The Lonely City (21 page)

The film I liked best was of his very first appearance, at Irving Plaza on 15th Street in 1978, performing at a night called New Wave Vaudeville. He appears on stage in a see-through plastic cape, with wings painted around his eyes. A science-fiction figure, gender indeterminate, he opens his mouth and out comes ‘Mon creur s’ouvre à ta voix’, my heart opens to your voice, from Saint-Saëns’
Samson et Dalila.
His voice is almost inhuman, climbing higher and higher.
La flèche est moins rapide à porter le trépas, que ne l’est ton amante à voler dans tes bras. The arrow is less rapid in bringing death, than is your lover to fly into your arms.

‘Holy shit’, someone shouts. There is a barrage of stray claps and cheers from the audience, then total silence, total attention. He gazes unseeing, that theatrical entranced Kabuki stare (the gaze that can cure epidemics, the gaze,
nirami
, that makes the invisible visible), the sound pouring from him.
Verse-moi, verse-moi l’ivresse. Fill me, fill me with ecstasy.
Then there is a series of bangs and the stage fills with smoke. ‘I still get goose pimples when I think about it,’ his friend and collaborator Joey Arias remembered. ‘It was like he was from a different planet and his parents were calling him home. When the smoke cleared, he was gone.’

Nomi’s career exploded from that moment. At first, his shows were put together by a group of friends, who collaborated on writing songs, making videos and creating costumes, developing together the Nomi universe, the New Wave alien aesthetic. On 15 September 1979 he appeared with Arias as backing singers for David Bowie on
Saturday Night Live,
both dressed in robes by Thierry Mugler. There was an elaborate live show, growing crowds, a tour of America.

Nomi wanted success, but he didn’t find it quite as fulfilling as he’d expected. According to the testimony of Andrew Horn’s affecting 2004 documentary,
The Nomi Song,
the alien act arose in part from a refined and hypermodern theatrical sensibility – that post-punk, Cold War infused infatuation with the apocalypse and outer space – and in part from a genuine sense of being freakishly other. As his friend, the painter Kenny Scharf, says in the film: ‘Everyone was a freak, but he was a freak among the freaks. But at the same time, he was a human being as well and I think he longed to have a boyfriend, relationship, more like love.’ His manager Ray Johnson put it even more strongly, observing that despite the sell-out shows, the crowds of fans, it was apparent ‘you were witnessing one of the loneliest persons on the earth’.

In the 1980s Nomi’s career shifted up a gear. He got a record deal, and made two albums,
Klaus Nomi
and
Simple Man,
recorded
with session musicians, his old friends sidelined.
Simple Man
went gold in France and in 1982 he toured Europe, culminating in December with his last recorded performance, at Eberhard Schoener’s Classic Rock Night in Munich, with a full orchestra, in front of an audience of thousands.

Again, you can conjure it from the vaults. He walks with his stiff puppet’s gait up the steps to the stage, dressed in a scarlet doublet and white ruff, his legs very thin in black stockings and black heeled shoes, his face dead white, even the palms of his hands unnaturally pale: an uncanny figure, stepping straight from the court of King James II. He looks around him like a sleepwalker, like someone beholding an apparition, his eyes staring from his head. And then he starts to sing, of all things, the aria of the Cold Genius from Purcell’s
King Arthur,
the song of a winter spirit summoned unwillingly to life. Hands raised, his voice climbs stutteringly upward to the accompaniment of strings, a weird mixture of dissonance and harmony.

What power art thou, who from below
Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow?
See’st thou not how stiff, how stiff and wondrous old,
Far, far unfit to bear the bitter cold,
I can scarcely move or draw my breath?
Let me, let me freeze again to death.

I am not the first person to observe that there was a prophetic quality to these words, or a depth of feeling to the performance
that went far beyond Nomi’s always sophisticated stagecraft. He sings the last line three times, and then, as the orchestra plays the final bars, he descends from the stage, a small, very upright figure, moving almost painfully in his gorgeous, anachronistic clothes.

