Christopher Bernau

Christopher Bernau born 2 June 1940 (d. 1989)

Christopher Bernau (born Herbert Augustine Bernau) was an American actor.

Bernau trained in the drama department at the University of California before getting his big break, appearing in the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of Antony and Cleopatra in 1962. He continued in that role until 1964, when he toured nationally in the production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? These roles, in addition to performing at Canada's Stratford Festival, led to an appearance in a story arc on cult Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows in 1969 and 1970.

His most famous role, however, was that of villain Alan Spaulding on the soap opera Guiding Light, a role he played from 1977 to 1984 and again from 1986 until shortly before his death in 1989.

Bernau is considered to be one of the only truly 'out' soap opera actors, as it was fairly well known by both the actors he worked with, and the soap press at large, that he was gay.

Bernau was diagnosed with AIDS but continued to work on Guiding Light. He left the show when he became too ill to show up at work, and he died of a heart attack brought on by complications from AIDS. He is buried at Santa Barbara Cemetery, Santa Barbara, California.

Crawford Barton

Crawford Barton born 2 June 1943 (d. 1993)

Crawford Barton was a notable gay photographer. His work is known for documenting the blooming of the openly gay culture in San Francisco, in the 1960s and 1970s.

Born and raised in a fundamentalist community in rural Georgia, Barton was a shy, introspective boy — a 'sissy'. His artistic interests and fear of sports alienated him from his father, a struggling farmer. He escaped family tensions by creating a world of his own imagination, which eventually led him to receive a small art scholarship at the University of Georgia.

It was here that Barton fell in love with a man for the first time. His feelings weren’t reciprocated, and after one semester, he dropped out and returned to the farm.

A couple years later, at age 21, he enrolled in art school in Atlanta. He made new friends and found outlets for his pent-up sexual energy in that city’s gay bars and clubs. It was during this time in Atlanta that Barton received a used 35mm camera as a gift, and learned basic darkroom techniques. He found his true calling in life — photography.

Barton moved to California in the late 1960s to pursue his art and life as an openly gay man. By the early 1970s he was established as a leading photographer of the 'golden age of gay awakening' in San Francisco. He was as much a participant as a chronicler of this extraordinary time and place.

Many of his images documenting long-haired freaks dancing in the street, love-ins in the park, 'dykes on bikes', cross-dressers in the Castro, and leather men prowling at night have become classics of the gay world. He photographed some of the first Gay Pride parades and protests; Harvey Milk campaigning in San Francisco; and celebrities including poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and actors Sal Mineo and Paul Winfield.

But it was his circle of friends and acquaintances that inspired his most intimate erotic photography, especially his lover, Larry Lara [left and below]. Crawford described Larry as the 'perfect specimen, as crazy and wonderful and spontaneous and free as Kerouac, so I’m never bored and never tired of looking at him'. Considered as a single body of work, his photographs of Lara dancing in the hallway of their flat on Dorland Street, a bearded hippie in the door of a cabin in Marin, a sensual nude in the hills of Land’s End, suggest the fullness, richness and complexity of the man he loved most.

In 1974, the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum featured Barton's prints in a show entitled 'New Photography, San Francisco and the Bay Area'. His bold, unapologetic work was praised by The New York Times reviewer. Other critics labelled it 'shocking' and 'vulgar'.

In addition to his fine art photography, Barton worked on assignment for The Advocate, and the Bay Area Reporter as well as The Examiner, Newsday, and the Los Angeles Times. A book of Barton's work, Beautiful Men, was published in 1976 and his photographs were used to illustrate a collection of short stories of Malcolm Boyd. Crawford Barton, Days of Hope was published posthumously in 1994 by Editions Aubrey Walter.

Days of Hope features more than 60 of Barton's black and white photographs which capture the look and optimistic spirit of '70s gay San Francisco: the freedom and joy of the sexual revolution (pre-AIDS), the intimate bonds of lesbian and gay couples, and like Beautiful Men, homoerotic portraits of the hottest men.

'I tried to serve as a chronicler, as a watcher of beautiful people - to feed back an image of a positive, likable lifestyle ― to offer pleasure as well as pride,' he explained.

By the early 1980s this period was over. San Francisco and the gay community were devastated by the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Barton’s lover of 22 years, Larry Lara, died of complications from AIDS before Barton himself succumbed at the age of 50 in 1993.

Howard Ashman

Howard Ashman born 17 May 1950 (d. 1991)

Howard Ashman was an American playwright and lyricist.

Howard Ashman first studied at Boston University and Goddard College and then went on to achieve his master's degree from Indiana University in 1974. He collaborated with Alan Menken on several films, notably animated features for Disney, Ashman writing the lyrics and Menken composing the scores.

Ashman, born Howard Elliott Ashman in Baltimore, Maryland was the artistic director of the WPA Theater in New York. He first worked with Alan Menken on a 1979 musical adapted from Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. They also collaborated on Little Shop of Horrors with Ashman as director, lyricist, and librettist.

