The Rock Hudson affair

One of my childhood memories is being taken to an outdoor movie theater, Motor View, by an aunt and uncle, to watch the movie “Giant,” starring Rock Hudson, James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor. I was probably seven years old, and had no business watching that movie. It was incredibly boring, but I think aunt and uncle were charged with taking care of me for some reason, and they wanted to see the movie. I was just assigned back seat duties.

Yesterday I went to read the synopsis of the movie, and I couldn’t get through it. Bored again! The reason for my interest was having just read the last chapter of the book Virus Mania, titled Rock Hudson Gave “AIDS” A Face, and Virus Hunters Godlike Status. I’ve been reading this book off and on for a long time now, having to get away from it now and then because the crap that has gone down in the fields of epidemiology, medicine and virology is so ghastly dishonest and criminal. That they get away with their crimes with utter impunity makes reading about them tortuous. But I did it, got through it, knowing all along that the last chapter was about Rock Hudson.

My only experiences with Rock Hudson were Giant and a TV series called McMillan and Wife (1971-1977) where he played the Police Commissioner of San Francisco. My big draw was his costar, the “Wife”, Susan Saint James, who I thought was stunningly beautiful and charming. She and Hudson played off one another very nicely, almost comedic partners.

Hudson was gay, not unusual in Hollywood or even for a leading man, but at that time, scandalous. He was also, according to Virus Mania, a lifelong heavy drinker and smoker, and user of poppers, the drug popular among gay men for prolonging orgasms and loosening the sphincter to make anal intercourse more comfortable. Poppers, in case the reader is unfamiliar, often lead to Kaposi’s sarcoma, a skin cancer common among gay men who have AIDS. They were falsely marketed as room deodorizers.

I have long assumed, without any evidence whatsoever, that Hudson’s death was faked. I understood that the people behind the AIDS hoax needed some famous deaths, and Hudson, along with Arthur Ashe and Freddy Mercury fit the bill. I maintain that Mercury’s death was faked, and have never looked into the other two. But no, according to Virus Mania, it was real, and tragic. Hudson was already sick when he went to Paris in 1984 to be treated for AIDS using a drug called HPA-23, one that never went through clinical trials.

HPA-23 is highly toxic, usually producing the same symptoms (called “side effects,”) which Hudson endured. Among them were severe itching, rashes and Vincent’s disease, a painful gum disease . His teeth also loosened and impetigo ensued. Having had enough treatment, Hudson paid several hundred thousand dollars to be flown back to his home where he died, for real, on October 2, 1985. It is hard to contend that a man as ill as Hudson was in any way “murdered” by doctors, as he was on his way out anyway. But his treatment was barbaric.

AIDS, I’ll repeat even though most readers know it, is not a “disease”, but rather a “syndrome”. It is generally caused by self-abusive behaviors, as with Hudson, and by malnutrition, making it prominent in sub-Sahara Africa, and by hemophilia. People who die of AIDS usually fall victim to diseases for which their immune systems are too weak to resist, such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, Kaposi’s sarcoma, even salmonella. It is not a viral disease, not contagious, and not caused by HIV, which was introduced on the scene to scare the general population into having less sex and causing men and women to distrust one another. Are you sensing, like me, eugenicists behind the hoax?

Anyway, may he rest in peace. I am not writing this to critique his life or habits, as he paid a dear price, and I am not one to judge such matters.

By the way, Hudson is listed among our Bokonovsky “Brats,” products of some cloning process, most likely. I eventually settled with him in the Jack Nicholson group, as seen below.

What intrigues me most about these comparisons,even as I don’t always get perfect alignment, is the hairlines, which in the matches we have come across, are nearly always perfect. Hair – the hairline, part, waviness or straighter, is a genetic trait and seems to pass among the Brats without fail.

Which reminds me – at age 71, I still have most of my hair, only the sides turning grey. I no longer, however, have a forehead. Instead, I have a “fivehead.” Ahr ahr. As if my barber has not heard that one a thousand times.

20 thoughts on “The Rock Hudson affair”

  1. Another closeted gay actor said to have died of AIDS was Robert Reed, best known as Mr. Brady on The Brady Bunch. I’m of the generation of latchkey kids who grew up watching that hokey show after school, and in the 1990s, when we were barely adults, Hollywood monetized our nostalgia for our recent childhoods by dumping loads and loads of Brady Bunch trivia on us.

