In Memoriam: The Rocks and Clifts of a Dame
Gay life pre-Stonewall was an isolated and closeted existence. The 50s and 60s represented a perilous journey fraught with so many vivid and foreboding unpleasantries that most of our forefathers stayed in the closet, merely to survive. Denial was not, as they say, a river in Egypt. It was our necessary reality. But we had a secret weapon: Cleopatra.
Dame Elizabeth Taylor will be sorely missed by her legions of adoring fans—and I, for one, keep returning in my mind to those repressive decades when the great lady navigated the Rocks (as in Hudson) and the Clifts (as in Montgomery) through their respective dark, personal existences.
With simple decency, the complex, violet-eyed vixen did what most friends would have done: She loved them. She made their tenuous existence bearable. Liz may have become famous as Spencer Tracy’s daughter in Father of the Bride, but a clear case could be made that she was The Mother of the Pride. It’s almost as though she dismounted her National Velvet horse and mounted a campaign for the homos. A campaign for acceptance. A campaign for unconditional love. A campaign for us.
When AIDS struck her best friend Rock Hudson, Elizabeth never flinched. She sprung into action, and her legendary cause celeb never ended. Along the way, she packed at least twice as many years into the 79 she lived. Volumes will be written about our Liz—and for me the ones of most interest will be those love letters she wrote at 17 to the man she never married (studio execs intervened—they wanted a more high profile duo for their prized young star). But in those writings, I’m certain we’ll find the simple, decent empathy that blossomed for us because she knew what true love was. She knew it should never be stifled and she didn’t ever, ever, ever put boundaries on it. Or us. So if you don’t think Elizabeth Hilton-Wilding-Todd-Fisher-Burton-Burton-Warner-Fortensky would fight for marriage equality, think again. (And I’m sure she’d say that if Ellen and Portia wanted to divorce and then reconsider/remarry, that would be just fine, too.)
One of Ms. Taylor’s marriages brought her to D.C., to marry then-Senator John Warner (which never quite explained how she could let him vote against us in the first “Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell” debacle). Much has also been written about her return to D.C. to dedicate her wing of the Whitman Walker Clinic, and then to reprise The Little Foxes at the Kennedy Center three decades ago. I prefer to think about her return in 2002 when she was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor.
Backstage escorts for the production are able to enjoy the full run of the show, and for theater freaks such as myself, it’s the rehearsals for each tribute that make all the effort worthwhile. At our first planning meeting, when the producers divulged the line-up for the Taylor tribute, only one thing leapt from the page: the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington would be singing “There is Nothing Like a Dame” to the best damn Dame we ever could have hoped for. Before one note was sung, with days still to go before the Honors, my tears began to flow. The fact that she lived long enough to watch 100 out gay men sing to her at the Kennedy Center in some measure brought our civil rights full circle. I thought of the way she comforted and nurtured the Rocks and Clifts, those men whom society had put on such hard, tenuous footing, so that today we could celebrate.
The evening of the Kennedy Center performance came. What must have gone through her mind? Perhaps it was that we’d finally come such a long way, baby. Or maybe she thought of Rock and Montgomery and what they’d be like, celebrating her life’s work, listening to the goose-bump-inducing tribute from gay men—and sharing her box. To borrow from Shirley MacLaine:
If they could see me now, that little gang of mine….
Here’s what I thought: Even as a scared kid going through puberty with a very scary secret, Liz gave our lives meaning; for every bully who ever tried to hurt you and push you back into a closet, you knew she was there for you. You reach a certain age and you realize that now it’s up to “the kids” to save us and themselves, to continue this march toward fuller civil rights. So we put our fate in their hands, but it goes without saying that the road so roughly traversed by the Rocks and the Clifts, was paved in no small measure by women with guts and nerve —and her in case, JEWELS.
There is nothing like a dame,
Nothing in the world;
There is nothing you can name,
That is anything like a dame.
Sung by her new gay boyfriends in unison, it was a beautiful night for everyone in attendance.
Elizabeth Taylor side-splittingly left orders to bring her to her own funeral 15 minutes late. For a woman whose 15 minutes of fame lasted nearly eight decades, it’s quite alright.
Our gay super hero Tony Kushner is right: there are indeed Angels in America—Dame Elizabeth Taylor is proof. She was a broad, a dame, and now our violet-eyed angel.
Brent Mundt resides in Washington, DC but lives in Rehoboth Beach.