Ashman was director, lyricist and bookwriter for the 1986 Broadway musical, Smile (music by Marvin Hamlisch). Along with Menken, Ashman was the co-recipient of two Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes and two Oscars. His second Academy Award in 1992 was awarded posthumously for Best Song and was accepted by his partner, Bill Lauch.

He succumbed to complications from AIDS at the age of 40 in New York, during the making of both Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. The song Proud of Your Boy from Aladdin was cut from the movie after the mother was taken out of the story. Ashman and Menken had finished the songs for Beauty and the Beast, but Tim Rice was brought in to finish the Aladdin songs with Menken.

He was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 2001. Beauty and the Beast was dedicated to him, 'To our Friend Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul, we will be forever grateful. Howard Ashman 1950-1991'

Liberace

Liberace born 16 May 1919 (d. 1987)

Wladziu Valentino Liberace, or Lee to his friends, was a classically trained musician who found a rich vein of record, concert and television success when he left the 'boring parts out'. His blend of campy, extravagant theatricals, flamboyant dress, witty self-deprecation and feather-light classical music made him adored by generations of women who were either oblivious to his blatant flaming, or just didn't care.

He suffered from ill-health in later life including heart and liver trouble, and emphysema from smoking, but it was an AIDS-related illness which finally sent him to his candelabra'ed rhinestone coffin in the sky at the age of 67.

Liberace always denied that he was homosexual, and the pretty young men were just his chauffeurs and personal assistants.
The Liberace Foundation

Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin born 13 May 1940 (d. 1989)

Bruce Charles Chatwin was a British novelist and travel writer.

After leaving Marlborough College in 1958, Chatwin reluctantly moved to London to work as a porter in the Works of Art department at the auction house Sotheby's. Thanks to his sharp visual acuity, he quickly became Sotheby's expert on Impressionist art. He later became a director of the company.

In late 1964 he began to suffer from problems with his sight, which he attributed to the close analysis of artwork entailed by his job. A leading eye specialist recommended that Chatwin take a six month break from his work at Sotheby's. Having been involved in the design of an eye hospital in Addis Ababa, he suggested Chatwin visit east Africa. In February 1965, Chatwin left for the Sudan. On his return, Chatwin quickly became disenchanted with the art world, and turned his interest instead to archaeology. He resigned from his job at Sotheby's in the early summer of 1966.

Chatwin studied archaelogy at the University of Edinburgh for two years but left without taking a degree, finding the work tiresome.

In 1972, Chatwin was hired by the Sunday Times Magazine as an adviser on art and architecture. His association with the magazine cultivated his narrative skills and he travelled on many international assignments, writing on such subjects as Algerian migrant workers and the Great Wall of China, and interviewing diverse people.

In 1972, Chatwin interviewed the 93-year-old architect and designer Eileen Gray in her Paris salon, where he noticed a map of the area of South America called Patagonia which she had painted. 'I've always wanted to go there,' Bruce told her. 'So have I,' she replied, 'go there for me.' Two years later, in November 1974, Chatwin flew out to Lima in Peru, and reached Patagonia a month later. When he arrived there he severed himself from the newspaper with a telegram: 'Have gone to Patagonia.' He spent six months there, a trip which resulted in the book In Patagonia (1977), which established his reputation as a travel writer. Later, however, residents in the region came forward to contradict the events depicted in Chatwin's book. It was the first, but not the last time in his career, that conversations and characters that Chatwin reported as true, were alleged to be just fiction.

Later works included a fictionalised study of the slave trade, The Viceroy of Ouidah, which he researched with extended stays in the West African state of Benin. For The Songlines, Chatwin went to Australia to develop the thesis that the songs of the Aborigines are a cross between a creation myth, an atlas and an Aboriginal man's personal story. On the Black Hill was set closer to home, in the hill farms of the Welsh Borders, and focuses on the relationship between twin brothers, Lewis and Benjamin, who grow up isolated from the course of twentieth century history. Utz, his last book, was a fictional take on the obsession which leads people to collect. Set in Prague, the novel details the life and death of Kaspar Utz, a man obsessed with the collection of Meissen porcelain. Chatwin was working on a number of new ideas for future novels at the time of his death in 1989.

Chatwin is admired for his spare, lapidary style and his innate story-telling abilities. However, he has also been strongly criticised for his fictionalised anecdotes of real people, places, and events. Frequently, the people he wrote about recognised themselves and did not always appreciate his distortions of their culture and behaviour. Chatwin, however, was philosophical about what he saw as an unavoidable dilemma, arguing that his portrayals were not intended to be faithful representations.

Much to the surprise of many of his friends, Chatwin had married Elizabeth Chanler in 1965, whom had met at Sotheby's where she worked as a secretary. Chatwin was bisexual throughout his entire married life, a circumstance his wife knew and accepted. They had no children, and after fifteen years of marriage, she asked for a separation and sold their farmhouse in Gloucestershire. However, towards the end of his life they reconciled.

