[This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the discovery of AIDS, and this World AIDS Day it seems fitting to remember an Australian pioneer who lived and died near the first official World AIDS Day in 1988, towards the start of the epidemic. His life and battle and death have lessons for our COVID world today.]
* * *
“If one is going to go to all the trouble to be gay, one ought to do a more interesting and useful job of it. Models exist in our very recent past. They should be recalled.” – Eric Michaels, 1990b, 192.
These were the last words documented in Australia’s earliest public AIDS diary. Possibly penned in 1982, and later added to his diary from 1987 and 1988 before being posthumously published in 1990, the words of Eric Michaels speak to us from the days of a terrible epidemic – one that was perceived to target people who were disempowered, stigmatised, invisible, and/or socially undesirable. At a time of terrible stigma, discrimination and open homophobia, Michaels encouraged the gay community to find role models and create its own pride amidst the prejudice. In doing so, he became one of those role models.
Stigma and invisibility continue today, in that the AIDS epidemic remains largely overlooked and forgotten. On a personal level, my introduction to Michaels’ book was when I first sought out a copy in a prominent public library; upon my request, the book was duly collected from the stacks and delivered to me – missing its colourful cover, which appeared to have been removed with surgical precision along the edge of its spine. When I asked the librarian what happened to the book, he carelessly shrugged. I later purchased another copy of the book online and donated it to the same public library, so that Eric Michaels’ words would be available to the public in the exact condition that he would have wanted.
It seemed fitting to help memorialise a man who foreshadowed many admirable outcomes from those terrible times.
The Australian Dictionary of Biography reports that Eric Michaels was born in 1948 to Jewish parents in Philadelphia, USA, and became a hippie studying cultural anthropology, examining groups as disparate as Christian fundamentalists in Texas, USA, and the Yanomami people of Brazil. He arrived in Australia in 1982 and ultimately became a lecturer at Griffith University in Brisbane, dying with AIDS in 1988. (Cunningham, 2012)
A tragic coincidence of timing meant that he arrived in Australia at approximately the same time as another US import: a particular strain of HIV and AIDS. Michaels thereby became somewhat of a potential double outcast: disapproved in mainstream Australia because he was gay, and also socially isolated from some sections within the Australian gay community because he was American in the days when the origin of AIDS was attributed to gay Americans (and well might we learn from his experience today, during another pandemic, when some people seek to scapegoat others from another country where COVID is meant to have originated – as though its geographic origin has anything significant to do with its treatment or mitigation). Paul Foss notes that ‘Eric’s sense of personal loss and betrayal’ – at his rejection at least as much as his actual AIDS mortality – contributed to an ‘accusatory tone’ as well as ‘vemom and impish humour’ in his writing (Foss, 1990, 13). In harnessing and harvesting this anger, Michaels foreshadows the rise of ACT-UP, an activist group borne of self-empowerment and anger.
For Eric Michaels, it is likely that this ‘otherness’ may have contributed to his writing/publishing his AIDS diary in the days before any Australian gay man had the interest or opportunity to do so. Those early days saw women such as Suzi Lovegrove take that same opportunity to bypass the dominant homophobic prejudice against the epidemic in Australia and create autobiographical documentation, such as the film, Suzi’s Story, or varied biographies. Michaels’ diary was the earliest such effort from a gay man to break out of what he termed the ‘lavender prison’ of homophobia (Michaels 1990b, 191).
It also seems probable that this ‘otherness’ similarly motivated Eric Michaels to spend much of his professional life assisting similarly disempowered voices. His academic career in Australia had revolved around, ’empowering Aborigines through the appropriation of new technology’ (Cunningham, 2012) and he had asserted that, ‘a cultural future can only result from political resistance’ (Michaels, 1987, 78). And yet he was also very conscious of the ‘politics of speech’ in empowering the very voices he wished to highlight (O’Regan, 1990; see also Michaels 1994).
