Love, Loss & Life: Real Stories from the AIDS Pandemic: Rupert Everett

Acclaimed actor and national treasure Rupert Everett describes the excitement of his youth when he first encountered the gay scene in London.  Rupert Everett's full story can be found in the NHST archive, but in this story he reveals his deepest fears as he became aware of a stalking "vampire" haunting the gay bars and clubs in the US and UK, and tells how AIDS was a 'time-bomb waiting to explode'.

This podcast series features stories taken from our first book, a collection of essays, reflections, and testimonies also entitled ‘Love, Loss & Life’ which you can buy here.

An audiobook is also available here.

Visit the National HIV Story Trust website

Transcript

Christopher Ashman: 0:06

'Love Loss and Life' - Real Stories from the AIDS pandemic. This is Rupert Everett's story read by Christopher Ashman. With an introduction by Anita Dobson.

Anita Dobson: 0:34

Today we understand that HIV can affect anyone of any age, sex or race. But back in the early 1980s, it was a community of gay men who were first impacted by the virus to devastating effect. At a time when this community was just beginning to enjoy some freedoms, a sense of joy and some liberty, an even bigger challenge was on the horizon that would rip this sense of freedom apart and decimate a generation. Here Rupert Everett reflects on gay life as it was leading up to the 1980s and how the landscape changed with the impact of HIV infection.

