Joel Resnicoff drew a shallow, final breath. Beside his hospital bed, a heart monitor stammered, beeped, then flatlined. The brilliantly mischievous commercial artist was thirty-eight. The death certificate would diagnose what killed him: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS.
Exactly twelve hours earlier to the minute, just ten miles away in a handsome row house in Washington’s fashionable Dupont Circle neighborhood, Terry Dolan drew a shallow, final breath. The brilliantly ruthless conservative political operative was thirty-six. The death certificate would diagnose what killed him: heart failure caused by cardiomyopathy. That was a lie. It was a genteel, well-intentioned lie, based on a doctor’s solemn promise to his patient, but it was a lie just the same.
Nineteen eighty-six was a dreadful year for gay men in America. It was the year that the U.S. Supreme Court formally gave its imprimatur to homophobia, deciding in the Georgia case of Bowers v. Hardwick that governments can prosecute acts of sodomy—anal or oral sex—between consenting adults. The Georgia law ostensibly applied to everyone, but had been enforced only for homosexuals. That Supreme Court ruling—essentially, the Dred Scott decision for gay America—would stand for seventeen more years before being overturned in 2003.
Nineteen eighty-six was also the year that the microbe that causes AIDS was given its iconic name—the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. It was the year infections and deaths climbed so precipitously that public health experts began to whisper the word pandemic, even as the Reagan administration was enforcing what journalist Randy Shilts would later call a policy of “ritualistic silence.”
Nineteen eighty-six was the year that Ricky Ray, nine, and his two younger brothers, all hemophiliacs, were thrown out of their public school in Arcadia, Florida, because they had AIDS. Their parents successfully sued to have them reinstated, against virulent community protests. But after their first week back the family would be forced to flee the town when the Rays’ house was burned down by an arsonist.
For an exponentially increasing number of gay men outed not by choice but by the undisguisable symptoms of a disfiguring disease, 1986 was a year in which they were forced to deal not just with mortality but also with stigma, shame, and public hysteria. Some, like Joel Resnicoff, embraced who they were and died in peace. Some, like Terry Dolan, embraced little and died at war with themselves.
Dolan was hardly alone in his public duplicity. Fashion designer Perry Ellis said he was suffering from “sleeping sickness.” Piano virtuoso Liberace claimed he’d been knocked for a loop by the effects of an ill-advised all-watermelon diet. And most famously, celebrity lawyer-fixer Roy Cohn, acid-tongued mouthpiece for Joe McCarthy and later consigliere to Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump, succumbed to the disease in the summer of 1986. He died gaunt, hollow-faced, and yellow-eyed, snarling to the very end, to whoever dared to inquire, the lie that he had liver cancer.
NEAR THE END, on Friday in his second-floor room at Washington Adventist Hospital, beside his mother, Blanche, and his older brother, Arnold—a rabbi who would walk two and a half miles home that night and who would walk back the next morning because he could not drive on the Sabbath—on that Friday, Joel Resnicoff decided to die. He’d held off gamely for months as his weight plummeted and skin lesions took over. He accepted the explosive diarrhea and the other humiliating symptoms with characteristic grace and even humor. He gasped through pneumonia. But when he finally went blind from AIDS-related retinitis, he could think of no reason to continue living. Neither his mother nor his brother even considered dissuading him. To be a visual artist without eyes? Unthinkable.
You might well recognize Resnicoff’s art, even today. It survives in old designs of Esprit, the international fashion company, and in shimmery rayon vintage Joel Resnicoff scarves, skirts, aprons, and T-shirts, many of which have been treated so lovingly over the years that they look brand-new today when offered for sale on eBay, which happens a lot. A thirty-five-year-old Resnicoff scarf can go for eighty bucks.
In the mid-1980s, Joel Resnicoff’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures were everywhere. He had spreads in Women’s Wear Daily. He crafted 3-D mannequins into traffic-stopping window displays in Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. He drew ResniCards, cartoony greeting cards that he marketed himself, and that sold briskly.