    The only trivia that stuck with me was the stuff about Robert Reed. His cast members loved him. The producers hated him so much they were plotting to kill his character off so they wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore. Yet both sides painted the exact same picture of him as a spectacular, over-the-top pain in the ass on the set. There is very little I believe in the news or even in entertainment “trivia” anymore, so the Robert Reed stories delight me because they’re hilarious and they have the ring of truth.

    Reed hated Gilligan’s Island, which was created by the same team behind The Brady Bunch. He knew he couldn’t instruct the writers to hone their craft and be better storytellers, so he came up with what I’m sure he thought was a brilliant compromise: All details on the show had to be “realistic.” He was the show’s self-appointed fact-checker, and had an apparently vast library of encyclopedias, science tomes, atlases and history books that the Brady Bunch writers damn well better not contradict. God only knows how crazy shit would have gotten if the Internet had been around. He held up the production for hours because Mr. Brady was supposed to talk about the smell of strawberries in the pot of jam that was cooking on the stove, yet one of his books declared that strawberries do not have a smell. A character was supposed to slip on an egg dropped on the floor, but another of Reed’s books (or the same one?) asserted that raw eggs aren’t slippery, and when Reed actually slipped on the egg in question while arguing with the producer, he shouted over the resulting laughter that his pratfall was beside the point. They had to follow the “facts” that were published in books.

    Does this have anything to do with anything? I don’t know, probably not. But if you can find an interview where Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of The Brady Bunch, tells Robert Reed stories, you’re in for a good laugh. They may be the only funny stories that ham-fisted Hollywood hack ever told.

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    1. That is really interesting. Reed sounds like a prima donna. Such prople can indeed drive others nuts.

      I wonder if he fits into one of the batches. I’ll have to take a look.

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      1. Glad you found it interesting. What’s sad to me is that I actually think I get what Reed was trying to accomplish, he just went about it in a completely crazy way. Even the people who loved him thought that because he was a classically trained Shakespearean actor, he was too much of a snob to understand and appreciate the family sitcom format. But his performance was so perfectly attuned to the needs of the show that, as an actor myself, I think they were wrong about that. Plus, he directed a few episodes, which were written by friends of his under his guidance, and they didn’t try to reinvent the show. They just took what it was and made it better by making sure all the hokey sitcom stuff moved the story forward. I think he envisioned a Brady Bunch that had the solid writing of, say, The Andy Griffith Show… or at least that’s what I took from watching the episodes he directed as an adult. But he let ego and self-righteousness get in the way, and I can’t blame the producers and writers for mocking and disregarding him. I often think of Reed when I find myself getting really full of how right I am and how wrong everyone else is. TV trivia as morality tale, haha

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    2. A cousin of mine was a waitress at a Marie Callender’s restaurant somewhere near Pasadena back when and Robert Reed was a regular with his own table and his own gay waiter. He had a thing for their fruit pies, ‘natch, and a particular affinity for strawberry pie. That’s probably how that got into the show, so he could eat the props.

      It’s highsterical that Reed would be such a stickler for realism given what he was up against. The Brady Bunch, like other housewife shows of the time, had nothing to do with human psychology; these shows were more like Stalin-era socialist cinema. There is big daddy wisdom, his practical wife who is an evergreen source of support and devotion as big daddy helps his minions in simple problem solving. The Brady children of this consumerist collective are steered towards friendly conformity, with the day to day operations left to the lesbian capo. No mention is made of the fact that three boys and three girls, with no blood relation, sleep on the same floor, but socialism is not about biology- humans are resources for industry; thus the conformity evangel.
      Even so, Sherwood Schwartz was a creation of circumcised Hollyweird and could not help but tip his hand, matching four curly, dark haired males with four straight haired blonde shiksas.

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  2. Yes, there is no HIV/AIDS, there isn’t even any drug AIDS or malnutrition AIDS, there simply is lifestyle (or lack thereof) and consequences for your health. There is two dozens or even more diseases that are reinterpreted as AIDS if your HIV test is positive. So never ever allow yourself to be submitted to an HIV test, which is useless and may only put you in danger.

