
before the jump line. It was a clear journalistic victory, and yet, an astatine-like rarity.

For years, significant and even secondary players in New York’s many underground arts scenes
had been dropping like flies with little to no media recognition. Klaus Nomi, a German-born
opera singer and self-identifying “alien” who first came to the attention of New York’s creative
in 1978, was one of the earliest known victims of AIDS in the arts community. With his
eyebrows painted like a Japanese Kabuki robot, face powdered alabaster white, and voice
soaring at a boys’ choir range, Nomi broke all the rules. In 1979, he performed “The Man Who
Sold the World” alongside David Bowie on Saturday Night Live. In 1981, he released his first
self-titled album. Later that year, he began donning baroque-style, sky-high collars—supposedly
to cover the black and blue legions which were creeping their way up his neck. And on August 6,
1983, he died of AIDS. “Klaus Nomi was really the first,” Kestutis Nakas, who had been a friend
of Nomi’s, told me with quivering pause, “he was the first that we all knew who had publicly
died of this new thing, this new disease…”

When Klaus Nomi died, the now bygone East Village Eye, a monthly culture publication which
ran from 1979 to 1987, published a short and whimsical tribute. It read: “Klaus Nomi appeared
on the NYC scene suddenly, leaping from his spectacular debut at the “New Wave Vaudeville”

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show (where the astounded audience had to be told repeatedly that the voice was truly live) to
spearhead a futurist movement of militantly fashionable avant-misfits. . . .He was tortured by a
disease whose myth exploded through thoughtless babble and media saturation.” It was one of
the first of many tributes to be published in queer and alternative publications like The Eye or the
New York Native, printed during a time when mainstream media outlets, particularly The New
York Times, were beginning to face criticism for their lack of reporting on AIDS

Despite a lack of reporting on the epidemic, The Times still ran obituaries for people who had
died of AIDS, one of the first being that of Paul Jacobs, an admired pianist and harpsichordist of
the New York Philharmonic. Jacobs and his many concertos and performances had been
covered extensively by The New York Times since 1951 when, as a recent graduate of the Julliard
School, he made his official New York debut. For the past three decades, nearly every music
critic at The Times had written, in some capacity, about Jacobs. But it was Harold C. Schonberg,
the first music critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, who was tasked with writing Jacobs’
final review.

“Paul Jacobs, the pianist and harpsichordist of the New York Philharmonic and
an internationally respected authority on contemporary music, died in his New
York home yesterday morning after a long illness. . . .Surviving is a brother, John
Jacobs, a market researcher of Bedford Hills, N.Y.”

Although the cryptic, “a long illness” would eventually become a detectable cipher for AIDS, in
the case of Jacobs, the crafty vernacular was still so new. For many, there could be no telling

12

how this man died. A few days after Jacobs’ passing, the New York Native, at the time, a popular
gay newspaper, published a very different obituary:

“Paul Jacobs, pianist and harpsichordist for the New York Philharmonic and
renowned authority on 20
th
-century music, died on Sunday, September 25, after a
long bout with AIDS. He was 53 years old. Although the New York Times obituary
made no mention of his sexual orientation and attributed his death to “a long
illness,” Mr. Jacobs was an openly gay man who wanted the nature of his illness
to be a matter of public record. . .he is survived by his brother, John, and by Paul
Levenglick, his lover of 22 years.”

The Native’s obituary, itself a quasi-analysis of the obituary in The Times, had not only named
AIDS as Jacobs’ cause of death, but also identified Paul Levenglick as his partner. “It was really
clear back then that there were two things at work in The New York Times obituaries,” Vanessa
Gould, filmmaker and director of the documentary Obit, which chronicles the daily lives and
responsibilities of New York Times obituary writers, told me in a phone interview. “Not only was
the cause of death not stated, but the fact that somebody was gay wasn’t even written about, so
there was a lie about the way they lived and a lie about the way they died.” The preclusion of a
person’s sexuality wasn’t always a cardinal offense. For many people living with AIDS,
particularly those of an older generation, their love lives were private information, something
they preferred to keep to themselves. But there were others living with AIDS, like Jacobs, who
made no mystery of their sexuality, nor of their relationships.