Most of his work was infused with whimsy, alive with primary colors and pastels. He trafficked playfully in extremes. His fashionable men were mammoth-shouldered and zoot-suited. His fashionable women had triangulate, mantis-like faces with spiky hair and the knobby-kneed, tweezer-legged, emaciated breastless bodies of the Studio 54 cocaine crowd. His unfashionable women were more fun—often a good-natured version of the dumpy, middle-aged, big-honkered, affectionately pushy-Jew stereotype, something that only a proudly Jewish artist with an emphatically Jewish surname could have gotten away with. He would even name some of these women after his beloved ma. Here is a poster of one of them in swimwear, looking none too good. “Beach, beach, beach, Blanche,” kvetches her long-suffering husband, “that’s all you ever do.” Here is a ResniCard: A hideous-looking woman in a dress, high heels, and gaudy jewelry is saying, “Birthdays don’t have to be a drag!” She is clearly a fat, hairy-armed man.
Resnicoff worked within the genre pioneered by Andy Warhol—the collision of fine art and commercial art, which both artists considered a distinction without a difference. Resnicoff’s work had balloony, cartoony echoes of Roy Lichtenstein and perspective-bending elements of Picasso, and certainly the impromptu feel of Keith Haring, the 1970s graffiti artist turned pop icon. Resnicoff and Haring were contemporaries; among the things they shared were New York City and AIDS. Haring lived four years longer. His work still sells briskly. The truth is, the far more famous Haring was not nearly as inventive or versatile as Resnicoff.
Like Haring, Resnicoff had briefly been a street artist, and like Haring he carried that exuberant sensibility with him into the studio. He’d lived in the East Village, worried always about rent because money scorched his pocket. He once got a commission of ten grand and blew it on a piece of jewelry for his mother.
Resnicoff was proverbially tall, dark, and handsome. He had piercing, twinkly eyes; superficially, he resembled the magician David Copperfield. In high school the girls pursued him, with predictably unsatisfying results. The artist came out in college in the mid-1960s to both friends and family during a hedonistic year at the hedonistic University of Miami.
He was always restless, constantly changing his appearance, always experimenting. Sometimes he’d have shoulder-length hair, aggressively poufed out. Sometimes he’d get a buzz cut down to his skull. Sometimes he’d be clean-shaven, but other times he had a mustache, a beard, or both. While his clothing was often daring and modern, sometimes he seemed contentiously counter-fashion, a precursor of the hipster—he’d wear the ultimate uncool footwear of sandals with socks. His experimentation extended to drugs, including intravenous narcotics. In his final years it wasn’t entirely clear to his friends and family whether he had contracted his disease in the bedroom or the bathroom.
He’d introduced his lovers to his mother, and she accepted them warmly and generously. In the end, in the hospital, in a section filled with young men dying of AIDS, Blanche Resnicoff would love them all. She mopped brows and performed more intimate services as well. Some of the men had been jettisoned by their families. She became their mom.
And then Joel went blind, and that was that. Somehow it extinguished his fear because, ironically, his lack of vision brought clarity. Before, he’d had a choice—drag this out as long as possible or cut it mercifully short—but now the choice, in his mind, had been taken out of his hands. Only one perspective made sense, and he welcomed it. He had lived an exciting, influential, honest life, and now it was over. His eyes, deadened of their twinkle, told him that.
He had one last thing to do. He spoke to his doctors and assured them that despite what was about to happen, he knew they had not failed him.
In that hospital room, at the desire of the patient and with the concurrence of loving family, the order was given: increased palliative care. That is a common medical euphemism in the world of the dying. Essentially, doctors stopped the blood transfusions and increased the pain meds, inducing a coma from which Joel would not emerge.
For weeks Joel Resnicoff had hardly slept—he was in agony from insomnia—and now he was snoring. There was comfort in this. At the end, with the heart monitor flat and beeping, brother and mother cried but also could not suppress a smile, like sun on a rainy day.