Chatwin was known as a socialite in addition to being a famous travel author. His circle of friends extended far and wide and he was renowned for accepting hospitality and patronage from a powerful set of friends and allies. Penelope Betjeman - wife of the poet laureate John Betjeman - showed him the border country of Wales, and thereby helped to contribute to the gestation of the book that would become On the Black Hill. Tom Maschler, the publisher, was also a patron to Chatwin during this time, lending him his house in the area as a writing retreat. Later, he visited Patrick Leigh Fermor, in his house near Kardamyli, in the Peloponnese.

Numbered among his lovers was Jasper Conran.

In the late 1980s, Chatwin developed AIDS. He was one of the first high-profile sufferers of the disease in Britain and although he hid the illness - passing off his symptoms as fungal infections or the effects of the bite of a Chinese bat - a typically exotic cover story - it was a poorly kept secret. He did not respond well to AZT, and with his condition deteriorating rapidly, Chatwin and his wife went to live in the South of France at the house that belonged to the mother of his one-time lover, Jasper Conran. There, during his final months, Chatwin was nursed by both his wife and Shirley Conran. He died in Nice in 1989 at age 48.

His ashes were scattered by a Byzantine chapel above Kardamyli in the Peloponnese near to the home of one of his many mentors, Patrick Leigh-Fermor.

Keith Haring

Keith Haring born 5 May 1958 (d. 1990)

Keith Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and studied graphic art in Pittsburg. After coming out, he moved to New York where he became influenced by graffiti art and studied at the School of Visual Arts.

With his distinctive style - strong graphic outlines, simple but effective stick figures and bold primary colours - he quickly moved from the streets to international art galleries. His work is part of the iconography of the 1980s.

He was a tireless AIDS campaigner and, tragically, succumbed to the disease himself in 1990 at the age of 31.

Shortly before he died, he established the Keith Haring Foundation to maintain and enhance his legacy of supporting children's and AIDS organisations.

Antony Hamilton

Antony Hamilton born 4 May 1952 (d. 1995)

Born in Liverpool, England, but adopted and raised in Australia, Antony Hamilton studied ballet and toured with the Australian Ballet Company before moving into modelling.

His handsome looks and dance training made the move into acting inevitable and after several TV specials, Hamilton was offered the role of male model/undercover agent in hit TV show Undercover, as a replacement for Jon Erik Hexum, who had been killed in a tragic on-set accident.

He was briefly considered as a successor to Roger Moore as James Bond. He continued to work in film and TV, notably the revived TV series of Mission Impossible and The Howling IV, until his death in March, 1995 from an AIDS-related illness.

Mark Morrisroe

Mark Morrisroe born 1959 (d. 1989)

Mark Morrisroe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1959 and was a photographer.

His mother was a drug-addicted prostitute. He left home at the age of 13 and began hustling. One of his disgruntled contacts shot him and he carried a bullet in his chest for the rest of his life.

He won a place at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but he was disruptive as his lifestyle involved drugs, cross-dressing, and exhibitionism.

Many of his photographs were self-portraits and formed a visual diary of his life. He photographed himself, friends and lovers in dark, grainy, distressed colour, integrating Super 8 stills and black and white Polaroids. His work is 'decadent' and his subject matter inseparable from his life. His work is technically experimental and takes on a sketchbook quality which includes titles and comments scrawled on the edges of his images.

Morrisroe used a 195 Polaroid Land camera and a film donated by the Polaroid company.

He assumed various identities including Mark Dirt, fanzine editor, and Sweet Raspberry, a maudlin drag queen down on her luck.

In 1997 an exhibition of Morrisoe's work My Life. Mark Morrisroe: Polaroids 1977-1989 was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. The exhibition included 188 portraits. Captured over a twelve-year period, Morrisroe's naked body in these photographs depicts the changes to his body cased by HIV infection as he transforms from youthful beauty to near-skeletal wasting. The photographs carry great self-awareness and poignancy.

Towards the end of his life he spent so much time in hospital he set up a dark room in the ward shower.

When he died 2000 Polaroids were found along with Super-8 films.

The estate of Mark Morrisroe (Collection Ringier) is currently located at the Fotomuseum Winterthur

Halston

Halston born 23 April 1932 (d. 1990)

Roy Halston Frowick, also known as Halston was an iconic clothing designer of the 1970s.

He was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He began his career as a milliner (designing the pillbox hat Jacqueline Kennedy wore to her husband's 1961 Presidential inauguration) and when he moved to designing women's wear, Newsweek dubbed him 'the premier fashion designer of all America'. His designs were worn by Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Anjelica Huston, Lauren Bacall and Elizabeth Taylor, setting a style that would be closely associated with the international jet set of the era.