    It is so enlightening to hear and read Peter Duesberg and Claus Köhnlein who both arrived at the same conclusion independently from one another.

    The enormity of the AIDS hoax boggles the mind. We’ve had the country plastered with condom ads (“mach’s mit!”) down to even villages of only 50 inhabitants.

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    1. As he probably knows hiv is not an infectious disease this could just be a cover story in case any photos of him frequenting these places come out.

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    2. “This was the very, very early years of the outbreak. We were seeing these large numbers of mostly gay men who were formerly otherwise well, who were being devastated by this terrible, mysterious disease,” he told Gross. “And it was so concentrated in the gay community that I really wanted to get a feel for what was going on there that would lead to this explosion of a sexually transmitted disease.”
      .
      Did you catch it? The sleight-of-hand?
      .
      Rather than just simply say “would lead to this explosion of AIDS” which would be the natural way to say it, he says “would lead to this explosion of a sexually transmitted disease.” He’s a deceiver. He speaks in this way on purpose, to cement the idea into your mind. AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease. But it’s not. He’s a liar. But he’s not just a liar – HE’S DECEIVING.
      .
      “So that’s exactly what he did. “I went to the Castro District. I went down to Greenwich Village, and I went into bathhouses to essentially see what was going on,” he said.”
      .
      If Dr. Fraudci went to bathhouses to “essentially see what was going on” – then he surely must have seen people participating in all sorts of drug use, including the use of poppers – RIGHT? It’s an assumption, but it’s a fair one.
      .
      So, why not start there and follow the observable evidence?
      .
      “The epidemiologist in me went, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is a perfect setup for an explosion of a sexually transmitted disease.’ And the same thing going to the gay bars and seeing what was going on, and it gave me a great insight into the explosiveness of the outbreak of the sexually transmitted disease,” Fauci continued.”
      .
      Do you see how he did that again? TWICE! Look over here (sexually transmitted disease, sexually transmitted disease, sexually transmitted disease) … not over there (drugs and poppers).
      .
      I’m certainly no epidemiologist, but the normal, functioning human brain in me thinks that the most logical place to start looking for evidence would be the things these people are putting into their bodies … no?
      .
      Instead, this “epidemiologist” decides to abandon the rational way of looking at things (the evidence) and goes virus hunting and searching for a sexually transmitted disease that doesn’t exist, while ignoring the TANGIBLE evidence that’s right in front of him. So, there’s only 2 possible explanations here. Dr. Fauci is either:

      a) stupid
      b) a liar and deceiver

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      1. He’s not stupid, but as I see him is an agent of unseen forces that operate in secrecy and demand that science be avoided and only propaganda be allowed. That’s all the AIDS/HIV campaign was, professional propaganda.

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      2. Good comment. His statement “I really wanted to get a feel for what was going on there that would lead to this explosion of a sexually transmitted disease” was a classic preemptive strike in the interests of Rockefeller medicine / virology.

        “Please allow me to tell you how this fictional narrative will read.”

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      3. I find his repetition of the word “explosive” fascinating. Explosive sexually transmitted disease? That should be the set up for a raunchy stand-up comedy bit. The image of Fauci going to gay bars and bathhouses and seeing explosions everywhere he looks is comical… and I don’t think you have to be particularly dirty-minded (as I admittedly am) to see it. Trump’s White House reality show was chock-full of intentional unintentional comedy like this. Has anyone who has researched propaganda techniques seen anything about this? I wonder if it’s a deliberate tactic, perhaps meant to train people to detach from their sense of irony. Or, in this case, maybe the combination of the word “explosive” with the idea of people having dangerous sex is simply a way of using charged language that bypasses the brain and sends the message straight to our loins? Thanks for posting, TB.

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  5. True story…I once rode a ski chair lift with Susan St. James (Telluride, Colorado – March, 1986). At the time, she was known as Kate in Kate & Allie. She was nice.

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  6. I see great resemblance to Sylvester Stalone, born as Michael Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone, aka Sly, in your leading picture. Have you ever checked him as a possible member of Bokonovsky Brat club? Just wondering…

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