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He was a lifelong closet case, whose life served as both a warning about the dangers of denial, and a wake-up call to a public too willing to believe that all "faggots" were limp-wristed fairies -- and only "limp-wristed fairies", junkies and Haitians could get HIV/AIDS. Hudson fell into the leading-man category occupied by Gable, Lancaster, Mitchum. He was raw masculinity, tempered by an engaging smile and easy demeanor. Women wanted him, and men wanted to be like him. He was voted star of the year, favorite leading man, and more similar depictions by countless publications. He was unquestionably one of the most popular and well-known movie stars of the 1950s.



Larry King Live, March 29, 2001 Larry King, Marvin Mitchelson,and Marc Christian

KING: You remember, as an onlooker then, Marvin, did you think Rock Hudson was gay? You lived here. You heard the rumors.

MITCHELSON: I lived here all my life. I heard the rumors, but it just didn't seem like he was.

KING: No one looked less -- I don't know if you look gay. Is there such a thing as looking gay?CHRISTIAN: No, but if look at him in "Pillow Talk," you've got the Tony Randall character, and Tony Randall seems gay, but he's absolutely hetero, and you've got Rock, who was extremely macho and he was gay,or bisexual, so...





What the his legions of fans did not know was that Rock Hudson was a "gay". When it seemed that gossip might ruin his career, his agent, Henry Wilson, talked Hudson into marrying his secretary, Phyllis Gates, in 1955. The agent made a career of handling handsome closet-case "gays", such as Tab Hunter, and Troy "I am not gay" Donahue). The convenience marriage lasted a respectable three years, long enough to put some of the rumors to rest.

Rock Hudson did not worry about the problem, perhaps because writers of the 1950s,like Hedda Hopper, were willing to keep his homosexuality a secret while gushings about his happy life with his bride. It was Confidential magazine that was delighted to expose "gays" that proved to be Rock's worst enemy. If you have read Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger, then you've seen the photographs of actor Rory Calhoun, along with Confidential's headline: "But for the Grace of God, Still a Convict!"There's a story behind the Calhoun headlined story:

Confidential was about to publish "Hudson-is-a-Homo" story to an unsuspecting public. They decided to not publish the expose' because, according to informed sources, Universal Studios paid $10,000 in hush money, also giving them a jucier story about Rory Calhoun being an ex-convict. Hudson had one more notable close call with Confidential during the 1960s, when the magazine threatened to expose his "affair" with not-so-deep-in-the-closet George Nader.

The truth seems to be that Nader wasn't sleeping with Hudson. Hudson was having sex with Nadar's personal secretary, Mark Miller. Mark ended up becoming Nader's partner for life and inherited Hudson's estate along with Nader. Hudson's studio quickly wrote another large check to stop the expose', then fired Nader. Confidential did not publish the story.

Hudson sailed through the 1960s on a cloud of romantic comedies with Doris Day, and was just finishing up his six-season run as the star of "MacMillan and Wife". He played the role of a super-heterosexual San Francisco police commissioner, and Susan St. James played as his young, sexy wife. He met writer Armistead Maupin in 1976. In spite of Rock's ongoing relationship with Jack Coates, the movie star and the writer continued sexual relationship together. Maupin explained in 2001 that "...When I talk to straight interviewers, they end up writing that I had an affair with Rock Hudson.' No, no, no. It wasn't an affair. We played a couple of times. That's what gay men do sometimes. The first time we played, I was completely unable to perform because I was acutely aware that I was going to bed with Rock Hudson. To make matters worse, he had a little black leather case of poppers [drugs] that was embossed with the initials 'RH' in case I forgot who I was with. But he was just really a good guy about it and terribly funny and pointed out to me that this happened to him all the time with his sex partners."

of the decision: "I was not into protecting him or trying to make him seem not gay."That's not entirely true. Just two months before making the above statement to The Advocate, she was asked by Larry King if she had helped Hudson "keep the secret."Smith replied: "I helped him to the extent -- I helped keep a woman from blackmailing him, because I happened to have a file on this woman for some unknown reason, and I sent it to him, and he showed to it her, and she dropped her blackmail."Still, she wouldn't have outed him. "I wouldn't have reported him going out with girls or anything," she told The Advocate. But she wouldn't have reported him going out with boys or anything, either.