As 'the first [American] designer to realise the potential of licensing himself,' his influence went beyond style to reshape the business of fashion. Through his licensing agreement with US retailer JC Penney, his designs were accessible to women at a variety of income levels. Although this practice is common today, it was a controversial move at the time and cost him more couture customers.

Despite his achievements, his increasing drug use - he enthusiastically embraced the jetset lifestyle of his celebrity friends and clients - and failure to meet deadlines (he was reluctant to hire junior designers to design licensed products) undermined his success. In October of 1984 he was fired from his own company and lost the right to design and sell clothes under his own name.

Halston was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. He died of AIDS-related lung cancer in San Francisco, California on March 26, 1990.

According to Salon.com, Halston was 'the first international fashion superstar - and possibly the best designer America has ever had.'


In the Sister Sledge disco hit He's The Greatest Dancer Halston is memorably mentioned in a description of a well-dressed man: 'Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci - he looks like a still, the man is dressed to kill'.

Halton is often mentioned in songs, films and TV shows - usually as a yardstick for a certain kind of style.

The Halston label was resurrected in 2008 with London-based designer Marios Schwab.

Michael Callen

Michael Callen born 11 April 1955 (d. 1993)

Michael Callen was a singer, songwriter, composer, author, and AIDS activist. He was a significant architect of the response to the AIDS crisis in the United States.

First diagnosed with 'Gay related immune deficiency' (GRID) in 1982, Callen quickly became a leader in the response to the epidemic, coining the phrase 'people with AIDS' (PWAs) in contrast to the then current 'AIDS victims'. He was a founding member of the People with AIDS Coalition among other organisations, and he testified before the President's Commission on AIDS and both houses of Congress.

In 1983, Callen co-authored the book How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, which outlined the tenets of safe(r) sex. In 1990, he wrote Surviving AIDS, which received an Honorable Mention from the American Medical Writers Association.

He was frequently seen on television talking about AIDS. Appearances included Nightline, Good Morning America, 20/20, and The Phil Donahue Show. He wrote for several newspapers and magazines, including the Village Voice, The New York Native, and Outweek; some of his articles are collected in Surviving and Thriving with AIDS, published by the People with AIDS Coalition in 1988.

In the early 80s, Callen was in a gay and lesbian four-piece band called Lowlife, playing piano and keyboards, singing, yodelling, twirling a baton, and dancing.

He was a well-loved singer and songwriter in the US gay community. He was a founding member of the gay male a cappella singing group, The Flirtations, with whom he recorded two albums. He also had a solo album, Purple Heart (Significant Other Records, 1988), which a review in The Advocate called, 'the most remarkable gay independent release of the past decade'. During the last year of his life, Michael worked furiously to record over 40 tunes; Legacy, a 2-CD album of 29 of them, was posthumously released by Significant Other Records in 1996.

In partnership with Oscar winner Peter Allen and Marsha Melamet, he wrote his most enduring song, Love Don't Need a Reason, which he sang frequently at gay pride and AIDS-related events around the country.

In 1993 he appeared in the films Philadelphia (as part of The Flirtations) and Zero Patience (as a singing transvestite virus, Miss HIV).

Callen died of AIDS-related complications in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 38.

George Stambolian

George Stambolian born 10 April 1938 (d. 1991)

George Stambolian was a scholar of French, and advocate and critic of American literature and photography. A pioneer of queer literary studies, he also edited many very successful collections of homosexual fiction including the Men On Men series, and was a regular contributor to The Advocate, Christopher Street and the New York Native.

He died of an AIDS-related illness in December 1991, at his home in New York.

Bernard-Marie Koltès

Bernard-Marie Koltès born 9 April 1948 (d. 1989)

Bernard-Marie Koltès was a French playwright and director.

Born in 1948 to a middle-class family in Metz, his life was violent and anchored in revolt. He tried his hand at writing as a youth but later renounced it, and didn't take to the stage until the age of twenty. He garnered recognition for his work on a production of Medea (Médée) directed by Jorge Lavelli in 1970.

After seeing the film actress Maria Casarès, he was inspired and resumed writing, completing around ten plays in his lifetime. His first piece, the long monologue, The Night Just Before The Forests, was staged in 1977 at the Avignon Festival, and subsequent productions were put on in collaboration with director Patrice Chéreau.

Koltès's work, based in real-life problems, expresses the tragedy of being alone and of death. His writing style accents the dramatic tension and the lyricism of his plays. Koltes is most famous for his plays The Night Just Before the Forests (La Nuit juste avant les Forêts, 1976), Sallinger (1977) and In the Solitude of Cotton Fields (Dans la Solitude des Champs de Coton, 1986). Many of these plays were first directed by Patrice Chereau when he was artistic director of the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre. Koltes also translated into French Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.

