Okay, this is going to be long because, as the kids say, I just can't. I have not said anything in any of the Donna Summer threads because it's horrible when somebody dies so young and I didn't want to take anything away from that or from anybody's grief, but as the story of her AIDS commentary continues to evolve all the way to Eric saying "which again have never even been documented," I just finally have to throw the history, etched in stone in my memory, as I recall it.
It was the very early-'80s. It was the most awful of times, it was the worst of times. The AIDS epidemic was growing exponentially on a weekly basis, and everybody was scared crapless.
Elton John, of all the queens on the planet earth, married a woman, that's how scared he was about his own homosexually active past. People from all social strata were doing anything possible to distance themselves from their own homosexual activity and associations with the gay community.
Donna Summer's first wave of success had ended as the disco sucks era took over. She was a mainstream disco artist, like the Bee-Gees, she was associated with a fad that was now no longer in fashion. She had her drug issues, and her work with Giorgio Moroder (without whom she would have been nothing) was over.
Ronald Reagan was the new president and he and his party seized the moment to ignite the culture wars in an concentrated effort to snuff out the liberation movements of the '60s and '70s including the ideas of free love and cocaine fueled disco decadence.
"Dance music," the untainted new mainstream term for "disco" had not taken hold yet. People like Donna Summer and The Village People were looking for ways to stay in the game without looking like has-beens of an embarrassing era. The poor Village People tried being "New Romantics" to jump on the synth-dance movement breaking in England at the time, along with their gay archetype costumes. It didn't work.
All this was going on when Miss Summer became a born-again Christian, which PalJoey remembers as the outcome of a struggle with drugs. It was after that that she did a show in Atlantic City, which had only recently had its first casinos open up. And one of the gay pop music writers of the Village Voice (I think it was Ed-something, who I am pretty sure became an editor at Billboard) covered the show. Because he was a gay man who loved Donna Summer.
In full disclosure mode, I was a gay punk rocker at the time and NOBODY hated gay disco more than gay punk rockers. We couldn't understand the very concept of having to dress up in expensive clothes and beg to be allowed to pay our way in to a club to dance to recordings of studio musicians playing behind mostly faceless, unnamed women singing. This is not to say that Donna Summer's records were not secret aural pleasures of mine. The Moroder era was remarkable with the synth work.
Summer had been away from the public for a little while by the time of the Atlantic City show, perhaps she had been to rehab and found the lord and all that. During the show, and I have no memory of what prompted Summer to say this (perhaps glancing at the crowd and how many men were there without women?), she said, "The Bible says God made Adam & Eve not Adam & Steve, but I still love you." This shocked the Voice writer, since the people who turned up for the comeback were mostly the only people who cared, gay male disco fans.
Later in the show, she threw in a little more testifying because basically that's what newly-minted born again Christians do, and she said that if people were interested in hearing more about how the lord saved her, she would be back out onstage after the show to talk about it.
It was in this smaller group that the Voice writer heard her talk about how God punishes sin and that AIDS was gay men's sin. You have to remember the times. Try to imagine a time before cellphones, where people went through life without telephones, still and movie cameras and voice recorders in their pockets. I don't even know if the Voice reporter had a photographer with him, or if he was sent by the paper to cover the show or if he was there as a paying fan. But a credentialed reporter writing in a newsweekly WAS the documentation. That's why you will not find a handheld phone camera video of Donna making the statement in 1981.
I remember reading this article, because I read the Voice every single week, and for those first eight years or so I read every single article I encountered that mentioned AIDS at all.
There was some backlash in the Voice at the time. There were a couple of letters to the editor of the "I find that hard to believe" and "Maybe that wasn't what she meant to say" variety, with the article writer saying, no, that's what she said, and he was there to hear it. He had no reason to be making this up. She wasn't some horrible person who deserved deflating. She was widely considered a dinosaur. He was there as a fan. He documented the experience. Not just during a throw away line onstage, but a "come down and chat and hear my biblical wisdom" small group discussion afterwards.
There was no response from Summer or her camp officially, because, who cares? This was the new zeitgeist. She said nothing that was out of line with the new Reagan era.
She did have gay friends who sort of attempted to explain the whole situation. Caftan-wearing producer Allan Carr (Grease, Can't Stop the Music) said in one interview that he was sure she did say those things, because she was a very naive woman and easily took on the opinions of those around her. Okay, he called her a naive girl. He explained that if there were a preacher who had made an impression on her, who had given her a framework (no matter how homophobic) that could help her make sense of her turbulent world, she more than likely latched onto it.
You have to remember, her career had not yet gotten its second post-disco wind. When she DID finally get that wind, she was embarrassed about her work on "Love to Love You" and "Bad Girls," and claimed she didn't really know what she was doing when Moroder had her simulate all those orgasms, which did lend credence to Carr's assertions that Summer's sails were blown by the prevailing winds and that she was naive. But extremely ambitious.
The career got the second wind, she was on the Geffen label after leaving the Casablanca label (known for disco and KISS) and was repositioned as a pop singer, not a disco diva. Eventually, she did the benefit for GMHC and THAT'S when there was some push back and Summer said she never said any such thing and besides nobody can prove it (which may not have been the smartest thing to say). You know all those historical references to the beginning of the AIDS epidemic where the focus is on the rare, brave people who didn't abandon people with AIDS? Well, the reason it was so rare was because so many people DID abandon people with AIDS and by extension gay men. Donna Summer was one of those people. She was not alone.
Look, we all tell ourselves all sorts of things to help us get past stupid things we've said and done. Denial is a VERY strong defense mechanism. Summer may have very well come to believe that she never said any such thing. But the writer was there. I don't find it surprising that the woman who smoked for 30 years was sure the lung cancer was from 9/11 dust. It just makes it easier to go on when "I didn't do anything!" allows you to not really think about your complicity.
I don't meant to take anything away from how much she meant to so many people. She did have a beautiful voice and she worked with people who crafted her work into masterful pop creations. I had a chance a couple of times in the past several years to see her live, but I couldn't get over the AIDS stuff. With her death, I find a sense of forgiveness. I can forgive the awful things somebody has said, but without them explicitly apologizing for it, I won't forget.
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