Where Does the Power Come From?
On who lives, who doesn't, and whose stories we tell
A recent rewatch of Chariots of Fire (1981) sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about the 1924 Olympics and what in the movie was true to life or not. That’s how I learned that one of the lead actors, Ian Charleson, who played Scottish missionary Eric Liddell, was diagnosed with HIV in 1986. He died of complications from AIDS in 1990 at age 40.
He appears to have been closeted, as well as the first show-business death related to AIDS in the UK – and he wanted the world to know it.
From the United Press International story, Jan. 8, 1990:
It was Charleson’s wish that the cause of his death be made known.
“It is rare for anyone in the public eye to say that they are HIV positive, let alone that they have AIDS,” fellow British actor Ian McKellen told the London Daily Mail.
“It is a tribute to Ian that he should ask for the cause of his death to be made public and it is the most marvelous offer of support that he could have given to other men and women all over the world suffering from the AIDS virus,” he said.
Charleson certainly was well-known in the UK for his stage work, but he’s most recognizable around the world for his role as Liddell. I keep thinking about that role – of a devout missionary who would not run in an Olympic heat scheduled on a Sunday, it being the Sabbath. Liddell gives some of the most moving speeches in the film, and Charleson brings him to life with such reserved grace off the track – and unreserved passion on it. His head tilts back and his arms flail as he runs, runs because it was one of the things he was divinely made to do, he says. Through his talent, he honors God.
Liddle died in 1945, at age 45, in a Japanese civilian internment camp.
I don’t know what Charleson’s personal views were on religion, but I can’t stop thinking about how he died from a disease that ravaged communities in the 1980s and ’90s – a disease about which many Christians were, and still are, silent. Many Christians love Chariots of Fire. But would they have loved Charleson, as he was?
Six years ago today, my friend, Jeff, died of AIDS-associated Kaposi sarcoma. He was 30. I woke up that Monday to a text from his sister, who said he died that morning with her and another sister's hands on his heart. A group of his friends had been in Houston the previous two days to see him in the hospital. We watched him die, and did our best to let him know we were there, and that we loved him.
We’d been friends since our days at a private Christian university, where he was closeted. His life after school was a tad reckless, and eventually he learned he was HIV positive. And he didn’t do anything. He just got more and more sick, eventually moving back in with his parents, who told him he was getting what he deserved for being gay. One of his sisters found him in an upstairs room, wasting away, and got him to a hospital, where he stayed a month.
She did his best to care for him. She got him care and prolonged his life for close to a year, long enough for him to let some of his friends back into his life. They couldn’t afford the nutritional supplements he needed, however, so his body eventually shut down, although his disability was denied at first and, as we learned in the hospital, the payments eventually were mailed to his parents’ house once approved. They didn’t say anything. His mother, in fact, declared him dead the Friday before his death, and when he actually died, she came to the hospital to claim his remains. I spent the day on the phone tracking down friends who are lawyers who could find us any leads to put a stop to it, and thankfully, his sister was able to go before a judge and have his remains returned. Jeff wanted to be cremated; his parents, no doubt, would have either held a macabre funeral for him against his wishes, or perhaps have done their best to erase his existence.
The phrase “skin and bones” takes on new meaning once you see someone at that level of starvation. By the time most of us got to the hospital, he was intubated. His head bobbed with exhaustion; he’d raise his arms and move them up and around out of discomfort. He looked like a marionette. His lucidity would come and go, and thankfully, it came enough that he saw and recognized his visitors as they stood by his bedside. He’d point, and maybe waive his finger or open his arms. He recognized all of us. He was intubated, so he couldn't talk, but he was still animated. He saw he was loved at the end. But I wish he could have truly seen that sooner.
He grew up surrounded by Christians, but in many ways, they were the people he trusted the least.
Three years ago today, I sat in my boss’s office, crying. We were talking about how the university was handling issues related to LGBTQ+ students, and I, like many others, was upset. Sitting with me, he became emotional as well. Tearing up, and picking at the arm of his chair, he told me that when he and his wife were there at school in the 1980s, she often found herself as the friend many closeted young men would turn to for support. That didn't surprise me, as she seems so kind and tenderhearted. But then he said something that has stayed with me: “Many of them are no longer with us.”
I wonder: How many men have been erased from our stories because of AIDS? Christian men who didn't know where to turn, who had to find different communities to accept them because the ones in which they were raised – the ones that claim to be loving and resembling the life of Christ – would have rejected them? I wonder how many of my fellow alumni are on that list. I wonder how many of their classmates even know.
Grief over Jeff’s death played a large role in why I went to work at the school, although I didn't realize it at the time. I guess I hoped I could make some type of difference by speaking up for the young Jeffs of the world, who needed more support and love than he ever got. I became a little too well-known for speaking up in faculty/staff meetings, that's for sure. But trying to change an entire system takes a collective effort, not to mention moral courage from leadership.
Early on in Chariots of Fire, the freshmen of Cambridge, in 1919, are asked to consider a wall listing the names of peers who died in World War I, an ugly blight on the world that robbed much of the country of so many men. If I could, I’d build a similar memorial on our campus to the young men we lost do a different type of war – a genocide that went unremarked upon by the government and that devastated communities. I want to learn their names, and I want them remembered.
