Posts tagged aids
Remembering Anthony Perkins
Though a fine character actor who starred in many films as well as an accomplished singer who released a number of charting pop albums, Anthony Perkins was born on this day, April 4, in 1932. He died just over 60 years later, on September 12, 1992, from AIDS.
Uncanny corner: His widow, Berry Berenson, was killed on American Airlines Flight 11 during the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the day before the 9th anniversary of Perkins’ death.
Happy Birthday Michael Ontkean
Happy Birthday Michael Ontkean, 67 today, and best known for his performance as the sexually-conflicted protagonist of the great pre-AIDS film Making Love.
This scene from the film (which was made in 1981 and released in 1982) fascinates me endlessly. Watch and listen as a gay guy (Harry Hamlin) visits a doctor (Ontkean) and is told he probably has “some virus”. After they talk about promiscuity and drugs, they go for a walk, and end their conversation outside a hearing aids shop. The camera angle obscures the word “Hearing” from the shop sign so hovering between their heads is the all caps “AIDS”. The very definition of the uncanny:
Remembering Rock Hudson
Rock Hudson (born Roy Harold Scherer, Jr on November 17, 1925) died on this day (October 2) in 1985. For better or worse, Rock’s illness and death played a monumental part in the history of the epidemic, and rewrote his star text completely and permanently.
Quotables: Colby Keller
In his sprawling interview with Nightcharm earlier in the year, the clever Colby Keller came up with this quick and easy way to remember that safe sex is perfectly straightforward, and that the glamour of doing it “raw” is not really that glamorous at all.
Sex is like buying chicken at the grocery store. Sometimes its covered in E. coli, sometimes its not. It’s the risk you take. You can’t live your life in fear, but you also can’t be careless. Cook the damn shit.
Complete Nightcharm interview with Colby Keller AND Outrate interview with Colby Keller
Book Of The Day: After Midnight
After Midnight is the hard to find memoir of Susan Bluestein Davis, who was married to Brad Davis, star of Midnight Express and Querelle. In it, she details the last years of Brad’s life as he finds out he’s HIV positive, conceals his condition from Hollywood decision makers, and ultimately dies of AIDS.
A must for fans, and historians too. Get a copy here.
Remembering Brad Davis
The sadly not immortal Brad Davis died on this day (September 8) from assisted suicide/AIDS in 1991, aged 41. His final words were “Oh God, it hurts!”.
To lighten the mood, peruse moments from that other great B. Davis.
A moment with Elizabeth Taylor #8
If your friends and peers are banging on about zero sorting and negotiated risk and all the rest of that crap that results in infection after infection on a daily basis, then find new friends and peers. Traditional safe sex - condoms for fucking - works, so make it work for you, whether it’s your preference or not.
Don’t take my word for it:
Remembering Al Parker
“I had never really thought about the size of my cock until I was saddled with the nickname ‘Pony Boy.’”
Born as Andrew “Drew” Okun in Natick, Massachusetts on June 25, 1952, Al Parker was a major star of pre-AIDS gay porn. His definitive “clone” look and act as well as his 9-inch cock,was a highlight of classics including Inches and The Other Side of Aspen.
His first job in California was as a butler at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. Rip Colt, founder of Colt Studios, discovered Drew and named him “Al Parker”. With Surge Studios, he produced, directed and acted and was integral to that studio’s decision to pioneer condoms in gay porn soon after the onset of AIDS. He died of AIDS on this day (August 17) in 1992. Roger Edmonson’s biography Clone: The Life and Legacy of Al Parker Gay Superstar details his adventures
Positively Infuriating
If you’re HIV-negative and growing tired of the increasingly persistent suggestions that the only consistent thing about your approach to HIV is your ignorant, demeaning attitude towards those HIV-positive, then you’re sure to love Condom Break, a film from Raw Joxxx.
In Condom Break, a dorky (and presumably HIV-negative) guy tentatively announces “I only play safe” (who talks like that?) but is soon taught the error of his ways when his assertive, in-the-know power top continues on long after the condom has broken and slid off.
The director describes the movie:
A hot hung cast Caleb Lucas, CJ Banks, Dominik Rider, J.R., Jason Mitchell each team up for some hot rough sex. But each bottom insists on the top to wear a condom which of course we watch him put the condom on and roll it all the way down to satisfy the bottoms.
But someone after the top starts fucking and pounding the bottoms ass the Condom Breaks and slides down making the top feel the bare ass and keep on fucking without telling the bottoms.
These hot bottoms didn’t know they were getting pounded raw and some even took some loads without knowing it. HOT! Now this is hot raw sex!
I think a sequel is in order for this movie!
Gross and horrifying, and “charged up” with every pejorative stereotype under the sun about both HIV-negatives and HIV-positives but then I guess I would (being HIV-negative), say that.
Quotables: Camille Paglia
You began to have sex shows, and fist fucking was coming in, men in swings, that kind of thing. And almost immediately, this was in the mid-Seventies, I remember reading this in the New York Native or something like that, and it reported — now also, my friends started talking about having this — trouble with amoebas, these parasites that would not go away. And then I saw this — this is in the mid-70s — this article that said a parasite had been identified in the intestines of gay men in New York that had never been identified in human medicine before. Only veterinary medicine was able to recognize it. It was an animal parasite. A chill went through me. This cannot have been more than six or seven years after Stonewall. I’m saying that the signs that something terrible was about to happen were already obvious within a few years after Stonewall. The idea that this came out of nowhere — this is a piece of historical nonsense.
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