13

In many ways, Jacobs’ obituary in The Times portended a pattern of secrecy. But it also
prophesied a decade filled with obituaries, a decade of death—death from sex, from needles,
from exchange of fluid and transfer of blood, death by stranger, by lover, by friend. “It was like
cancer all over again,” Charles Hamlen, the founding director of the AIDS nonprofit Classical,
told me. Hamlen, who is now 70, lost his own partner to AIDS in 1988. He established Classical
Action in 1992 in response to the massive impact of AIDS on the classical, jazz and opera
communities. “I remember when I was 13 or 14, a close family friend had died of breast cancer
and it was very hush-hush. You couldn’t mention that word—cancer. That’s how it was with
AIDS.”

In many ways, AIDS assumed all the impure and unspeakable associations which had once been
ascribed to cancer. In her 1989 critical work, AIDS and Its Metaphors, the follow up and
companion book to 1978’s Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag deconstructs the transfer of
stigmatization from cancer patients onto AIDS patients. “For a long time cancer was the illness
that best fitted this secular culture’s need to blame and punish and censor through the imagery of
disease. Cancer was a disease of an individual, and understood as the result not of an action but
rather of a failure to act,” wrote Sontag.

“Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in
which everyone now lives. Cancerphobia taught us the fear of a polluting
environment; now we have the fear of polluting people that AIDS anxiety
inevitably communicates. . . .Attitudes about cancer have evolved. Getting cancer
is not quite as much of a stigma, a creator of “spoiled identity.” The word cancer

14

is uttered more freely, and people are not often described anymore in obituaries as
dying of a ‘very long illness.’”

In turn, cancer, with its propensity to strike at embarrassing parts of the body often associated
with sex or excretion, became a desirable alternative to AIDS. As, for that matter, did ailments
like heart disease or even fungal infections.

When Choo San Goh, a choreographer and associate artistic director of the Washington
Ballet, died in 1987 at age 39, his obituary, citing his executor, stated: “Mr. Goh died of
complications arising from viral colitis.” It seemed that even an inflammation of the colon’s
inner lining, a characteristically unsavory condition and surely not a cause of death one would
typically find in The New York Times, had become more socially permissible than AIDS. When
Times’ dance critic Jennifer Dunning wrote the obituary of Robert Joffrey (d. 1988), a prolific
dancer, choreographer and co-founder of the Joffrey Ballet, she cited the director of media
relations for the hospital where Joffrey received treatment as stating: “We are simply saying that
he died of liver, renal and respiratory failure.”

And then there was Liberace, whose staff had vehemently denied rumors of his AIDS diagnosis
up until the day the showman died, claiming that he’d been hospitalized due to anemia resulting
from a diet of watermelon. Although his obituary did not mention watermelon, it certainly did
not mention AIDS. The nearly five-column piece ran on page B6 of the February 6, 1987 issue
of The Times with two large images of Liberace, a disclosure of his managers’ repeated denials
that he had had AIDS and an impossibly puzzling, seven-line-long cause of death:

15

“Liberace, whose glitzy costumes, giant candelabra and extravagant
showmanship made him almost as famous as his piano playing, died yesterday at
his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 67 years old. His spokesman in New
York, Denise Collier, said the cause of death was cardiac arrest due to congestive
heart failure brought on by subacute encephalopathy. Encephalopathy is a
degenerative disease of the brain.”

For someone like Liberace, who spent the last twenty years of his life suing just about any
publication which so much as insinuated he was gay—later issuing consecutive renouncements
against rumors that he’d been diagnosed with AIDS—a convoluted cause of death should have
come as no surprise. Still, his death and subsequent obituary proved that one’s status played an
undeniable role in concealing AIDS diagnoses. The more power and money these individuals
possessed, the more likely they were to have retinues of spokespeople cooking up lies on their
behalf.