Rupert Everett (read by Christopher Ashman): 1:15

On the 5th February 2013, the British House of Commons approved the Same Sex Marriage Bill in a landslide vote, 400 to 175. That night, I was performing in 'The Judas Kiss' by David Hare, a play about the life of Oscar Wilde. It was an extraordinary evening to be playing Oscar, a man whose life was destroyed because he was a homosexual. With two years of hard labour for gross indecency, followed by three sad years of exile. Oscar died penniless in a cheap hotel in Paris. The dizzy heights from which he fell are hard to imagine for us today. But he was one of the great stars of the times. No party was complete without him, with three hits concurrently playing in the West End at the time of his arrest. Royalty attended his first nights, while later he slept with rent boys at Willis's. Like many stars, he felt himself above the law. As he walked into the fatal lawsuit against the father of his lover, he declared that 'the working classes are behind me', to a boy. They weren't. Five short years later, he was performing for drinks on the Parisian Boulevard with a missing tooth and a shabby suit. His companions were pickpockets and rent boys. He was a ruined man. During the play that cold February night felt like surfing a historical wave. On the street, the Evening Standard was full of the news from Parliament. The audience converged on the theatre with the same thought. Never was a play more suited to the times than 'The Judas Kiss' that night. We were not just a hit show. We were a total eclipse. The energy in the auditorium was intense. It felt, and I was not on drugs, as if the universe had briefly stopped in its tracks to watch. As I ran on for my first scene as Oscar into the arms of Lord Alfred Douglas, played by Freddy Fox, I felt like the crest of a wave crashing onto the stage with all the blinding tragedy of gay history in my wake. The drownings, the burials alive, the hangings, the pillorying, all the tortures invented by man in the name of God. The applause was euphoric at the end of the show, as much for the day itself as for the performance. Finally, homosexual relationships were fully and equally accepted in law. We've come a long way. As Oscar predicted, The Road to Freedom has been long and smeared with the blood of martyrs. And the fight is not over yet. I was sent away to school in the spring of 1967 at the age of eight. It is strange to think that on the 27th July that year, the Sexual Offences Bill received Royal Assent and to be homosexual was no longer a crime, technically. Based on the findings of the Wolfenden Report of 1957 'The Sexual Offences Act' decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men over 21. The law did not apply, by the way to the merchant navy or the armed forces, to Scotland or to Northern Ireland. Those countries only decriminalised in the 1980s. To give one an idea of the national attitude, one has only to listen to Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary at the time, during the all night debate, which led up to the vote. He declared that those who suffered from this disability carry a great weight of shame all their lives, and he was on our side. The Act did little to stop a steady rise in prosecutions. As the police took it upon themselves to raid clubs and bars, parks and bath houses, anywhere public displays of homosexuality could be found or tricked out. London in the mid 70s was still caked in soot, a post war city of bedsits and mansion flats where the rich, hardly rich by today's standards, and the poor still rubbed shoulders. If you could sing for your supper, you could get by on four pounds a week, crashing at other people's houses, eating at greasy spoons and faulting the barriers at the underground with a spot of light grazing at Harrods if provisions were running low. Nobody worried about the future. Nothing was written down. So you found your way about using your nose. Pretty quickly, I sniffed out the Forbidden City behind the crumbling facade of respectable Kensington. Following a man down the King's Road one night, I discovered a sex club called The Gigolo. With my heart in my mouth, I descended a thin rickety staircase, not knowing exactly where I was going, but following some interior sat nav, the same one that makes birds fly south, etc, into a writhing cavern of bodies under a naked red light bulb. 'Rocket Man' was on the record player, and I felt quite suddenly, as if I had disappeared from my own life. There was a sense of complete freedom that I have rarely felt since. There was always the danger of the police. And of course, I had to be there on the night of the famous Gigolo raid. Suddenly, the lights snapped on. Elton stopped singing as the needle scratched across the vinyl and the police swarmed down the stairs. There was mayhem as 100 queens tried to pull their trousers up, while being herded onto the street into paddy waggons. Some attempted to run and were tackled to the ground and dragged back. But I just acted like a passing Hurray and managed to squeeze through the crowd and get a lift to the Sombrero where those of us who had evaded the police went to regroup and embroider the event into the annals of gay history. Being only 17, the age of consent for homosexuals was still 21, I was living outside the law, and I loved it. I felt I was a part of something. And I developed a passive distaste for the status quo, a sort of inverted snobbery, which I have never managed to shake off. The gay world of the late 70s was a melting pot, classless and ageless. A decrepit Duke in leather cruised a young plumber at The Coleherne while the smoothie from Sotheby's was the sub of a dangerous felon over the road at The Bolton's. We were united just for being there. And sex was good for the fact of doing it. It didn't really matter who it was with. I took my first trip to New York. I remember standing on the roof terrace of some rich queens house in the West Village my first night there, dopey with jet lag. And looking across the rooftops at all those weird water towers perched on houses scribbled over with fire escapes against a backdrop of skyscrapers replete with Twin Towers blinking. The air tasted of metal. A couple of men were copulating on an old mattress on the roof opposite, observed by a half naked lady riding the bannister of her fire escape and stroking her breasts. Two men watched and tweaked each other's nipples in an open window. On another roof further off, a party of men danced on a tiny terrace, and disco music, helium screams over strings and a heartbeat pulsed through the streets when I