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"The AIDS epidemic was mushrooming in those years," reflects

Michelangelo Signorile

, "and the urgency of gay visibility was being underscored by activists while the silence around AIDS in the media and among politicians was deafening. [Rock Hudson's] life and death exposed how the media bought into the Hollywood machine that heterosexualized actors -- and how that machine reflected an entrenched media hypocrisy that went well beyond Hollywood."What was the rationale among mainstream journalists to promote such inaccuracies? I asked. They were protecting people's right to privacy, they claimed, noting that it was up to the individual to decide whether or not to be out or to put forth a heterosexual facade and that no one else could make that decision. And at that time, make no mistake, suggesting or even hinting that someone was gay was considered as horrific as outright reporting it."There was no rationale -- unless you want to credit the stifling conservatism of the times. Ronald Reagan was in office, and bolstering his complete disregard for those filthy homosexuals was the newly-organized extremist wing of the Radical Right, led by the most phobic of homophobes, Jerry Falwell.And then there was the president's plain, willful ignorance. Even his White House physician, Brigadier General John Hutton, stated that Reagan thought of AIDS as though "it was measles and would go away."After Reagan's death,

Allen White wrote

:

By Feb. 1, 1983, 1,025 AIDS cases were reported, and at least 394 had died in the United States. Reagan said nothing. On April 23, 1984, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced 4,177 reported cases in America and 1,807 deaths. In San Francisco, the health department reported more than 500 cases. Again, Reagan said nothing. ...With each diagnosis, the pain and suffering spread across America. Everyone seemed to now know someone infected with AIDS. At a White House state dinner, first lady Nancy Reagan expressed concern for a guest showing signs of significant weight loss."

That guest was Rock Hudson.

EVANS: Yes. Sure. Sure. No, I knew he was gay. I just didn't know he had AIDS.KING: You ever talk to him about it?EVANS: Gay?KING: Yes. Did he ever talk about it?EVANS: No. Because the thing about Rock was so great is when he was with you, he always made you feel like he was just a man that could flirt with you and be with you. He didn't -- he was just this kind of a man-woman thing, that he would do.

Larry King, Linda EvansLarry King LiveMarch 15, 2004

In 1984, after a series of forgettable (and some, like

Embryo

, downright embarrasing) movies, Hudson landed a recurring role on the nighttime soaper, "Dynasty." Never mind that Rock was a bit old to be frolicking about with the much-better-preserved Linda Evans -- the fact was, frankly,

he looked like hell

.Some people thought maybe he was just old, since they hadn't seen him in a while.But some of us -- especially those of us who had been running into the star for years at gay clubs up and down the California coast -- suspected something else was very, very wrong.His co-workers were certainly alarmed. While Rock's inability to memorize dialogue was the stuff of legend, now he was exhibiting all the signs of a man in serious trouble. The need for cue cards was one thing, but when his speech began to deteriorate, everybody knew the least of Rock's problems was simple forgetfulness. And at just 58 years old, no one was quite ready to brand him "senile." The word "cancer" was tossed around -- but not, at least by those who had something to lose, was the phrase "gay cancer" mentioned. Not yet.Marc Christian, Rock's bisexual lover of three years, was as much in denial as anyone. He finally asked Hudson about his startling weight loss in the spring of 1985, and, Christian later told Larry King, "he said I've been checked for cancer, I've been checked for everything, including the plague, meaning AIDS, and I don't have it. And then the word got around the house that he had anorexia, which was typically a teenage female infliction. I didn't buy that either. I thought he probably had lung cancer. He was a very heavy smoker."Hudson's friend and publicist Dale Olson finally asked, "'Rock, do you have AIDS?' And he said, no, he was anorexic. I think I believed that because I wanted to believe it."The jig was up in July of 1985, when Hudson joined his old pal Doris Day for the launch of her new cable show, "Doris Day's Best Friends." His gaunt -- nay, skeletal -- visage (and nearly-incoherent speech) was so shocking that it was broadcast again all over the national news shows that night and for weeks to come. D-Day herself stared at him throughout their appearance together; she appeared as if she was trying, as we were, to cpmrehend how this sunken-eyed bag of bones could really be Rock Hudson.Even Hudson's publicist couldn't believe what he wanted to believe any longer. Dale Olson asked Doris Day to talk to Rock. The two stars had breakfast alone, and Rock finally came clean.But it was veteran gossip columnist Army Archerd -- who had somehow got his hands on one of Hudson's lab reports, and saw the words "Kaposi's sarcoma" -- who broke the story in Variety.Olson denied it outright. "I wasn't lying, actually," he told Larry King. "I simply ignored the fact that he had AIDS, but I announced that he had liver cancer."Olson has continue to justify his own actions, and defend Hudson's. The publicist told King he considered Rock Hudson "the hero of AIDS awareness." When King reminded Olson that if Hudson had been allowed to keep his condition a secret, he could have gone on infecting other people, Olson replied: "He could have infected people, I'm sure, I don't know anything about that, because I didn't know anything about that at the time. ... All I'm saying is that when that announcement was forced by the American hospital in Paris, who discovered he had AIDS when he collapsed at the Ritz Hotel. ... I spoke to him and said, 'Rock, this is terrible,' and frankly said 'You have a terminal disease. This is going to affect a lot of people. And you can be the person who can make people aware of it.' He agreed totally, was not capable of doing it himself, but asked me if I would be a spokesperson and get that message out. Which I did."Which he did indeed -- but only after there was no other way to deny it.On July 25, 1985, while in Paris for experimental treatment, Hudson issued a formal statement: He was gay, and he had full-blown AIDS."And," Christian recalled, "the very day that the news broke, I was sitting in his living room, and he was over in Paris and he had collapsed. And his secretary called me and said, 'We have very bad news, he's got liver cancer and they're going to say it on the news.' And of course I'm devastated, thinking, 'Liver cancer, it's inoperable.'