Perhaps the earliest to be recognized among famous people living with AIDS was Rock
Hudson, who, in part, also benefitted from the presence of spokespeople made possible through
money and power. Although Hudson did eventually disclose his diagnosis, after keeping it under
wraps from June 1984 to July 1985—just three months before his death.

A red-blooded, six-foot-five adventure film star with an impenetrable jaw-line and Elvis-like
coiffe, Rock Hudson seemed an unlikely candidate to become the face of AIDS. He had been the

16

wealthy Texas rancher to Elizabeth Taylor’s wit savvy damsel in Giant and a romantic super
sleuth to Doris Day’s Jan Morrow in Pillow Talk. He was traditionally masculine and considered
far more palatable than most people living with AIDS. His homosexuality, only truly revealed
post-mortem, had been speculated, nearly exposed by Confidential magazine in 1955, and made
a mockery by MAD magazine in 1972.

But in the hands of Times’ reporter and obituary writer, John Berger, Hudson’s life became
complex and layered, and far from a mockery. It became a life taken by AIDS.

“Rock Hudson, the actor whose handsome looks and flair for comedy made him a
romantic idol of the 1950’s and ’60’s, died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles.
He was 59 years old and had been suffering for more than a year from AIDS. . .
.The actor was the first major public figure to acknowledge openly that he was
suffering from acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a mysterious and usually
fatal illness that primarily afflicts male homosexuals, intravenous drug users, and
recipients of contaminated blood transfusions.”

In closing Hudson’s obituary, Berger lingered on a telegram which the actor, too sick to appear
in person, had written to be read aloud at a celebrity AIDS fundraiser less than a month before
his death: “I am not happy that I am sick. I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if that is helping
others, I can at least know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth.”

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Even at 59, Hudson still maintained his reputation as a “romantic idol.” He was a king—a king
who had been wronged—refused help by his friends, the Reagans, after asking to be transferred
to a French military hospital to be seen by an army doctor who had previously treated him in
secret. For many—particularly those of powerful or celebrity status—his death brought to light
the social implications of AIDS and how those implications stymied any potential path to a cure.
He was lauded by Hollywood, made an example by The New York Times, and a catalyst for
President Reagan, who had long remained silent on the deadly epidemic, to finally utter the word
“AIDS” on camera.

III. “Not a crucial story”

Well into the late 1980s, the disease which had by then killed tens of thousands, was still not
given much attention in either medical or political communities. In April 1987, President Regan
delivered his first major speech on AIDS, touting increases in federal spending for AIDS
research and education which had been amended by Congress, after he and his administration
had requested just half the congressionally altered amount. In The New York Times, obituaries
continued to run with obscure and elusive causes of death.

Wayland Flowers (d. 1988), one of the first openly gay mainstream entertainers and a
ventriloquist who, along with his puppet, Madame, became a famed comic duo of the 1970s, was
said to have been “suffering from cancer for some time;” Amanda Blake (d. 1986), the fiery
actress who portrayed Miss Kitty Russell on Gunsmoke, was originally said to have died of
throat cancer. Three months after her death, The Times printed a statement from her doctor,

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saying that although she did have throat cancer, she had actually died of AIDS-related
complications; Alvin Ailey (d. 1989), an African-American choreographer and establishing
figure in the world of modern dance whose page one obituary attributed his death to “a long
illness,” had, according to his doctor, died of “terminal blood dycrasia, a rare disorder that
affects the bone marrow and red blood cells.” AIDS, although more widely discussed and
recognized, was still very much viewed as an implacable and stigmatizing death sentence,
something to hide from one’s mother, something to erase from one’s legacy.

The Times had begun to institute a new obituary policy whereby the cause of death had to be
formally attributed to a family member, spokesperson or overseeing medical professional. “The
way it finally started to change was that we would have somebody who was not at The Times
state the cause of death,” said Page, “In other words, we would say ‘According to so and so’s
cousin, lawyer, mother, etc., so and so died from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.’”
Though an earnest approach, the new protocol did not put a stop to the problem of circumventing
AIDS, particularly when it came to getting accurate information from close relatives and loved
ones.