DAYS AFTER THE DEATH of Terry Dolan in his Dupont Circle townhouse, there were two memorial services held for him in Washington. The first was a very public ceremony at the Dominican House of Studies, attended by some of the most influential Republican politicians in the country. U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch spoke. Senator Paul Laxalt was there, as was Patrick Buchanan, former White House director of communications and future presidential candidate.
It was a celebration of a potent political life ferociously lived. At a young age, Terry Dolan had become one of the leading voices of the modern conservative movement; for a time, he was perhaps its mightiest facilitator. In 1975, Dolan had cofounded NCPAC, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, and in that capacity became a startlingly successful fundraiser and political hit man in the take-no-prisoners style of his contemporary Lee Atwater. Many of the candidates Dolan financed, and whose elections he helped engineer, were opponents of, or indifferent to, gay rights.
The second memorial service for Dolan was held two days later, three miles away in St. Matthew’s Cathedral. This one had a smaller, less illustrious crowd. A few of the attendees from the first ceremony were there, but mostly it was others—personal, not political, friends of Terry Dolan. The attendees were largely male and young. People in the know speculated there would have been a significantly bigger turnout, but that many men were afraid to attend, lest the media—or people from rival political camps—started taking pictures, allowing people to link faces to jobs in Washington, drawing conclusions, assassinating reputations, gaining political leverage.
The people at this second service were mostly men Dolan knew from the gay nightlife in D.C. This was his big secret, the one he kept from almost all of his professional associates and even his immediate family. It was the secret he’d asked his doctor, Cesar Caceres, to keep. Caceres was the man who signed the death certificate. Even today the doctor won’t confirm what killed Dolan; he considers his promise to his patient to be sacrosanct and timeless. But he gently concedes that Dolan did not die of heart failure, except in the sense that, at death, most everyone’s heart fails.
Terry Dolan’s death, like Terry Dolan’s life, became a matter of politics. Some news organizations reported that he had died of complications from AIDS. Others did not. Brent Bozell, the conservative spokesman writing Dolan’s obit in the National Review, stubbornly went with the busted-heart story. NCPAC officially said he had succumbed to “diabetes and pernicious anemia.”
Terry Dolan had in fact died of AIDS, as most of the mainstream media eventually acknowledged. In May 1987, The Washington Post’s Elizabeth Kastor stated it as fact in a riveting five-thousand-word piece titled “The Cautious Closet of the Gay Conservative.” It was a nuanced story, sensitive and sympathetic to the dilemma of gay men like Dolan, whose public and private lives collided so stridently and painfully and, arguably, encouraged hypocrisy. Kastor quoted Dolan’s priest, who served Washington’s gay and lesbian community: “It’s not easy to be a gay man or woman. If you’re Irish, Catholic, and Republican, it makes it even more difficult.”
The secret was officially out. And yet eleven days later, something remarkable happened, even for Washington, the epicenter of bitter political contention.
Anthony Dolan, Terry’s older brother, took out a two-page ad in the conservative Washington Times headlined “What the Washington Post Doesn’t Tell Its Readers.” Anthony Dolan happened to be Ronald Reagan’s chief speechwriter. In the ad, he declared that Kastor’s story had been an abhorrent libel dishonestly prosecuting a political agenda: “The greatest and most malicious falsehood in this story,” Anthony Dolan wrote, “was its entire thrust, its basis: the claim that my brother lived and died a homosexual.”
John Terrence Dolan was a slim, small-statured, high-energy political player who campaigned for Richard Nixon at the age of nine, honed his political skills as a national college Republican leader, then, on the national political stage, sharpened them to the point of an ice pick. In the end, as his politics drifted further rightward, Dolan soured even on Nixon, denouncing him, with dubious authority, as “the most liberal President we’ve ever had.”
