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This is the first in a four-part oral history of fashion's response to the AIDS Crisis. Here, fashion industry leaders reflect on the beginnings of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the fear and stigma that arose from the virus.
This was a time—you couldn’t imagine how special it was. And I know people say, “Everybody says that about every generation of time.” I don’t think that’s true. Believe me: That time, no one who lived it can say it wasn’t anything but special.
People from little towns who didn’t find their comfort zone would come [to New York], and could absolutely feel free to be who they were and who they wanted to be. But then, this insidious illness came and started to erode that freedom of spirit, and fear became a part of it. Suddenly, people were afraid to catch it. Like, what happens if you hug someone or kiss someone that may be sick, and will this be contagious?
Before you knew it, all those beautiful boys who were about free love and free sex and everything, they all started getting sick. At the time everybody was dancing, smoking, and taking drugs, and doing whatever the heck if it makes you feel happy. And everybody was just falling dead.
It became known as “the gay disease.” All the kids that I knew, all the fashion designers and the photographers and the makeup artists and hairdressers, they started getting sick. It was a domino effect.
It was called the “gay plague,” that was a term that people used. I worked at an advertising agency where the owner was gay, and so many people were coming in—but then you would never see them again or you would hear that they passed away. Folks that I worked with, their lovers were dying.
But I knew it wasn’t just a “gay disease” because I had two cousins who passed away in the early days. They were Black [straight] women, and they were IV drug users, and that’s how they contracted it. I remember going to see them in Harlem Hospital and they didn’t know enough about the disease, so they actually made me wear a full hazmat outfit.
There was this idea going around that a “gay cancer” was affecting all the hardcore queens who are sexaholics and doing drugs. So my friends and I thought we were safe. But then my roommate said to me, “Oh, I’ve got this.” One after another, all my friends and ex-boyfriends were being stricken. It’s hard to describe how horrible it was to be in your 20s and all your friends are just hitting their strides and everyone’s having fun and being creative, then all of a sudden the floor just falls out from under everybody.
I remember going to see The Normal Heart with a friend. Larry Kramer was starting to make noise that we had to close down places where people were having public sex and there was a lot of pushback. We met a friend after the theater for lunch who was quite promiscuous. I started lecturing him and he said, “No, no, no. This is for people in the leather community.” Unfortunately, he passed away. And you started having this constant conversation of who was “sick.” Everyone used the euphemism “sick.” “Oh, is he sick? I think he’s sick.”
You constantly saw people who had marks from Kaposi sarcoma. They were super-thin. You started seeing people who were 40 years old in a wheelchair, or with a walker. And the government refused to do anything! There was no acknowledgement. Everyone had this helplessness and fear, the combination of both.
It really felt like the party was over.
The Death of Model Joe MacDonald and How The Fashion Industry Succumbed to HIV/AIDS Stigma
There was a cover story in New York magazine. There was a very successful male model, and he was the first famous person who passed away. His name was Joe MacDonald.
Joe was the first person to pass that I think everyone in the gay community knew that had a powerful effect on people. He was ridiculously handsome. It was like, How did God design anybody that good looking? And, like anybody in the ’70s, he was as sexually voracious as everybody else. And when I say everybody, I mean both straight and gay.
When we first started reading about [HIV/AIDS] and hearing about it, people did not want to acknowledge that this disease didn’t discriminate. People thought, Oh, if you’re young and you’re healthy, and you quote live a clean life, you’re not going to get it. And then they started seeing people like Joe MacDonald and realized this was not selective. The reality became very harsh at that point.
Joe, like most of the guys back then, you didn’t necessarily know if they were gay. We were told that he died of encephalitis. They said, “Well, that happens sometimes with pigeons.” People were blindsided—and I’m talking about the medical profession too. That’s how it felt. They came out later with the fact that he died of this thing called AIDS, immune deficiency.
We knew Joe personally through his brother Tim, who was an associate to the interior designer Angelo Donghia, and worked from time to time on the design of our showrooms. Eventually, we were aware of others in our extended creative community who got it, and before long, there were cases in our own immediate teams—some who thankfully survived and others who did not. It was a terrible time for them, their loved ones, and for all of us. In those early days, there was so much confusion and anxiety around how the disease was transmitted that many who were [positive] kept it to themselves.
Even in the fashion industry, people started to talk about, maybe we ought to not hire gay men anymore in fashion unless they can take the test and prove that they don’t have it, that they can get insurance policies. Mary McFadden told John Fairchild of Women’s Wear Daily, “People were dying like flies. I lost two assistants. I’m sure in five years we’ll only be seeing women designers. There won’t be many men left in fashion.”
The designers’ customers were afraid too. If you’re a society designer, you're ladies who lunch, you think they want to fool with somebody who has this new gay cancer? They weren’t out there talking about “They’re going to do an AIDS benefit and they’re going to give money to the cause.” They weren’t doing that.