“Oftentimes family or friends can be your least good source. “Perhaps they have reasons to
withhold or shade certain bits of information, so they might not tell you the cause of death
because it’s embarrassing,” Chuck Strum, who oversaw the obituaries desk at The Times from
2000-2006, told me. “Even now, things like ‘AIDS’ or ‘Cancer’ are considered to be dirty words
in many obituaries.”

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Still, the face of AIDS was beginning to change. The observable quotient of dying people no
longer appeared to be exclusively gay—nor male, nor white, for that matter. Pornographic actors,
sex workers, heterosexual men, women—both gay and straight—transgender people, and
intravenous drug users were dying, maybe not as readily nor as noticeably, but dying just the sae.

In March 1987, former playwright and novelist Larry Kramer, having exited his directorial post
with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis four years’ prior, was asked to speak at the Lesbian and Gay
Community Center in New York City as part of a rotating speaker series. When it was his turn,
Kramer posed a question to the audience: “Do we want to start a new organization devoted to
political action?” Two days later, in the same West Village location, approximately 300 people
met to form the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Their mantra, Silence=Death, was as
unforgiving as its tactics. In the 2012 documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, a
video clip from the organization’s early days shows Kramer arraigning three men as the chief
enemies of AIDS: President Ronald Reagan, New York City mayor Ed Koch, and Abe Rosenthal
of The New York Times.

Around the same time that ACT UP was beginning to take shape, The Times underwent
significant staff and policy changes. Max Frankel, who had overtaken the executive editorship
from Abe Rosenthal in 1986, was signaling a desire to change the paper’s approach to gay issues,
starting internally, with their very own. In a 1992 article for The Advocate, entitled “Out at The
New York Times: Gays, Lesbians, AIDS and Homophobia Inside America’s Paper of Record,”
journalist Michelangelo Signorile wrote:

20

“As soon as Rosenthal retired in 1986 to become a twice-weekly op-ed columnist
at the paper and Max Frankel took over as editor, the walls of repression came
tumbling down . . .‘I knew they had a hard time,’ recalls [Max] Frankel, ‘and I
knew they weren’t comfortable identifying themselves as gay.’”

Frankel would also take the lead in updating The Times’ style guide to allow for use of the word
“gay.” Things were beginning to change. But for members of ACT UP, The Times’ past
transgressions were unforgiveable. And long after Rosenthal’s departure, Kramer remained
unrelenting in his attack on the paper.

In 1989, members of ACT UP took direct action outside the home of the paper’s publisher
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Sr., known to most of the staff by his nickname, “Punch.” Activists
drew tracings of corpses on the sidewalk outside Sulzberger’s building, posting stickers with the
slogan “All The News That Kills.” The following day, about 150 of the group’s members
picketed outside Sulzberger’s apartment, then marched to The Times office on West 43
rd
Street.
With heavy police presence at each location, the ACT UP delegation remained blocked from
entering the building, and subsequently issued a written request to meet with Sulzberger and
Frankel:

“The Times is known as the “newspaper of record,” whose coverage influences
public opinion, lawmakers and journalists everywhere. When the world’s leading
newspaper runs incompetent AIDS coverage, it sends the clear message around
the world that the epidemic is not a crucial story. This is not merely bad

21

journalism—what amounts to an AIDS news blackout has already costs thousands
their lives. . . .LET THE NEW YORK TIMES KNOW THAT ITS REPORTING
OF THE AIDSEPIDEMIC IS INEFFECTIVE AND MORALLY
REPREHENSIBLE.”