He took it very well. He knew that he had something very serious. He was aware of the disease. He had friends who had been affected. And he knew that there was no cure at that time.

Dr. Michael Gottlieb to Larry King, June 7, 2001

"So I'm watching the television, and [Hudson's French press secretary] came on and said he has Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. And my first reaction was, 'They just discovered this?' But then she said, later on, 'which was diagnosed a year ago in the United States.' And then I knew I had been lied to. It just was -- so I was devastated."So, Rock Hudson knew he had AIDS for a full year, and didn't tell his lover... which is strange, considering that Hudson told his own doctor he had sent anonymous letters to at least four other sex partners to inform them that they had been exposed. Why didn't he do the same for Christian? (Perhaps his relationship with Christian wasn't all flowers and roses -- but we'll get to that later.)In any case, Hudson did continue to have sex -- unprotected sex -- with Christian.But no one -- besides Marc Christian -- was thinking about that. Immediately, all thoughts went back to the full-bore kissing scene Hudson shared with Linda Evans for "Dynasty" less than a year earlier.Of course, now we know that you don't catch AIDS from kissing. But this was 1985, and even the best doctors out there weren't too certain about the risk of transmission through saliva. In that light, it was extremely unfair of Hudson to go through with the liplock without informing Evans of his status. People -- Hudson included -- just didn't know if kissing could kill.

The anxiety over actor Rock Hudson's death from AIDS was that he had shortly before kissed actress Linda Evans on the set of Dynasty. The genuine concern of the day was that "beautiful innocent Linda Evans" was going to become infected and die. (The queers, after all, deserved it.)

Eric Resnick

Generation 'Gay-C'turns middle age

Gay People's ChronicleNovember 28, 2003

"You'd go to parties," recalled Liz Smith in her Advocate interview, "and people would have really negative things to say about how afraid they were of getting AIDS from shaking hands with somebody. I mean, people were just ignorant."So Evans got tested, while friends and co-workers worried from afar ("People started staying away from me," she said on a Lifetime special a couple of years ago. "People wouldn't hug me anymore"), and the media lambasted Hudson for putting her at risk.Evans herself was about the only person who wasn't angry with Hudson. She knew something was a tad off in Hudson's performance -- his kisses just weren't so hot -- and then after his AIDS announcement decided that he was holding back because he was afraid of infecting her."They saw the dailies," Evans told Larry King in 2001, "and they came back a couple weeks later, and they said, 'We'd like to do that scene over, and we'd like you to be more passionate.'"I said, 'I can't be more passionate, because I'm the one who's just laying there on the ground. He has to be.'"They explained it to him. We do it again. He does the same thing. He did it because he knew he had AIDS. And because over the years we were such good friends. And I'd -- you know, whenever I'd be at a party or anything, I'd sit and we'd talk together and everything. He was trying to protect me in his own way."And people were just so upset, they said, 'Why? Aren't you mad at him for doing that to you?' And I knew he was trying to protect me."