Dolan’s style was button-down dapper, but he seemed always to be hiding an impish smile. His mustache was bushy, like Ned Flanders’s in The Simpsons. Dolan gave the impression of the popular and dedicated 1970s high school civics teacher who would invite students over to his house for a study group and then pass out the joints. People who liked Terry Dolan liked him a lot. People who disliked him detested him.
One day in 1984, the famously prickly gay playwright Larry Kramer, author of The Normal Heart, the first mainstream play about AIDS, walked up to Dolan at a cocktail party in D.C. and dashed a glass of water in his face. At the time, Dolan was known in gay circles to have just ended a relationship with a male epidemiologist in New York and was actively partaking of the gay party scene in Washington.
Among AIDS activists it had become a truism: The greatest impediment to getting better attention for the terrifying national health crisis was not the outspoken homophobe. You could marginalize that guy; you could call him out for what he was. The bigger impediment was the closeted gay person who is in a position to help but is afraid to.
“How dare you come here?” Kramer shouted at Dolan, whose face was impassive and dripping. “You take the best from our world and then do all those hateful things against us. You should be ashamed.”
The anecdote was first reported in Randy Shilts’s book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. Today Kramer confirms it. He says Dolan just smiled and ambled away into the crowd, and the crowd looked at Kramer like he was nuts for making a stink. Many of them empathized with Dolan. “Gays in D.C.,” Kramer remembers, “were very closeted in fear of losing their jobs with the government.”
Nineteen eighty was a tremendous year for Republicans. It was the year the Ronald Reagan landslide redrew the political landscape in the United States. Some iconic Democrats who’d seemed unbeatable lost their jobs, including George McGovern in South Dakota, Frank Church in Idaho, and Birch Bayh in Indiana. They’d been specifically targeted by NCPAC, which spent millions of dollars in advertising against them—empowered by loosened court interpretations of post-Watergate spending regulations that placed no limits on the amount of money an independent organization could spend on a political campaign, so long as it had no direct affiliation with the candidate.
Terry Dolan took that broad license and brandished it jubilantly. In a remarkably candid (and prescient) interview with The Washington Post, he’d said this about his new freedom:
Groups like ours are potentially very dangerous to the political process. We could be a menace, yes. We could say whatever we want about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the senator wouldn’t have to say anything. A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean.
Later, Dolan would claim he was not speaking about his organization—he was talking about potential abuse by other, unspecified, presumably less scrupulous PACs.
And yet NCPAC was on the forefront of profoundly negative, dubiously accurate advertising, long before “profoundly negative, dubiously accurate” became a standard tactic. In the 1980s some TV stations refused to run NCPAC ads.
It was NCPAC that bought ads describing George McGovern as a “baby killer” for supporting abortion rights. (Even McGovern’s opponent, James Abdnor, who would win big, renounced that attack.) Another NCPAC commercial falsely accused Frank Church of having voted for an increase in his own Senate salary. That one was actually withdrawn after complaints. The NCPAC ads crushed both men.
Both Church and McGovern were sympathetic to gay rights; their opponents were not. (For Church, the issue was deeply personal. His gay brother, a closeted Navy admiral, had taken his own life in the 1960s after being targeted in a sexual blackmail scheme.)
Dolan clearly walked a fine line in his public life, and his public statements did not always jibe with his public policy. He once gave an interview to The Advocate, the national gay magazine, saying he opposed laws that discriminated against homosexuals. And yet his organization had recently sent out a fundraising letter signed by U.S. Representative Daniel B. Crane of Illinois saying: “Our nation’s moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical ERA pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians).” In the interview with The Advocate, Dolan apologized for this ad, claiming he hadn’t personally approved it.
But it had done its job. It pulled in significant money for Crane, who won his election and remained a congressman until defeated after it was revealed he’d had a sexual relationship with a seventeen-year-old female House page.