By the end of 1995, it seemed the AIDS crisis had been assuaged with the discovery of a new
class of high-tech drugs, which attack the ability of the HIV virus to reproduce, inhibiting an
enzyme crucial to HIV production called protease. Still, in the years following the FDA’s
approval of the protease inhibitors, Kramer, ever the agitator, made frequent phone calls to The
Times, often targeting known or alleged gay reporters. In a 2014 op-ed for The New York Times,
Frank Bruni, who in 2011 became the paper’s first openly gay op-ed columnist, wrote,

“I learned long ago to open my inbox with trepidation. I also learned to take a
deep breath and maybe a stiff drink if an email from Larry Kramer lurked there. . .

I dreaded Larry Kramer, and sometimes I even detested Larry Kramer, but
always—always—I knew that he was on the side of the angels and that we needed
him there, in all his unappeasable and obnoxious glory.”

The growing presence of ACT UP and other activist and fundraising groups, including the Gay
Men’s Health Crisis, amfAR and a host of smaller organizations all operating without any
federal funding, signaled a paradigm shift. Suddenly, there was a fight—a fight against AIDS,
against the individuals, organizations and administrations who remained silent, perpetuating the

22

epidemic. Many people who’d been suffering with AIDS felt a new sense of purpose, often
treating their own deaths as occasions to educate, inspire, or just simply come clean.

Max Robinson, a co-anchor of the ABC News weeknight program “World News Tonight” and
the nation’s first black network news anchorman asked that in his death, his family reveal that he
had AIDS so that, according to the Los Angeles Times, “Others in the black community would be
alerted to the dangers and the need for treatment and education.” When Robinson died in 1988,
his obituary in The New York Times fulfilled his post-mortem request: “In accordance with Mr.
Robinson’s wishes, his family requested that his death be the occasion for emphasizing the
importance of education about AIDS.” It was an utterly momentous act—a signal to both black
and AIDS communities that the stigma of the disease could be shattered, that is if enough people
willed it.

Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer who captured a dark and sensitive, albeit controversial
side of humanity, felt a responsibility to represent people living with AIDS in the visual arts
community. Just a year prior, he had established the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, with
equal emphases on funding for AIDS research and the support for visual arts and photography
programs. In Mapplethorpe’s 1989 obituary, photography critic Andy Grundberg wrote: “Mr.
Mapplethorpe was first diagnosed as having AIDS two and a half years ago, according to
Howard Read of the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, which represents his work. Since then,
the artist had become for many a symbol of courage and resistance to the disease; his
willingness to publicize his illness helped focus attention of AIDS throughout the art world and
nationwide.”

23

For all the subtle activism that began to take place in AIDS obituaries, there were many others
that just simply—and often brazenly—told the truth. One of the most utterly disquieting of these
being Ethyl Eichelberger’s 1990 obituary. At the time of his death, Eichelberger was a well-
known drag performer, a figure in New York City’s experimental downtown theater scene and a
playwright, who, according to friend and fellow performer Black-Eyed Susan, had AIDS.
Although AIDS was not Eichelberger’s ultimate cause of death. As his obituary states,
“[Eichelberger] had committed suicide by slashing his wrists.” Like Eichelberger, the obituary,
penned by much-lauded theater critic Mel Gussow, was unapologetically candid—a proper
barefaced send-off for a cheeky iconoclast in full makeup.

IV. The writer and the editor

In 1992, Arthur Ochs Sulzburger, Jr. succeeded his father as publisher of The New York
Times. Upon assuming his new role, the younger Sulzberger, a considerably more
progressive child of the 1960s, announced to The Times staff, “We can no longer offer
our readers a predominately white, straight, male vision of events and say we’re doing
our job.” Under Sulzburger’s leadership, the Times “Wedding” pages were changed to
“Weddings and Celebrations” to include unions between gay couples, LGBTQ staff
members were no longer as afraid to come out and AIDS reporting, in both the paper and
the Sunday magazine, increased exponentially—in large part because of one man.