It is evident that Genet and the absurdists influenced Koltès's writing. Like other absurdist writers, he felt exiled - in his case, as a homosexual in a heterosexual world. In Africa, he saw native cultures being wiped out by European influences. This theme brought forth Black Battles with Dogs. After a visit to America he wrote Quay West (1985), about a brother and sister in a foreign culture. The psychopathic killer Roberto Succo provided the inspiration for his final play Roberto Zucco. It was first performed posthumously in Berlin in 1990, directed by Peter Stein. It has since been performed across Europe and the United States.

Bernard-Marie Koltès is considered by many the greatest French playwright of the end of the twentieth century.

Koltès died in 1989 due to complications from AIDS.

Anthony Perkins

Anthony Perkins born 4 April 1932 (d. 1992)

Actor Anthony Perkins is best known for his role as Norman Bates in the classic Hitchcock thriller Psycho (1960).

He made his first film in 1953 and was Oscar nominated for his second film Friendly Persuasion (1956). Many felt he should have been nominated for Psycho, and would have been offered better roles as a result. He appeared in a number of acclaimed roles in films such as Catch-22, (1970), The Trial and Murder On the Orient Express (1975) and on Broadway. But his later career saw him doing mostly made-for-TV movies and Psycho sequels. His persona as an actor was frail, delicate and agitated, and this seems to have reflected his actual nervousness.

Primarily homosexual, Perkins had a number of relationships with men in the 1950s and 60s, including Tab Hunter, writer/model/actor Alan Helms, Rudolph Nureyev and dancer/choreographer Grover Dale, with whom he had a six year relationship prior to his marriage. Perkins may have married for fear of an expose of his homosexuality in Confidential magazine - his wife, Berry Berenson was sixteen years his junior. Dale also married, 10 days before Perkins. Perkins and Berry had two sons, Osgood (Oz) and Elvis.

Anthony Perkins died from an AIDS related illness in 1992.

As a further tragic footnote, his widow Berry Berenson was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, the flight that was hijacked and crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001.

Leigh Bowery

Leigh Bowery born 26 March 1961 (d. 1994)

Leigh Bowery born in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia was a performance artist, club creature, and clothing designer.

After attending Melbourne High School, and having abandoned his home in Australia and a fashion course there he had a colourful exhibitionist career following his arrival in London in 1980, making a name for himself by dramatic performances of dance, music and simple exhibitionism, while wearing bizarre and very original outfits of his own design. He was frequently seen performing in Taboo, a fashionable night club he operated, (after years brightening the doorways of other people's events) near Leicester Square and is frequently identified as a key influence on the style of the New Romantic music movement that was popular in Britain during the early 1980s. Though perhaps he is more properly placed within the context of 'The Cult With No Name' as the activities of the pansexual set of young Londoners had already been dubbed.

A large man, he used his costumes to exaggerate his size and the effects were frequently overpowering and unforgettable for those who encountered him, the more so because of his confrontational style. A wallflower he was not.

In the late 1980s, Bowery collaborated as a dancer with the post-Punk ballet dancer Michael Clark, after having been his costume-designer for a number of years. He also participated in multi-media events like I Am Kurious Oranj and the play Hey, Luciani, with Mark E. Smith and The Fall.

In 1988 he had a week-long show in Anthony d'Offay's prestigious Dering Street Gallery in London's West End, in which he lolled on a chaise longue behind a two-way mirror, primping and preening in a variety of outfits while visitors to the gallery looked on. The insouciance and audacity of this overt queer narcissism captivated gallery goers, critics and other artists. Bowery's exquisite appearance, silence and intense self-absorption was further accentuated by his own recordings of random and abrasive traffic noises which were played for the show's duration. The very intimate and private was flung in the face of the public complete with a 'Street Life' sound track, hinting perhaps at something still darker. In some outfits he appears like some strange roadside creature, like a cat that finally got the cream (of art world attention), in others he is the 'Satan's Son' that he would whisper, years later, on his deathbed.

The difficulty of engaging in such an hedonistic and wilfully original life and artistic practice without independent financial means has long been the curse of the both the innovator and bohemian. For all his art world exposure and contacts it seems peculiar now that no-one suggested to Bowery that he might adopt the very viable strategy of Gilbert and George - an earlier generation's living sculpture - and derive an income from selling images of himself rather than rely on occasional commissions, modelling work for Lucian Freud, or design consultancy for Rifat Ozbek. In the later years of his life the advantages of having an independent income started to become more obvious and Bowery looked to music, in the form of art rock/pop group Minty, to possibly provide this independent income stream. 'I have a profile,' he confided to flatmate and fellow Australian Anne Holt, 'But I have no money.' Minty he hoped would provide a solution to this crux.

He outraged the London gay scene with a performance at SMact, a short lived SM Night at Bar Industria. Using Nazi costumes with a lesbian friend named Barbara, they turned concentration camp experimentation into SMart. The readers of Capital Gay, the London weekly newspaper, turned on fellow performer Berkley, who had played the victim, and Barbara and Leigh weathered the storm. He was after all, 'the punk of the eighties' and longtime darling of the international avant garde.