Halston in many ways was stereotypically queer, and yet he also surrounded himself with the Halstonettes and never really admitted being gay, and probably a lot of his clients really didn’t have any idea, especially people buying the J.C. Penney clothes. There were lots of people who didn’t realize and would just ask, “Where is your wife?” Gay designers would be like, “I’m not married.”
At that point, America hated [gay people]. They were blaming everything on us. When I came out, it was the norm that your parents would throw you out of the house. I mean, that’s the reason I gravitated to fashion—because I knew I could find a place where I assumed people were like me, and I could build a new life around what I would consider to be an extended family.
Lots of gay men started to marry women to sort of protect themselves. Everyone in the business knew they were gay, but they never came out. You could be openly gay in the fashion industry, but you kind of couldn’t, really. Like, you couldn’t sit down as an openly gay man in an Upper East Side restaurant and be flamboyant. You probably would be asked to leave.
I think that people who are roughly in my age group in the fashion world—myself, Marc Jacobs, Isaac Mizrahi, Dolce, Gabbana—we were really the first generation who were never in the closet. And probably the only older designers, adult designers, who acknowledged gay relationships, were Giorgio Armani and Yves Saint Laurent. That’s it. And maybe both of them gave you the sense of security that, you know what? I have to just do myself. I think that during the AIDS crisis, a lot of people were afraid to come out. In a weird way, it made me more emboldened, quite frankly, to just say, “I’m a gay man. I’m going to live my honest life. And if the consumer is freaked out by that, they’re freaked out by it. I don’t care.”
Honestly, it’s still a part of me now. For a long time, I equated having gay sex with meaning you’re going to die. I assumed every person I hooked up with had AIDS.
I had one partner, Robert, and he was diagnosed. He went home to Mobile, Alabama, to a very loving part of his family...and I went to visit. The family’s neighbors were like, “Oh, your gay son has AIDS. We’re not going to socialize with you.” When people went to visit Robert, of course they were taking precautions, but it was funny how the people closest to him would still kiss him and touch him and I, of course, felt the same way. We were being cautious, but we were still loving, and touching, and caring, and feeling, and sensitive. But the world at large wasn’t. Doctors didn’t want to treat him or talk to him. There was such a stigma and a prejudice against gay people. It was like, “Don’t touch a gay person, you’ll get AIDS.”
I heard about it early on when it was called GRID, gay-related immune deficiency. A friend of mine wound up actually becoming diagnosed, and he was the first person I knew to die of it. I went to visit him in New York Hospital, and he handed me this sheath of mimeographed papers and said, “Read this. You won’t understand all of it, but it’s going to change your life.” Well I read it, and I immediately thought, Okay, this is me.
To get an HIV test, you had to wait three weeks to a month, so your whole life just went on hold because you’re like, “Oh, my God, I don’t want to know. But now what do I do for three weeks?” Because also if you found out, you were probably dead in six months. The way the information was put out was that this was all our fault and we were the only ones that could get it. At that point, it hadn’t infiltrated the straight community yet.
All of those years leading up to the activist moment in New York, people in the fashion world had euphemisms surrounding the ways in which they would talk about HIV. They would use words like, “Oh, I hear he’s sick.” They would never say, “I hear he might have AIDS.”
The boys just started getting sick, and you know how you embrace each other when you say hello, “Oh, hello,” and you do the fashion kiss? But it was, “No, don’t come close to me. Don’t touch me. Something’s wrong with me.” They would either have a stench or their faces would be broken out, or they’d look really sad, sick, and pallid.
It was like a mark. It was a look that came on the face. It was almost like their face got gaunt and there was a line that went in a certain area. I would say, “He’s sick.”
I was a very skinny, tall guy. I was always six-feet-two, but I was 155 pounds. I was always really self-conscious of being skinny because being a waif, being thin, was a way that people regarded you as being sick. People would ask me, “How are you feeling?”
If you lost a little or too much weight, you were terrified that people thought you were going to have the disease. That was constantly the elephant in the room.
You know how “skinny is always the best thing to be in fashion”? No one wanted to lose weight during that season, honey, I’ll tell you that much.
I remember going to get the test. When I came to see [the doctor], he sat me down. I was probably freelance writing for 10 different publications, from New York magazine to Vogue to Elle. He told me I was positive. He handed me a packet of pills called AZT. He said, “Take 12 of these a day and you should really take care of whatever it is that you need to take care of in your life, because you have four months to live.”
Other than the fact that I felt I was HIV-positive, you could not tell to look at me. There was no wasting syndrome. I didn’t have [Kaposi sarcoma]. I never had thrush. At that point, I took the pills and I handed them back. And he said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m giving them back to you.” And he said, “Why?” And I said, “You’re giving me these to assuage your guilt because you don’t know what else to give me. But frankly, this will kill me as easily as the disease will. This thing has you baffled. How dare you steal my hope? You have no right to steal anybody’s hope. So, I have to go now.” I never saw him again.