24

Jeffrey Schmalz started working at The Times at age 18. He had dropped out of
Columbia to work as a copy boy, eventually rising through the ranks to become deputy
national editor. He was a level-headed Timesman with a tendency for telling the unbiased
truth, often taking other young reporters under his wing. One of those reporters was
Samuel G. Freedman, now a professor of journalism at Columbia University and religion
columnist at The Times. “I definitely benefitted from having Jeff as my rabbi,” Freedman
told me in a phone interview. “He was only about two years older than me, but seemed
infinitely more talented, experienced and savvy. . .not to mention particularly adroit with
navigating the internal politics of The Times.”

Almost immediately after Freedman began at The Times in December 1981, Schmalz,
rather matter-of-factly, told Freedman that he was gay; naturally, Freedman assumed that
he was out to the rest of the staff. But it wasn’t until over 30 years later, when Freedman
was assembling an oral history of Jeff Schmalz’s tenure at The Times, that he realized
Schmalz was not yet fully out to The Times’ editorial staff until 1991, when he collapsed
in the newsroom from a seizure and not long after, confirmed that he had AIDS.

Months later Schmalz was diagnosed with PMI, a progressive brain infection. He was
told that he only had a few months to live. But a year in, things seemed to be stable, and
in the late spring of 1992, he returned to The Times. Invigorated, angry, and on the brink
of death, Schmalz walked into Max Frankel’s office and told the editor, “I’m gay, I have
AIDS, and the doctors say I don’t have long,” adding that he wanted to devote whatever
time he had left to covering AIDS.

25

In less than a year, Schmalz conducted and published interviews with many outspoken
figures from the latter part of the AIDS crisis, including Mary Fisher, an artist, activist
and designated face of AIDS for the 1992 Republican National Convention, journalist
and author Randy Shilts, Larry Kramer, and professional basketball player Magic
Johnson. He even clambered into the back of the presidential limousine to interview a
newly-elected Bill Clinton, where, according to Freedman’s book on Schmalz, Dying
Words, he was rumored to have said to Clinton, “How does it feel to be in the backseat of
a car with a known homosexual?”

Schmalz continued to cover AIDS well into the spring of 1993. And with every new
piece of AIDS reporting, he began to approach a more personal style. But it wasn’t until
later that year, when Schmalz had a conversation with the newly-minted editorial director
of The New York Times Magazine, a man named Adam Moss, that he began his most
personal piece yet. “We were sitting around having lunch and he uttered to me this
phrase, ‘Whatever Happened to AIDS?’” Moss, who is currently the editor-in-chief of
New York magazine, told me in a phone interview. “The spotlight at that point had really
moved on from AIDS and people were kind of exhausted by the subject, as sometimes
happens with news subjects—as always happens with news subjects. And even though
Jeff knew better than anyone the way that news worked, he found it frustrating and
enraging.” Moss detected a certain resonance in this phrase, “Whatever Happened to
AIDS,” a resonance which he believed would be best elucidated through Schmalz’s own
personal dealings with the disease. And so this phrase, this sudden quip, became a

26

magazine article—one of the first in the history of The Times to be written in the first-
person.

“He began this project, which was very different and difficult for him because it involved
not just reportage but also a great deal of memoir.” The story, by Moss’s account, had
been written in spurts. Although Schmalz was becoming very sick, he continued to
deliver a piece, which, although fragmented, defied so much of the by-the-books inked
persona he’d developed over the last 20 years. “Although he was a person who was
certainly in touch with his anger, that was not part of his writing—his performative self,
certainly. Subjectivity, emotion—all those things had been bred out of him as a writer
and reporter.”

But in the fall of 1993, Schmalz’s health had worsened. And on December 6, surrounded
by his sister Wendy, her husband Michael, and fellow reporters and friends, Jeffrey
Schmalz died.