It was evident that something was very wrong when he returned to New York at the beginning of 1983. In an interview with
Attitude
magazine Joey Arias describes his appearance. ‘He was always thin. But I remember him walking into a party looking like a skeleton. He was complaining of flu and exhaustion, and the doctors couldn’t diagnose what was wrong with him. Later he had breathing difficulties and collapsed, and he was taken into hospital.’

At the hospital, Nomi’s immune system was found to be practically non-functioning, making him susceptible to a myriad of normally uncommon infections. His skin was covered in sore and unsightly purple lesions – the reason he’d worn the ruff in Munich. It was diagnosed as Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare and usually indolent skin cancer. Rare, that is, until 1981, when doctors in California and New York began seeing virulent cases among young gay men. Like Nomi, these men were suffering from an underlying immune disease so new that it had only been named the previous summer, on 27 July 1982: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, also known at the time as GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.

Gay cancer, most people were calling it, or else gay plague, though it was increasingly being observed in other populations too. There was no treatment, and the cause, the Human-Immunodeficiency Virus, wouldn’t be identified until 1986. AIDS
wasn’t fatal in itself, but left the person susceptible to opportunistic infections, many of them previously unusual or mild in humans. Candidiasis, cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex, mycobacterium, pneumocystis, salmonella, toxoplasmosis, cryptococcosis, bringing with them blindness, wasting, pneumonia, sickness.

Nomi was prescribed Interferon for the Kaposi’s sarcoma, but it didn’t help. He went on a macrobiotic diet and spent much of that spring at home in his apartment on St Mark’s Place, watching his own old videos on repeat.
If they saw my face,
he sings in ‘Nomi Song’,
would they still know me now
– another line that shifts its meaning. In the summer he went back into Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Arias again:

He began to look like a monster: his eyes were just purple slits, he was covered in spots and his body was totally wasted. I had a dream that he’d recover his strength and go back on stage, but that he’d have to veil himself like the Phantom of the Opera. He laughed, he liked that idea, and he actually seemed to be getting better for a while. That was on a Friday night. I was going to go and see him again on the Saturday morning, but they called me and told me that Klaus had passed away in the night.

The story of Nomi’s short life haunted me. To resist loneliness, to make a joyous art of difference, and then to die in such profoundly isolating circumstances seemed brutally unfair, though it would soon be a common experience in the world he had inhabited. What did it mean to have AIDS at that time, when
diagnosis was an almost certain death sentence? It meant being perceived as a monster, an object of terror even to medical personnel. It meant being trapped in a body that was regarded as repellent, toxic, unpredictable and dangerous. It meant being shunned by society, subject to pity, disgust and horrified fear.

In
The Nomi Song,
there is a distressing section in which Klaus’s friends discuss the climate that surrounded his diagnosis. Man Parrish, his long-term collaborator: ‘A lot of people took off. They didn’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t know how to deal with it. Is this something I could catch? Does he have typhoid or the plague? You heard rumours. You heard stuff in the underground. No one knew what was going on.’ Page Wood, the art director of Nomi’s stage shows: ‘I remember seeing him at dinner and usually I’d go over and give Klaus a hug, and give him a European kiss on each cheek. And, I was just afraid to. I didn’t know if this was contagious . . . I sort of went up to him and I hesitated, and he just put his hand on my chest and said “It’s alright, don’t worry about it,” which made me start to tear up and I think that was the last time that I saw him.’

These responses were by no means uncommon. The intense fear generated by AIDS was in part an understandable reaction to a new and rapidly fatal disease. This is especially true of the very early years, in which both cause and mode of transmission were undetermined. Could it be spread by saliva? What about surfaces on the subway? Was it safe to hug a friend? Could you breathe the same air as a sick colleague? These are reasonable questions to ask, but fear of infection rapidly became entangled with more insidious concerns.

Between 1981 and 1996, when combination therapy became available, over 66,000 people died of AIDS in New York City alone, many of them gay men, in conditions of the most horrifying isolation. People were sacked from jobs and rejected by their families. Patients were left to die on gurneys in hospital corridors, assuming they’d managed to get admitted in the first place. Nurses refused to treat them, funeral parlours to bury their bodies, while politicians and religious leaders persistently blocked funding and education.