In 1993 Leigh formed Raw Sewage with Sheila Tequila and Stella Stein. They performed in 18" platforms at the Love Ball in Amsterdam, but the collaboration ended in dramas. Leigh went on to appear as 'Madame Garbo' in The Homosexual (or the difficulty of sexpressing oneself) by Copi at Bagleys Warehouse in London's King's Cross.

During 1994 Leigh performed the Fete worse than death in Hoxton Square, Leigh and Nicola Bateman (later, Nicola Bowery) showed their classic 'Birth Show' in which Leigh gives birth to Nicola, using a specially designed harness which holds her upside down to his belly under his costume.

In November 1994 Minty began a two week show at London's Freedom Cafe, watched by the young Alexander McQueen but it was too much for Westminster City Council who closed the show down after only one night.

He married his long-term female companion Nicola Bateman on May 13, 1994, only months before his death from AIDS-related illness at UC Hospital London on New Year's Eve 1994, after a five week battle that only a handful of friends were informed about. 'Tell them I've gone pig farming in Bolivia' is one reported death bed pronouncement which is illustrative of the gallows humour and dark irony that can be traced in much of his work.

Glimmers of the influences of film maker John Waters and artist Andy Warhol can be seen in his keen appreciation of bad taste, truly outlandish self presentation and a deep desire to shock and confuse. 'I want to be the Andy Warhol of London' he once said. 'Dressed-up' he was obviously 'Modern Art on legs' (as Boy George commented), but in daytime attire the badly-fitting, obvious, disturbing wigs are a nod to Warhol's self-presentation strategies that has thus far seemed invisible to both critics and friends alike.

He became known to a wider audience by appearing in a Post-Modernist/Surrealist series of television and cinema and commercials for the Pepe jeans company, MTV London and other commissions such as stage work for rock band U2. He also appeared regularly in articles, vox pops and as cover star in London's i-D magazine. Tired brands in need of fresh ideas tended to covet his dazzling originality.



Bowery was painted in a series of nude portraits by Lucian Freud [above and left], and travelled internationally to the opening events of his exhibitions. This modelling work provided him with an income of sorts for a period and he certainly relished Freud's connections to the British establishment, though it seems strange now that such an explosively original and inventive artist like Bowery would subordinate himself to the likes of Freud.

Bowery received posthumous exposure in the form of the West End and Broadway musical, Taboo starring Boy George, which transferred to Broadway after running for 16 months in London - Bowery was played by Boy George [pictured as Bowery] and subsequently Matt Lucas. Bowery's career is described more straightforwardly in a 2002 documentary The Legend of Leigh Bowery, directed by Charles Atlas.

Ricky Wilson

Ricky Wilson born 19 March 1953 (d. 1985)

Ricky Helton Wilson was the original guitarist in the rock band The B-52s, which he helped to form in 1976.

Born in Athens, Georgia, he was the brother of fellow B-52s member Cindy Wilson.

Among guitar aficionados, Wilson's most salient feature must surely be his highly original approach to playing the instrument. Because at first The B-52s did not have a bass, he invented his own tunings, grouping the strings into a bass course (usually tuned to 5ths for strumming) and a treble course (often tuned in unison), removing the middle two strings entirely, though sometimes he played with 5 strings as well.

His style is said to have been heavily influenced by American surf group The Ventures, possibly Pink Floyd's Lucifer Sam and other Batman-style sixties music. A Wilson-modifield blue Mosrite guitar is visible on the back cover of the B-52s' self-titled first album [pictured left, Ricky Wilson is in the red jacket].

Wilson died on October 12, 1985, aged 32, from health complications related to AIDS. In an interview, fellow band member Kate Pierson stated that Wilson had kept his illness secret from his fellow band members because he 'did not want anyone to worry about him or fuss about him'.

Following his death, fellow B-52s' member Keith Strickland (originally the drummer for The B-52s) learned how to play the guitar in a similar fashion to Wilson.

The B-52s effectively disappeared for a couple of years following their loss, unable at first to envisage continuing without their friend (and in Cindy Wilson's case, brother) but they eventually regrouped and returned to achieve mainstream worldwide commercial success and The B52s remain musically active.

Rudolph Nureyev

Rudolph Nureyev born 17 March 1938 (d. 1993)

Rudolph Nureyev was the greatest male ballet dancer of his generation - and one of the two most significant of the 20th Century - the other being Nijinsky.

Born on a train somewhere in Siberia in 1938, he was a small, sensitive, somewhat deprived boy, bullied and tormented by the other children. But he had a flair for folk-dancing, and was discovered, taught and encouraged by two exiled ballerinas living in Ufa. His father was less than pleased on his return from the Second World War to discover his son studying ballet - picture a Russian Billy Elliot. His natural ability and an unshakeable self-belief gave him his escape.

