I am not happy I have AIDS. But if that
is helping others, I can at least
know my own misfortune has
had some positive worth
Rock Hudson
B: 17 November 1925
D: 2 October 1985 aged 59
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His sexuality, like his name, was a facade. Forever the Hollywood heartthrob, the Rock Hudson
of the cinema world was in reality born Roy Harold Scherer Jr., due recipient of four Golden
Globe® Awards, a highly successful film career, together with one of the most
popular television series of the '70s in the form of MCMILLAN AND WIFE. He was,
in effect, every inch a man's man, only as is now known, strictly in the homosexual sense!
Subject to a three year marriage to his agents' secretary, Phyllis Gates, when the true nature
of his sexuality threatened to become public knowledge, Hollywood ever keen to maintain the
'heterosexual visibility of their homosexual players' was soon to cast Hudson in a series
of sex comedies opposite the leading ladies of the day, works that ironically saw him
at times 'play gay' to get the girl.
Whether such was a coded message to his fans remains open to question. But what is clear is that
his greatest work was not GIANT / 1956 opposite Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean, nor the
chilling SECONDS / 1966 or even the Alistair MacLean based Cold War thriller ICE STATION
ZEBRA / 1968; rather it was his portrayal of the perfect heterosexual ladies man,
whereas in reality he was anything but.
He was in effect playing two characters; that as the script required and that as his public
persona dictated. Indeed such was the success of the masquerade, that the public was
shocked when his gaunt appearance in 1984 on the hit soap DYNASTY fuelled rumours
over the nature of his ill heath.
At first described as liver cancer, Hudson came clean in July 1985 when he announced that he
was dying of AIDS. He passed away in October 1985 and in death gave AIDS a face the world over.
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