Perhaps there is no better evidence of Dolan’s willingness to manipulate the truth for his own ends than his preface to a 1984 book he wrote with Greg Fossedal, Reagan: A President Succeeds. The book apparently was never released, but a publisher’s proof copy was issued and circulated to interested parties. It’s still around. The book is mostly a paean to the first Reagan presidency. The dedication page reads like this:
This book is dedicated to the many patriotic conservative Americans who made the election of Ronald Reagan a reality in 1980. Before Mr. Fossedal and I wrote even the first word of this book, I had all of the following people in mind. Now, in the 84 campaign to reelect our president, I call these people “American Heroes for Reagan.”
(With your written permission your name will appear here, along with your designation as director, patron, or sponsor.)
Dolan died three days before Ronald Reagan delivered his annual New Year’s speech to the people of the Soviet Union. Anthony Dolan’s office wrote that speech, which was in part an eloquent defense of human rights, if tone-deaf to the irony of America’s persecution of people who were dying by the hundreds of a disease their administration was failing to take seriously.
“The American people are deeply concerned with the fate of individual people,” Reagan told the Soviet people. “We believe that God gave sacred rights to every man, woman, and child on Earth. . . . Respect for those rights is the bedrock on which our system is built.”
AT SOME TIME IN THE AFTERNOON, around the time Joel Resnicoff was breathing his last, a New York entertainment lawyer and Broadway entrepreneur named John Breglio arrived at a stately, spacious ranch-style home in the suburbs of Tucson, Arizona. It was at the foothills of a mountain range outside the city, and the view was spectacular.
Breglio had been summoned to Tucson by his friend and client Michael Bennett, the choreographer. Bennett was the gifted, driven, elegant, wildly innovative genius behind the 1975 smash Broadway hit A Chorus Line, which he conceived, created, choreographed, and directed. Over the years, Bennett had won five Tony Awards for choreography; only Bob Fosse has more.
Bennett was very ill. He’d be dead in a few months, at forty-four, of AIDS-related lymphoma, and on this day he knew the probable timetable. There was something he needed to get done first.
Like Joel Resnicoff, Michael Bennett was comfortable with his sexuality. But like Terry Dolan, he had lied about why he was sick.
Bennett was bisexual and had made no efforts to hide that. He’d been briefly married to the dancer Donna McKechnie, who created the role of Cassie in A Chorus Line. He had also had numerous relationships with men; in accepting his 1976 Tony, onstage, Bennett unhesitatingly kissed Bob Avian, his friend and co-choreographer, on the mouth. But when Bennett’s health began to fail, like Dolan he equivocated. He told people he had heart trouble. His reasons for the lie were complicated.
At the time of his diagnosis, Bennett’s name was everywhere. He was involved in a half-dozen high-profile productions and felt he had a financial obligation to protect his reputation—both for himself and for others. “He didn’t want to become a poster boy for the disease,” Breglio says today.
It was understandable, if less than fully courageous. There was at least one precedent for a famous man risking his reputation for the greater public good of AIDS awareness. When Rock Hudson finally disclosed his disease in 1985, he did it with this generous statement, read by Burt Lancaster to a silent, shocked audience at a huge Hollywood charity dinner: “I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if that is helping others, I can, at least, know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth.”
But Bennett told The New York Times he had angina; when others reported that he was suffering from heart problems, he kept quiet. And yet Bennett was a fundamentally principled man, and all this seems to have been weighing on him. He never quite articulated that, but his business meeting on December 28 was evidence enough.
Bennett had moved to Tucson from New York months before to be near a doctor who was treating his illness.
He was having some cognitive troubles. His longtime dalliances with Quaaludes and alcohol did not sit well with a fatal disease. He became occasionally confused and paranoid.
But on the day lawyer John Breglio arrived at Bennett’s house, his client was lucid and thinking clearly. He told Breglio that he had decided to add a codicil to his will. He was going to leave 15 percent of his $25 million estate to help fund AIDS research and treatment. The two men worked it out.