Aged 17, he found himself enrolled at the Leningrad Ballet School, where he was brilliant and difficult. In 1958, following graduation he became a soloist with the Kirov Ballet. Having always struggled with the confining rules of the Soviet way of life, he fell foul of the Soviet security regulations while on tour with the Kirov Ballet in Paris in 1961, and rather than be sent back to the USSR, slipped his minders at the airport in Paris and sought political asylum in France - his 'great leap to freedom'.

Tried and convicted of treason in his absence, he spent the rest of his life fearing kidnap or assassination, for his defection had made headlines around the world and a superstar of the young Nureyev. His family, friends and teachers back home paid the price for his freedom.

His physical beauty, extraordinarily athletic and sexual dance persona, and bags of Russian charm, made him a leading light in the glittering world of international cafe society. But his passport to lasting success was the way he transformed the role of the male ballet dancer, much as Nijinsky had done years before - the solo male again became electric and thrilling.

He became a soloist with the London Royal Ballet, the Chicago Opera Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet, as well as forming his own touring companies and achieving great success as an artistic director and choreographer - particularly re-energising the established classics such as Giselle, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Romeo & Juliet.

His partnership with Margot Fonteyn [pictured] made both their stars burn brighter. His dancing career was long and he toured the world extensively, raising the profile of ballet and his own central role as its most shining star.

Nureyev's other significance was his openness about his own sexuality - ballet was ironically very closeted because of its effeminate image. Because he made no effort to appear heterosexual and yet was an incredibly athletic and male performer, he was able to explore and express roles without restrictions, which gave a depth not only to his performances but to the range of artistic expression for other male dancers. This openness however, may have had much to do with his extreme arrogance and super-sized ego.

Famously well-endowed, his sexual life was the stuff of legend - the gay playboy of the western world. But he also enjoyed several long-term relationships - he spent the early 60s involved with an older Danish dancer named Eric Bruhn (1928-1986) but their relationship had suffered from something of a 'Star Is Born' nature as Nureyev's career rocketed and Bruhn became an alcoholic. In the 1970s, he had a long relationship with Wallace Potts, a director and archivist; and in 1978 he met a young dancer named Robert Tracy, who moved into his New York apartment and stayed for fourteen years until he was evicted, complaining that he had been treated `like a lackey'.

In 1983, Nureyev was diagnosed with HIV. Rudolph Nureyev died of an Aids-related illness in Paris in April, 1993.

Leaving nothing to Robert Tracy (who took legal action and won), he left the bulk of his fortune to establish foundations to promote dance and medical research.

Rudolph Nureyev Foundation
Rudolph Nureyev - The Life

Top Photo of Rudolph Nureyev and nude photo by Richard Avedon. Second photo: RUDOLPH NUREYEV, ROYAL BALLET SCHOOL, LONDON, 1963 by SNOWDON

Perry Ellis

Perry Ellis born 3 March 1940 (d. 1986)

Perry Ellis was an American fashion designer.

Perry Edwin Ellis was born in Virginia. His father owned a fuel company, which enabled the family to live a comfortable middle-class life. Perry studied at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, and graduated with a degree in business administration in 1961. He enlisted in the United States Coast Guard reserve to avoid the military draft and after six months he enrolled at New York University, from which he graduated with a master's degree in retailing in 1963.

He then started out in department store retailing in the Richmond, Virginia area to gain experience in the fashion industry as a buyer and merchandiser. He later joined the sportswear company John Meyer in New York. In the mid-1970s, eventually, he was approached by his then employer, The Vera Companies to design a fashion collection for them. Soon after that, Ellis presented his first women's sportswear line, called Portfolio, in November 1976. Although he could not sketch, he knew exactly how the industry worked and proved a master of innovative ideas who created 'new classics' that American women longed for at the time.

Praised by critics as the ideal American sportswear designer of the time and loved by female consumers for his clean-cut yet casual style, Ellis, together with The Vera Companies' parent company, founded his own fashion house, Perry Ellis International, in 1978. He opened his showroom on New York's Seventh Avenue. As the company's chairman and head designer he later developed Perry Ellis Menswear Collection — widely successful, and marked by 'non-traditional, modern classics'. Step by step, he added shoes, accessories, furs and perfume that all bore his name. It became his trademark to skip down the runway at the end of his fashion shows.

Throughout the 1980s the company continued to expand and include various labels such as Perry Ellis Collection and Perry Ellis Portfolio. By 1982, the company had more than 75 staff. In 1984, Perry Ellis America was created in cooperation with Levi Strauss. In the early 1980s, wholesale revenues had figured at about $60 million. By 1986 that number had risen to about $250 million.

In November 1984, Barbara Gallagher, a Hollywood screenwriter and long-time Ellis friend, gave birth to Ellis' daughter Tyler Alexandra Gallagher Ellis.