Speculation about whether or not Hudson, who in real life was living with AIDS, had possibly transmitted HIV to Evans ran rampant. Not only was it a reminder that the public was woefully uninformed about the transmission routes of HIV, but it was also a reminder of a double standard in television: Shows were saturated with sex, but nary a word was spoken about the risks and responsibilities of those juicy trysts. That is, until Hudson’s real-life HIV-positive status accidentally intersected with the high-glam fantasy world of the Carringtons and Colbys.

Chael Needle

Girlfriends for Life

A&U

Since no one really knew at the time whether or not you could get it from kissing, maybe Evans' calm was self-protective denial. "I never thought I could catch it," she said. "In my mind, I felt fine."In the meantime, Army Archerd was taking the heat for breaking the story -- and especially for breaking rank. "There are quite a few people who were upset with the fact that I had written this story," Archerd told Larry King, "among them, several at Dale [Olson]'s profession, press agents who had worked with Rock who were very fond of him and thought that I should not have done it, and who one of whom never spoke to me again."It was a strange time. There were some people who were trying to do things about AIDS, and they couldn't get any celebrities to help them" -- and yet those same people went absolutely ballistic now that they did have a celebrity poster child (albeit a reluctant one).Archerd had been invited to a book party for Carol Bayer Sager, hosted by Elizabeth Taylor. A couple of days before the party, he received a call from Sager's publicist, "disinviting" him, telling him: "If you come to the party, Elizabeth will not show up."The Elizabeth Taylor? AIDS activist and lifelong fag hag?It's impossible to know if Taylor really was that angry with Archerd, or whether Archerd was just getting the cold shoulder from yet another pissed-off publicist.After finally copping to AIDS publicly, Hudson left Paris (the only passenger on a chartered commercial jet) and came home to die."You know," Liz Smith told The Advocate, "Rock didn't know what getting AIDS meant. He didn't know what he would do for the movement, for activism against AIDS. He didn't have to cooperate. And he didn't. But he didn't lie."But he did lie, by omission. And he knew very well "what getting AIDS meant.""He was very cognizant of the fact that he had AIDS," Army Archerd told Larry King, "and he was not a stupid man, and he knew what the ramifications of AIDS was."In spite of this... he continued a lifestyle endangering lives of so many people in San Francisco; the stories that were very well-known, those kinds of things did not fit in with the kind of person that we liked to believe Rock Hudson was."

When the book, the biography that I wrote, came out, I was attacked by people who said: "Rock would never have wanted this to be known. He wouldn't have wanted people to know about his lovers, about his romantic life." And I realized that it was because he was homosexual that they felt people didn't want to know. If he was a straight actor, everybody would have expected to hear about all the women he had loved and who had been in his life. But because he was gay, you weren't supposed to tell, weren't supposed to talk about it.

Sara Davidson to Larry King, 2001

On the other hand, Hudson put his last few months to good use. Less than a month after announcing he had AIDS (and at the request of his doctor, Michael S. Gottlieb), Hudson wrote a check for $250,000 to help get the then-fledgling National AIDS Research Foundation (NARF) off the ground. (It was for NARF that Rock's old friend Elizabeth Taylor began leading the public fight against AIDS in earnest -- although Taylor is wont to remind us that she was already concerned and active in the AIDS battle before she knew Rock was sick.)Just before his death on October 2, 1985, Hudson said: "I can at least know my own misfortune has had positive worth."We don't think he was referring to his quarter-million-dollar donation when he said that.There is no denying that Rock Hudson's death was probably the number-one catalyst that forced the public -- especially Americans -- to reconsider the AIDS controversy. "Rock Hudson's death gave AIDS a face," said Morgan Fairchild.But more than two years would pass before Ronald Reagan would even acknowledge the existence of AIDS, much less provide funding for research. Wrote

Allen White

:

With AIDS finally out of the closet, activists such as Paul Boneberg, who in 1984 started Mobilization Against AIDS in San Francisco, begged President Reagan to say something now that he, like thousands of Americans, knew a person with AIDS. Writing in the Washington Post in late 1985, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, stated: "It is surprising that the president could remain silent as 6,000 Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic's existence. Perhaps his staff felt he had to, since many of his New Right supporters have raised money by campaigning against homosexuals."Reagan would ultimately address the issue of AIDS while president. His remarks came May 31, 1987 (near the end of his second term), at the Third International Conference on AIDS in Washington. When he spoke, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had died. The disease had spread to 113 countries, with more than 50,000 cases. ...Reagan could have chosen to end the homophobic rhetoric that flowed from so many in his administration. Dr. C. Everett Koop, Reagan's surgeon general, has said that because of "intradepartmental politics" he was cut out of all AIDS discussions for the first five years of the Reagan administration. The reason, he explained, was "because transmission of AIDS was understood to be primarily in the homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs." The president's advisers, Koop said, "took the stand, 'They are only getting what they justly deserve.'"How profoundly different might have been the outcome if his leadership had generated compassion rather than hostility. "In the history of the AIDS epidemic, President Reagan's legacy is one of silence," Michael Cover, former associate executive director for public affairs at Whitman-Walker Clinic, the groundbreaking AIDS health-care organization in Washington. in 2003. "It is the silence of tens of thousands who died alone and unacknowledged, stigmatized by our government under his administration."Revisionist history about Reagan must be rejected. Researchers, historians and AIDS experts who know the truth must not remain silent. Too many have died for that.

Yet it's hard to fight revisionist history about Reagan, when Reagan himself is at the core of it:

LARRY KING: AIDS -- did -- were we late on that?REAGAN: I don't think -- no, certainly we -- it was a -- we were not unnecessarily so. It was a plain case of catching up with things, and I immediately appointed a commission to get into the whole problem of AIDS and come back with the recommendations of what we could and should be doing.KING: Do you think Rock Hudson focused a lot of our attention on it?REAGAN: Oh, I think that brought a lot of attention to it, sure....KING: Are you hopeful about it?REAGAN: Well, yes, I think we have to be hopeful about it, or we'll find ourselves back in those days of the plagues... that wiped out millions of people.



Larry King Live

January, 1990

After Hudson's death, Marc Christian sued his lover's estate on grounds of "intentional infliction of emotional distress." Christian tested negative (and as far as anyone knows is still HIV-free) -- but the fact remains that Hudson continued having sex with him for a year after he knew he had AIDS.Today, in some states, a person can be convicted of attempted murder for that.Through high-profile attorney Marvin Mitchelson (the plaintiff's lawyer in the 1976 Lee Marvin "palimony" case), Christian sued for $5 million, and ended up with $14.5 million ("Sometimes juries get angry," Mitchelson later remarked).FootnoteLest you applaud Marc Christian as a hero -- despite the fact that his suit and subsequent win sent a message to those who might fail to inform partners of their HIV status -- keep in mind Christian's apparent internalized homophobia and obvious disdain for the gay community:In 2001, when Larry King remarked that "a lot of people" were mad at Christian when he won his case, Christian replied, "Yeah, especially the gays. ... I found out that I got a lot more vitriolic hatred from liberal gays than I did from conservative straight people. Straight people were great to me, because I think they found themselves in a position of, gee, if my wife or my husband hadn't told me, I'd know how he would feel. ... I think that liberal gays think that if you had AIDS, you couldn't do any wrong. You could go out and infect anyone you want, you're the victim. ... There is this whole victim mentality that we have, not just in the gay world, but in America now, that it's always somebody else's fault. ... [A] lot of the groups like Lambda, GLAAD, and amfAR, they didn't like me too much."With an attitude like that, it's easy to see why they didn't.Too, there is the question of Christian's relationship with Hudson.

Hudson biographer Sara Davidson

later told King: "By the time I met Rock... Marc Christian was living in his guest house, and Tom Clark, who had been his lover for many years before, was living in the house, and he -- Marc was frozen out, he wasn't allowed to come in the house. He was holding on to his territory. It was a very strange scene."Addenda

"I hope I die of a heart attack before they find out," Hudson said when he was diagnosed.Hudson was romantically linked with Jim Nabors (yes, "Gomer Pyle"), Wally Cox, James Dean, and, the butchest of the bunch, Joan Crawford.He was a Republican. He considered John Wayne a friend.Due to too many potentially damaging jokes after Hudson's death, the Prudential Life Insurance Company killed its longtime commercial slogan "Get a Piece of the Rock."Hudson's ashes were scattered at sea.His Hollywood Walk of Fame star is at 6104 Hollywood Blvd.