Such empowerment foreshadowed the empowerment of indigenous and other voices during the AIDS epidemic; from gay men to women and others who fought for their lives as well as their civil rights. Their battle resonates a generation later, after male homosexuality has been decriminalised and destigmatised, in no small part due to these foot soldiers.
Michael’s situation and perspective seem to echo those of his contemporary, Scottish journalist and New Zealand resident Tom Maclean, whose own AIDS pathography, If I Should Die: Living With AIDS, reflects the life and times of his trans-Tasman gay compatriot. Whereas Michaels implicitly evokes a firm resolution to choose life and activism, McLean more pointedly speaks about this stark choice among the last words in his own book, which was published four days before his death in 1989 at age 40 (PA, 1989). “There’s a lesson in everything if you look for it,” McLean writes, “Even in AIDS” (McLean, 1989, 98).
His friend John Hobson eulogised Michaels with recollections of their life and times together, but spoke frankly about his last photograph:
“The last image of Eric shows the ravages of Kaposi’s Sarcoma; a rare form of skin cancer prevalent in the early years of the epidemic. It is almost unheard of these days thanks to advances in treatments. It is definitely a shocking image, but one that Eric chose to be published as his final one. As well as a clinical photo to evidence his ultimate reality, it was also clearly one last opportunity for him to poke his tongue out at the world.” Hobson, n.d (b).
Hobson also notes that after his death, Eric Michaels’ Warlpiri and Kardiya friends from Yuendumu created an AIDS Quilt memorial panel in his memory. (Hobson, n.d.(b).)
The title of his diary, Unbecoming, is a play on words: tapping into the societal disapproval of gay men as being somewhat unbecoming, it also implicitly examines his own unravelling life due to AIDS and questions whether he is, in some inverse act of creation, literally un-becoming himself. Ultimately, he demonstrates that in his becoming less or other than himself, he is also becoming much more – perhaps the perfect symbolism for an activist seeking to create something positive out of loss. A generation later, as the world seeks to rebuild or redefine itself after the ravages of another pandemic, we might learn valuable lessons from this experience.
Although written during the era of AIDS, Michaels’ words resonate during our era of COVID:
“Maybe the lunatic right wing will mobilise and we will have to drag ourselves out of this languor to protect ourselves and respond. Or maybe the baby boom will eventually reach their sixties and, upon looking back, develop a more powerful criticism than any advanced so far.” (Michaels, 1990b, 192).
Maybe.
This work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
References:
Stuart Cunningham, ‘Michaels, Eric Philip (1948–1988)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 2012, accessed online 14 November 2021.
Paul Foss, 1990. ‘Foreword’ in Eric Michaels, 1990b.
John Hobson, n.d (a). Queers of the Desert: AIDS Quilts (1990).
John Hobson, n.d (b). Queers of the Desert: Eric Michaels.
Eric Michaels, 1987. For A Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla Makes TV at Yuendumu, Melbourne: Artspace.
Eric Michaels, 1990a. ‘A model of teleported texts (with reference to Aboriginal television)’, in Tom O’Regan (ed.), 1990, Communication and Tradition: Essays after Eric Michaels, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, Vol. 3, No. 2.
Eric Michaels, 1990b. Unbecoming: An AIDS Diary, Rose Bay: EMPress.
Eric Michaels, 1994.’Aboriginal Content: Who’s Got It, Who Needs It?’, Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 21 – 48.
Tom McLean, 1989. If I Should Die: Living With AIDS, Glenfield: Benton Ross Publishers.
Tom O’Regan (ed.), 1990. ‘Preface‘, Communication and Tradition: Essays after Eric Michaels, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, Vol. 3, No. 2.
PA, 1989. ‘Author dies of A.I.D.S.’, The Christchurch Press, 27 March.
©2021 Geoff Allshorn
Geoff, what a powerful article. How much pain, physical and mental, before treatments were discovered and dignity was attained. Thank you for making us aware of so much unacknowledged work before a battle is won. Looking forward to your own book. Take care.