Three weeks later, his final article appeared posthumously as the cover story of The New
York Times Magazine. Pieced together by Moss and Schmalz’s close friend, Adam
Nagourney, then a reporter at Newsday, the article, titled “Whatever Happened to AIDS,”
ran in the November 28, 1993 edition of the Sunday Times Magazine. Written from
Schmalz’s point of view, its tone was bold and unrelenting, confronting a killer which
had long rendered the American people, including its political and social leaders, numb to
its carnage, impervious to its ruination. The story of AIDS, according to Schmalz, was

27

already beginning to cycle back to what it had been in the beginning: a science story—a
story of mere numbers, statistics and reports.

For Schmalz, the story was different. It was about his own life and others which had long
been stuck in a state of precariousness—dead or near-dead by those who refused to
declare war on a terrorist. It was about telling those people’s stories, just as he’d done in
his profiles of people like Larry Kramer, Mary Fisher and Magic Johnson. “I usually say
that my epitaph is not a phrase but the body of my work,” wrote Schmalz. “I am writing it
with each article, including this one.”

V. A long coming of age

I began my obituary purge looking for answers, searching for hope—hope in myself, in
others. I wondered if I’d have been any more hopeful had I been there. Would I, like
Schmalz, have been tricked into believing that Bill Clinton could have been a white
knight for AIDS, a defender of the dying, the already dead? Would I have believed that
my friends, my loved ones could be saved through federal action, through legislative
change?

I found hope where I expected it—in protests, vigils and sit-ins, in old Music for Life
programs, Keith Haring murals and the Philadelphia soundtrack. But more often, I did
not find hope, not in the records of medical institutions, nor in the many bar graphs
detailing old NIH health budgets. I, like those who came before me, saw the death toll

28

increase and the numbers stay relatively the same. By 1994, AIDS would become the
leading cause of death for all Americans ages 25 to 44, reaching half a million total cases,
62% of which ended would end in death by 1995. Later that year, the FDA would finally
back the first protease inhibitor, Saquinavir, as one part of the first-ever drug cocktail
used to effectively treat AIDS. While the news was good and hopeful, the response was
not totally one of celebration. Hope, as it were, had begun to dwindle. Hope in survival,
in the efforts of governmental and pharmaceutical officials, had long disappeared. The
protease inhibitors were a victory, indeed, one which came, perhaps, just a little too late.

In Spring 2018, The New York Times editorial staff began engaging in a self-imposed
intervention, particularly surrounding the paper’s early coverage of AIDS and the
community of gay men which the disease so indiscriminately demolished. In the April 22
issue of The New York Times Style Magazine, both staff and contributing writers and
editors reflected on 1980s New York City, a time and space which would become utterly
ravaged by AIDS. The Times followed the T Magazine issue with an online piece
reflecting on the paper’s history of covering AIDS and gay issues. Written by six Times
reporters and edited by Kurt Soller, the article began: “The New York Times had a spotty
record of covering the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s—and gay culture in general.”

On March 8, Amisha Padnani, the digital editor of the obituaries desk, along with The
Times’ first gender editor, Jessica Bennett, launched Overlooked, an obituary project for
women whose deaths were unmarked in The Times’ obituaries pages. The project, which
reinstates the significance of the obituary as “a testament to human contribution,” has

29

published ex post facto obituaries for a number of misremembered women, including
Henrietta Lacks, Marsha P. Johnson, Qui Jin, Sylvia Plath and Ada Lovelace—all of
whom, dating as far back as the paper’s formation in 1851, had been neglected by The
Times. But the obituaries project does not call into question obituaries which were
written, those which severely underplayed the accomplishments of the deceased based
solely on how they died. It does not call into question the obituaries of those who died of
potentially embarrassing or unnamable causes of death, those who died of cancer, who
died of AIDS.

I have read dozens of obituaries of people who lived with and died of AIDS, most of which date
between 1983 and 1994. I’ve circled the “pneumonias,” the “cancers,” even the “subacute
encephalopthys” in ink. I’ve noted the prevaricating families and the lovers in disguise. I’ve read
obituaries which outed a person’s sexuality and those which overboarded on tactics to ensure the
very opposite. I’ve searched high and low for obits which were never written, those of
individuals whose lives, for whatever reasons, were never documented within the pages of The
New York Times. And while I respect that The Times is beginning to say they’re sorry, I also
recognize that it’s been a long coming of age.