Ellis' long-time partner Laughlin Barker since 1980, an attorney, became president and legal counsel for Perry Ellis International in 1981. Barker's health deteriorated seriously in the early 1980s and when he died on January 2, 1986, aged 37, it was said in a whisper that he had suffered from HIV and AIDS although officially only lung cancer was mentioned. 'It's been a difficult time for me', said Ellis of Barker's death in 1986: 'Laughlin was an extraordinary man, and I loved him. We worked together 24 hours a day, and he brought genius and humor to this business. We were together five years, and there was never an argument or a disagreement.'

Perry Ellis fell seriously ill during the mid-1980s. Initially, it was not said what he was suffering from although he had been treated for hepatitis in a previous year. At the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) annual awards ceremony in January of 1986 he had to be accompanied to the podium by an aide to receive his award.

On 8 May of that year, Ellis was not able to perform his traditional skip down the runway anymore and, looking shockingly gaunt and frail, had to be supported by two of his employees when he briefly appeared at the end of the runway. It was to be his last fashion show and he received standing ovations for it. Immediately after the show, he was admitted to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center where he fell into a coma and died two weeks later of viral encephalitis, an AIDS-related disease, on 30 May 1986. A memorial was held at the New York Ethical Culture Society on 12 June. Perry Ellis was dead at 46 and one of the first prominent American figures to succumb to AIDS.

In early 1986, Robert L. McDonald, a former film producer and close friend of Ellis, succeeded Barker as president of Perry Ellis International. After Ellis' death in May 1986, McDonald announced that under the terms of Ellis' will he had full control of the company in trust for Ellis' heirs. McDonald successfully guided the company through setbacks and challenges in the years to come. Recommended to McDonald by the fashion director of Bloomingdale's at that time, the young designer Marc Jacobs, who would start his own label in 1993 and become head designer of Louis Vuitton in Paris in 1997, designed for the house of Perry Ellis from 1988 to 1993. Isaac Mizrahi and Tom Ford both also worked for Perry Ellis early in their careers.

Since then, the company has changed hands several times but the Perry Ellis name survives and is now one of the top menswear brands in the US.

Robert McDonald died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 45.

Michael Sundin

Michael Sundin born 1 March 1961 (d. 1989)

Michael Sundin was a television presenter, actor, dancer and trampolinist, who was best remembered for his short spell as a Blue Peter presenter.

He was born in Low Fell, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. After winning five British titles and one World title in British & World Trampolining tournaments, he first entered showbusiness in 1980 when he appeared in the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk, with Barbara Windsor. He went on to make various television and theatre appearances, both as an actor and dancer, which led to a long run in the Cameron Mackintosh musical Cats, in which he played Bill Bailey in its West End run from 1982-83. He also appeared in the video for Culture Club's video for I'll Tumble 4 Ya in 1982.

In 1984, he began rehearsing the character Tik-Tok for the Walt Disney film Return to Oz, and this was covered by the long-running BBC children's magazine programme Blue Peter. Sundin impressed the editor, Biddy Baxter, and was invited to audition for the presenting vacancy left by Peter Duncan; it was his fortune that one of the audition items was to interview someone on a trampoline, and he presented his first programme on 13 September 1984.

After fronting 77 episodes, the editors and production team decided not to renew Sundin's contract after the summer break, because they felt that he had little rapport with the viewers and some parents complained about his perceived effeminacy - in fact he was sacked because Biddy Baxter thought he was gay. He presented his last show on 24 June 1985. Sundin was very unhappy about this decision, and made his feelings known in the tabloid press. In October 1985, The Daily Mirror printed photographs of him taking part in what was exaggeratingly described as a videotaped gay sex show, at London’s Hippodrome Theatre.

Sundin subsequently appeared in the 1987 film Lionheart (in which he was incorrectly credited as 'Michel Sundin'). After a UK theatre tour of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and a Japanese/Australian tour of Starlight Express from 1987-88, Sundin fell ill.

At the age of just 28, he died in the Newcastle General Hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne. The Times newspaper reported (on 26 July 1989) that he had died of liver cancer, but in fact his death was AIDS-related, and a decision had been made that this information would not be released to the press.

Peter Hujar

Peter Hujar born 1934 (d. 1987)

Peter Hujar was an American photographer known for his black and white portraits.

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, United States Hujar later moved to Manhattan to work in the magazine, advertising, and fashion industries. His subjects also consisted of farm animals and nudes.

His most famous photograph is Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, strikingly used as the cover of Antony and the Johnson's 2005 album I Am A Bird Now.

A one-time partner of artist David Wojnarowicz, Hujar died of AIDS complications on November 26, 1987.

The Estate of Peter Hujar is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.






Photographs from top: Self-Portrait, 1980; Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, 1974; Bruce, 1976; Larry Ree; Self-Portrait, 1980; David Wojnarowicz, 1981