I had seen Jeff just a month before he died, so I was more prepared than most of the others for how he looked. I wish I had prepped one of my friends, Jim, before we went back to see Jeff. He seemed nervous, and he’d brought photos from past times with Jeff to show him. Jeff was bobbing in and out of consciousness, his hands akimbo, and I realized he was trying to wipe his bloody nose. I instinctively did it for him, and then paused to look at my fingers, now marked with traces of his blood. I washed them thoroughly.
The moment has stayed with me, even more so as a metaphor – having blood on my hands. I hesitate to say this because my point in all of this rambling is not to center myself in the story. But I do think it’s crucial to consider the concept of complicity. Philip Gourevitch – bear with me – touches on this in a way at the beginning of his excellent 1999 account of the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. Here he describes his first impressions of the aftermath of the genocide, as he walked among the dead:
Like Leonitus, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge – a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, as horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy.
The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquility of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there – these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I couldn’t settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure but nothing truly meaningful. I just looked, and I took photographs, because I wondered whether I could really see what I was seeing while I saw it, and I wanted also an excuse to look a bit more closely.
We went on through the first room and out the far side. There was another room and another and another and another. They were all full of bodies, and more bodies were scattered in the grass, and there were stray skulls in the grass, which was thick and wonderfully green. Standing outside, I heard a crunch. The old Canadian colonel stumbled in front of me, and I saw, though he did not notice, that his foot had rolled on a skull and broken it. for the first time at Nyarubuye my feelings focused, and what I felt was a small but keen anger at this man. Then I heard another crunch, and felt a vibration underfoot. I had stepped on one, too.
Whether it was his intention or not, I’ve always interpreted those last lines as concerning complicity. No, he didn't participate in the genocide, but he like most of the world stood by and watched as it happened. He was angry at one of his guides accidentally stepping on a skull, only to soon do the same. Even indirectly, even symbolically, he’s a part of the problem.
No, Jeff’s blood is not on my hands. But I am in some ways complicit for his death by being a part of a community – Christianity in the southern U.S. – that was not one in which he felt he could be himself, one in which he would be readily welcomed.
I don't think I ever heard him say the word AIDS. He didn’t tell many people; he didn't even tell many of his older friends he was gay. Most of what we know about what happened to him we learned from his sister; it never seemed necessary to ask him to tell us details about his illness and why he didn’t seek help at first. But those are the ideas that haunt: What does it take for a person to learn they are sick and then not get help? What does it take to feel you are unworthy of being saved, physically or eternally?
It takes a lifetime of being told you aren’t worthy.
I think back to Charleson, and his take on Liddle’s 400-meter run. His narration, about when he runs, he feels God’s pleasure.
I think of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and its finale set at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. I went to see the anniversary revival of the play in June 2018 for my birthday, and on the day of the second half of the play, “Perestroika,” I’d wandered my way through the park to the fountain. I’d stopped to take photos and briefly admire its beauty, but my impatience with the heat didn’t allow me to dwell.
I didn’t then make the connection to the story of the healing of the paralytic by Jesus at Bethesda. There are other versions of the story, revolving around a pool/fountain/spring of healing, some created by an angel touching the ground (which prompted a fountain to spring up) or by stirring existing waters. As Angels tells it, the fountain went dry once the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, but legend says that once the Millennium arrives, the water will flow again. The healing will begin again. “We will all bathe ourselves clean,” the character Hannah says at the end of the play, as she stands with several characters in front of the park fountain. She promises to take the character Prior, who has AIDS, there.
I cried from then on out — through the last lines, through the curtain calls, and out into the night to wait by the stage door. What’s more beautiful than redemption? What’s harder to understand? And why, oh why, is this plague still with us? Why can’t we be healed *now*?
I stopped by a drug store on my way back to the hotel to pick up bandages for my blistered feet, which I’m sure my Central Park trek spurred. I went to grab a Coke, too. The brand is still in the “Share a Coke with” campaign, and the first name I saw in the queue was Jeffrey. Spelled just like that, just the way he spelled it. I had to smile.
Prior gets to live past 30 in Angels. Who knows how much time he would get, but he at least got some. Confronted with death — with the option to just stop moving — he chose “more life.” It seems simple, but it’s the hardest thing we can do. I’m working on seeing Jeff through the lens of how he lived, not how he died, just as I’m trying to do with my mother. But how he died is a part of his story, and it’s a mark on all of us who claim to believe in salvation but only want a specific few to be cleansed.
God made Liddle fast. He made Charleson a talented actor. He made Jeff a singer. All fearfully and wonderfully made. And while we don’t have magic waters to heal all diseases, we have the power to bring a level of healing – of peace – here, while we can. Liddle honored God in a specifically devout way, but I’d argue his isn’t the only way. We can honor God – or whoever we worship, or if we don’t believe, we can honor each other – in so many ways. The most important of which is to keep going, and to keep loving. That power comes from within.
“The fountain’s not flowing now, they turn it off in the winter,” Prior says at the end of the play. “Ice in the pipes. But in the summer ... it’s a sight to see. And I want to be around to see it. I plan to be — I hope to be. This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all. And the dead will be commemorated, and we’ll struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.”
This is beautiful. Thank you.
Thank you for writing this. ❤️