What was happening was a consequence of stigmatisation, the brutal process by which society works to dehumanise and exclude people who are perceived not to fit, who exhibit unwanted behaviours, attributes and traits. As Erving Goffman explains in his landmark 1963 study,
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity,
the word
stigma
derives from the Greek and was originally coined to describe a system of ‘bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier’. These marks, which were burnt or cut into the flesh, at once advertised and confirmed the bearer’s status as an outcast, with whom contact must be avoided for fear of infection or pollution.

Over time, usage expanded to refer to any signifier of unwanted difference – unwanted, that is, by society at large. A source of stigma might be visible or invisible, but once identified it acts to discredit and devalue the person in others’ eyes, revealing them not only as different but as actively inferior, ‘reduced . . . from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one’. You can see this process at work in the way that Henry Darger’s eccentric behaviours led to his institutionalisation, or in the treatment
received by Valerie Solanas after she was released from prison; even in the way that Warhol was excluded from galleries for seeming too camp, too gay.

AIDS, especially in the early years, primarily affected three groups: gay men, Haitians and intravenous drug users. As such, it served to inflame existing stigma, amplifying already entrenched homophobia, racism and contempt for addicts. As these previously discountable populations became simultaneously hyper-visible, outed by the ravages of AIDS-related infections, and apparently lethal, the carriers of a potentially fatal disease, they were confirmed as people to be protected from, rather than people who required care and treatment.

Then there was the matter of sickness itself. Stigma frequently attaches to disorders of the physical body, especially if they affect or draw attention to regions that are already considered shameful, or that are required to be in pristine condition. As Susan Sontag observes in her 1989 book
AIDS and Its Metaphors,
stigma tends to accompany conditions that alter physical appearance, particularly the face, the signifier of identity – one of the reasons that leprosy, though notably hard to transmit, has been regarded almost universally with such unconcealed horror, and that the lesions spreading over Nomi’s face had been so devastating.

Stigma is also at work around sexually transmitted diseases, particularly those that spread via what a society has designated as deviant or shameful sexual practices. In America of the 1980s, this chiefly meant sex between men, especially if it involved promiscuity or anal sex, a practice that Reagan’s Health Secretary throughout the AIDS years, Margaret Heckler, was shocked to discover existed, and which the White House press secretary found
hysterically amusing to contemplate whenever a journalist did succeed in raising the subject.

With this dismal material in mind, it’s not hard to see why people with AIDS were the target of so much fear and hatred, such irradiating dislike. Objects of stigma are always understood to be somehow polluting or contaminating, and these fears fuelled AIDS panic, with its fantasies around quarantine and exclusion, its anxieties about contact and spread.

Then there’s the issue of blame. In the grip of this peculiarly malign kind of magical thinking, there is a tendency to believe that the stigmatised condition isn’t random, a matter of chance, but is instead somehow deserved or earned, a consequence of moral failing in the bearer. This is particularly marked when it results from volitional behaviour, from what is construed as individual choice, be it taking drugs, engaging in illicit activities or having non-sanctioned sex.

With AIDS, this manifested as a widespread tendency to see the disease as a moral judgement, a punishment for deviancy (something that is especially visible in the rhetoric around its so-called innocent or blameless victims, the haemophiliacs, and later the babies born of HIV-positive women). ‘There is one, only one, cause of the AIDS crisis,’ Reagan’s former director of communications Pat Buchanan announced in his syndicated column in 1987: ‘the wilful refusal of homosexuals to cease indulging in the immoral, unnatural, unsanitary, unhealthy, and suicidal practice of anal intercourse, which is the primary means by which the AIDS virus is being spread through the “gay” community, and, thence, into the needles of IV drug abusers.’

Considering that stigmatisation is a process designed to deny contact, to separate and shun; considering that it always serves to dehumanise and deindividualise, reducing a person from a human being to the bearer of an unwanted attribute or trait, it is not surprising that one of its main consequences is loneliness, which is further accelerated by shame, the two things amplifying and driving one another. Appalling enough to be critically ill, to be exhausted, in pain and with limited mobility, without also becoming literally untouchable, a monstrous body that should be quarantined, islanded away from what is inevitably designated the normal population.