left the house. Men loitered on corners still and tense as lizards waiting to snatch at a tasty ass swishing by. I could hardly breathe with the excitement. The whole city seemed poised for the sexual act. Emboldened by the success of the Stonewall Riots of 1969, gay New York in the 70s was a gritty and lawless jungle of sexual revelry. Queens like Andy Warhol, Halston and Steve Rubell ruled the Big Apple. Its constitution had been written at The Factory and on the dance floor at Studio 54, and it was all too good to be true. But there was a strange feeling, as if one was being followed. Moving secretly through the misty dungeons and discos, the bath houses and the rotting West Side pier, the invisible vampire was dancing with everyone, killing with a kiss. AIDS hit like a tsunami at the beginning of the 1980s. Many of the club cowboys lost their strut. They turned to skin and bone overnight, a new image of the bankrupt city, colour drained to black and white. They shuffled through the crowds wrapped in oversized scarves against the chill wind or a cold stare, but their glazed eyes and hollow cheeks gave them away. Parents held their children close as these queens limped by. Meanwhile, back in the UK, I had become a West End star, playing a gay schoolboy groomed for treason in a play by Julian Mitchell called 'Another Country'. I mentioned this fact not to draw attention to my patchy career, but because it was remarkable, a contradiction that a story about boys falling in love with each other achieved commercial success during such conservative times. This was when I first heard about the gay cancer. I turned on the telly one night and a boy's face appeared. He was someone I had been sleeping with on and off for years. In that split second before the sound came up, I knew. He was one of the early cases. Nothing would ever be the same. The next week, we went to war. A doctored poster of Ronald Reagan suddenly appeared all over America, plastered on walls at night by activists. He seemed to have Kaposi's sarcoma all over his face. It touched a nerve. Reagan had never once uttered the word AIDS in eight years in office. The organisation 'ACT UP' took to the streets and for the first time since Stonewall, when the police raised their batons, the gays fought back. Silence equals death was their mantra. The television images were horrendous and surreal. Young men streaming with blood being dragged from the steps of churches by policemen and spacesuits. Women joined the fight, outraged by what they saw. Mothers stitched panels onto the AIDS quilt and took it to Washington DC in a protest for their dead sons. The Princess of Wales walked into a hospital in Harlem and hugged a seven year old boy in blue pyjamas, AIDS and all, for the whole world to see. The Daily Mail lit the fire that ended up as 'Section 28', reporting in 1983 that a book entitled 'Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin', about a little girl who lives with her father and his homosexual lover, was available at a school library run by the inner London Education Authority. Conservatives roared with indignation at the idea of the promotion of homosexuality, especially since they bluntly considered as a disease trap. But despite the horror of AIDS, the tide was against them. And it was not until May 1988 that Section 28 half-heartedly became law. Margaret Thatcher had misread the mood of the country. The night before the law was enacted, four lesbians invaded the BBC Six O'Clock news studio, one lady managing to chain herself to Sue Lawley's desk, only to be sat on by Lawley's male fellow newscaster. Around that time, two clever queens bought a sandwich shop in old Compton Street, and suddenly, Soho was claimed by the gay community. Gyms changed the gay silhouette. And soon, we looked much better naked than our heterosexual counterparts. A London club scene exploded at venues with strange names. FF, Queer Nation, Troll, Trade and the Daisy Chain. One popular song was called 'Bring on the Guillotine', which always made me laugh. Maybe we were in the middle of a revolution, but we just didn't know it. For those of us that had survived the 70s and was still here, something had definitely shifted. Experience had toughened us. We began to have the same effortless confidence as straights. On the other hand, there was still no cure. But feelings of panic and helplessness were submerged in waves of hedonism that played out against a backdrop of hospital corridors and funeral homes. In 1996, the first cocktail of antiretroviral drugs became available. Initially, it was thought that this combination therapy could only buy time, but it quickly became apparent that the drugs were going to be a major game changer. If you didn't become resistant and could tolerate them long enough 28 pills a day at various intervals, before food, after food, waking and sleeping. They could even turn around your numbers. And, this was the elixir, render you undetectable. For some it came just in time. For others, agonisingly close, but too late. Nevertheless, we were entering a new era tinged with optimism, where AIDS could be managed at least. As if in celebration the following year, Tony Blair won a landslide victory. And I swept to Hollywood for my penultimate reinvention as America's singing and dancing gay best friend. Today, the world has gone full circle. Gay people seem to be doing all the decent things the straights used to do, getting married, having babies and recycling. I feel like an old grandmother, sitting in my rocking chair. The past is all twinkling lights on a snowy night. So here we are, marriage material at last in one corner of the earth, while in the other, we see the whole story repeat itself, in the destructive force of a world controlled by paranoid petty dictators, and so called religious leaders, all men. It's public school all over again. Russia, Uganda, Greece, and God are all putting their best foot forward to trample out the sin of homosexuality. So the revolution is not over. Maybe it never is.

Christopher Ashman: 16:47

A version of this essay first appeared in the New Statesman. Rupert Everett is one of the 100 people whom the National HIV Story Trust interviewed on film to create the archive now housed at the London Metropolitan Archives. Thank you for listening to this story from 'Love, Loss and Life', a collection of stories reflecting on 40 years of the AIDS pandemic in the 80s and 90s. To find out more about the National HIV Story Trust, visit nhst.org.uk. The moral rights of the author has been asserted. Text copyright NHST 2021. Production copyright NHST 2022