The money went to several charities, some of which—like amfAR—were directly involved in research. Others, such as God’s Love We Deliver, specialized in bringing psychological comfort and free food to the critically and chronically ill.
As it turns out, Bennett’s final generosity was literally bottomless. His bequest was permanent, meaning that for the last thirty-odd years, as residuals kept pouring in from all over the country from the hundreds of small and large and amateur and professional performances of A Chorus Line and Dreamgirls and other famous Bennett works, a percentage still goes to AIDS research and to comforting the afflicted.
ON PASSOVER 2018, Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff presided over a seder in his Washington apartment, as he does every year for about twenty-five people. It’s a joyful affair, devoted, as seders are, to a celebration of the story of the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt. A graying, patrician-looking man with a military bearing, Resnicoff is a gifted storyteller, so he peppers his historical lesson with intriguing, occasionally unsettling trivia. (Q: Why, for hundreds of years, did Jews tend to have only white wine at seders? A: To avoid being seen by a goy and being accused of the “blood libel”—drinking the blood of Christian children.)
Joel Resnicoff’s name didn’t come up in any of this. It didn’t have to. He was everywhere. The big brother’s apartment is a shrine to his younger brother’s art. There is some of it on every wall, more than two dozen pieces in all, and they are as eclectic as Joel was. Here, as you come in, presiding over the entrance almost protectively, like a mezuzah, is a gaily colored Joel Resnicoff scarf. (Arnold Resnicoff buys them on eBay, when he can.) There’s a silk screen of way-too-fashionable people with their way-too-fashionable dogs. A bed is covered with a huge beach towel Resnicoff designed for Bloomingdale’s: twenty-one young people looking impossibly hip.
There is a ResniCard: Two older ladies, wildly bejeweled, overly made up, overly broad in the beam, observing a wasp-waisted fashion-model type, and trying, as best they know how, not to be judgmental. “Maybe,” theorizes one, “she doesn’t like food.”
Here’s a small self-portrait in the foyer, done early in Joel Resnicoff’s career. It’s straightforward. He’s deeply tanned, thick of neck and resolute of mouth, a young man determined to grab the world as his own. Here’s another self-portrait, a larger one, in the dining room, painted much later, possibly after his diagnosis. It’s more surreal: Picasso triangles and Van Gogh colors and perfect almond eyes, a stylized young man with a stylized look of ineffable sadness. He is wearing a necktie, which Joel never did, and looking strangled by it.
Part of Joel’s bigger legacy is in fact his older brother. Arnold is a retired Navy chaplain. He was enticed into the clergy as an ensign in Vietnam in 1969, when an Episcopal priest realized he had no one to minister to Jewish soldiers in the Mekong Delta and deputized the lay Resnicoff into service.
Joel’s life and death had a profound impact on his brother. As a military rabbi, he risked censure by railing against the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that compelled gay service members to hide their sexual identity. Resnicoff called it “immoral,” saying that it “forced people to hide who they were while at the same time we were promoting core values that included honesty.” Resnicoff had been so outspoken and passionate on the subject that he was asked to deliver the invocation at the 2010 ceremony where Barack Obama signed the repeal of the policy. Resnicoff says today, “I think Joel was watching. I could feel his pride in me.”
ANTHONY DOLAN, TERRY’S brother, still lives in the Washington area. A former journalist, he once won the Pulitzer Prize for an exposé on public corruption, and then made the move into politics, where he found even greater fame and influence as Reagan’s hard-line, anti-Communist speechwriter. It was Dolan who wrote Reagan’s “ash heap of history” speech delivered to the British House of Commons, and, later, it was Dolan who persuaded the president to refer to the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire.” He is not an insignificant cog in the machine that ended the Cold War. At seventy, Dolan remains an icon of the national conservative moment.
He declined to be interviewed about his brother, and with characteristic bluntness, gave his reason: He didn’t want to take questions from someone working for a newspaper he dislikes, someone who is, he has decided, “a spokesman for the gay agenda.”