I just watched Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed and learned that Rock Hudson kept extra mouthwash on the Dynasty set. He kissed Linda Evans with his mouth closed, convinced he was poisoning her with every take, because he has Aids. His diary entries reveal a man trapped between professional obligation and the certainty that he was committing slow murder.
In 2009, I met Dr. Tony Silvestre at the Holiday, a gay bar in Pittsburgh facing its final days. Chuck Tierney, who co-owned the bar with his partner, Chuck Honse, since 1977, told us about the mid-1980s, when the Holiday was drowning in disposable cups.
There were mountains of trash every night. They’d switched to disposables because no one knew if AIDS spread through saliva. Better safe than dead.
Dr. Charles Rinaldo from the Pitt Men’s Study would come into the bar trying to distribute condoms and pamphlets. He kept saying it was about anal sex and needles. The regulars weren’t buying it. Everyone around them was dying.
One Saturday night, Rinaldo stood on the bar itself to give a safe sex talk. Attention was bleeding away—because of course it was. Then he grabbed a half-finished beer from a patron’s hand and took a sip.
The bar went silent.
A straight academic drinking after a gay man in the middle of the Aids crisis seemed like suicide, because they thought spit could kill.
“This is no risk at all,” Rinaldo told them. “Use condoms.”
Rinaldo had launched the Pitt Men’s Study in 1984 with $4.2 million in NIH funding, recruiting thousands of gay men in the Pittsburgh tristate area to donate blood and clinical specimens. The study would eventually contribute to over 1,700 scientific articles on HIV transmission and treatment. Forty years later, it’s still running.
Chuck Tierney died in 2017. The Holiday had closed a decade earlier. The story Tierney told me that afternoon in 2009 was one he’d witnessed firsthand—the bar was his space during the plague years, the place he and Honse had created as Pittsburgh’s first openly gay bar.
Rock Hudson died not long after kissing Linda Evans with his mouth clamped shut, terrified of his own saliva.
Knowledge eventually caught up. But terror filled the gap first.