The new HBO documentary ‘Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed’ attempts to examine the star's closeted career—and the impact of his AIDS diagnosis.
confirming Hudson’s sexuality once and for all. “When you see that [film producer] Ross Hunter, Rock’s best pal, was a gay man who had a long-term life partner who still was refusing to admit Rock was gay even after Rock died, you see how completely slammed into the closet this generation was,” Kijak says.
Another generational divide between Hudson and many of the queer men that came after him? He was a registered Republican. “He was an older, successful, closeted, white man. What does he have to lose in any way, shape or form?” Kijak asks. “Rock’s a corny old-fashioned dude, and him and his friends, the older they got, the square-er they became. They weren’t hip, they weren’t cool. He was, I think, a ‘small r’ Republican.
It was Hudson’s close friendship with Nancy Reagan that inadvertently led to his AIDS diagnosis. After attending a party at the White House in 1984, the actor was sent photos from the event along with a note urging him to get a mole on his neck checked. By June of that year, he was diagnosed—not that the Reagans would ever intervene on Hudson’s or any other AIDS patient’s behalf. “His pals, Nancy and Ron, turn their back on him and all of the HIV AIDS community,” Kijak says.
As recounted in the documentary, while privately suffering from AIDS, Hudson played a recurring role on. “Multiple narratives [were] being spun” to excuse the actor’s deteriorating physical health, Kijak says, but Hudson was nevertheless horrified to discover he’d have to kiss co-starduring a time of full-blown hysteria about the virus. “Kissing scenes, close contact, everything is just...It’s panic mode because no one knew the science,” Kijak says.
After Hudson’s AIDS diagnosis was disclosed, some of Evans’s co-stars refused to film with her. “There were people who wouldn’t work with me and so they had to change scenes because I might have AIDS,” she continues. “I had personal friends who wouldn’t come over to dinner…I thought, where’s your humanity or where’s your compassion? What’s wrong with this world right now?”
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