Recent attempts at reparative journalism might work to rewrite the past, but they do not absolve
what’s already been done. They do not eclipse the existence of a disease which still persists
today. In 2016, the CDC reported that only one in five sexually active high school students had
been tested for HIV and that an estimated 50% of young Americans living with HIV do not even
know they are infected. Among the more than one million people living with HIV in the United

30

States today, only 49% are virally suppressed, meaning they are treating the infection by taking
medication daily, as prescribed. This likely has something to do with the cost of HIV/AIDS
medications, which the CDC estimates would cost $23,000 (in 2010 dollars) annually. Although
the epidemic of AIDS is no longer fatal, the crisis of AIDS is far from over.

In early July 2017, Michael Friedman, a promising young songwriter and rising star in theater
and Broadway, tested positive for HIV. Friedman was best known as a co-creator of “Bloody
Bloody Andrew Jackson,” a satirical musical which ran on Broadway from 2010 to 2011. He had
recently been named artistic director of the New York City Center summer program Encores!
Off-Center, where he was working on a production of Sondheim’s “Assassins.” According to the
production’s director Anne Kaufman, Friedman was barely able to make it through the first two
performances. He spent the next month in and out of the hospital, until August 19, when he was
readmitted with acute respiratory distress syndrome. He died on September 9, 2017, just nine
weeks after he’d been diagnosed with AIDS.

In his post-obituary tribute, New York Times theater reporter Michael Paulson attempted to piece
together Friedman’s last days, reflecting on the unprecedented nature of his departure.

“Mr. Friedman’s death from complications of HIV/AIDS has rattled the theater
world, both because he was seen as among the brightest lights of his generation
and because it shocked those who had come to see HIV infection as a chronic but
manageable condition, at least for those with health care.”

31

‘It feels like a brutal reminder of another time,’ said Jonathan Marc Sherman, a
playwright and friend. ‘It’s going to be a long time for a lot of us to wrap our
minds around this one.’”

In 1996, Variety published a brief essay on the AIDS crisis, what the magazine referred to as
“the plague years,” which by most accounts—including those published in The New York Times
and The Wall Street Journal—were then considered to be over. The writer was Jeremy Gerard,
who by that point had moved from The New York Times to Variety where he was named the
magazine’s chief theater critic. “If you are a journalist writing about the entertainment industry,
you will have spent much of the last decade and a half writing about AIDS, too,” wrote Gerard.
“You will have written countless stories about the toll AIDS has taken on the arts, as the disease
cut a swatch through every segment of the industry.”

He continued, describing how the advent of the protease inhibitors had already caused an uptick
in survivor’s guilt, engendering rising fears of what was to come and serving as a reminder of
everything still left to despair. Then, summoning the lyrics to Richard Farina’s “Children of
Darkness,”—“And where will we take our pleasure / When our bodies have been denied”—he
concluded,

“I began writing about the theater long before the beginning of the plague, but no
subject more profoundly influenced what I have written as witness to its
devastation. It has been my Dresden, my Shiloh, my My Lai. As it has so many
people I know, the good news fills me with hope and yet all I can do is weep.”

32

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Asset Metadata

Creator Rosenzweig, Leah (author)

Core Title Cause of death: AIDS, obituaries, and The New York Times

School Annenberg School for Communication

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Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 02/02/2019

Defense Date 08/02/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1980s,1990s,ACT UP,Adam Moss,AIDS,AIDS reporting,art,Charles Ludlam,cultural criticism,Gay,HIV,Jeffrey Schmalz,journalism,Larry Kramer,LGBT,LGBTQ,media,Michael Bennett,Music,New York City,newspapers,OAI-PMH Harvest,Obituaries,queer,The New York Times,Theater

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Advisor Page, Tim (committee chair), Scheer, Robert (committee member), St. John, David (committee member)

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