October 18, 2017 | Health Matters

A death too soon

HIV, if left untreated, will eventually kill you as it morphs into acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). If HIV is caught early enough, it can be treated and poz men can live a normal, healthy life. We all know this, yet some gay men still resist being tested for HIV. It's a decision that could literally kill you.

Michael Friedman, best known for the musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, was only 41 when he died in September. He had only been diagnosed with HIV nine weeks earlier.

It was a shockingly quick decline for someone known for his energy. Before passing, he was working as the artistic director of Encores! Off-Center, the New York City Center summer program that offers short revivals of Off Broadway shows. He had also decided to direct Assassins for the Encores! Off-Center series, and was working on a second show called The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin. If that wasn't enough, he was trying to launch a musical adaptation of All the President’s Men.

But friends started to notice his declining health and his complaints about being unwell.

Following the opening of Assassins in July, Friedman shared news of his diagnosis with co-workers.

“The day of the opening, we walked up five stairs, and got to the top, and Michael was completely winded,” Sam Pinkleton told the New York Times, who also works with Encores! Off-Center. “Then he pulled me and others aside and told us that he was diagnosed positive. My gut response was, I know a lot of people who are HIV positive, and this is not what they’re like -- this is somebody whose body is in the process of being cannibalized.”

And a meet-and-greet for The Bubbly Black Girl ended with him being rushed to the hospital.

“He said he had HIV he was going to the emergency room, and could I bring him a phone charger,” explained his friend Daniel Goldstein. “They had caught it at a rather advanced stage, but the drugs were working, and we all thought things were getting better.”

A man who was seen as having limitless energy was now bedridden.

“Every part of me expected him to break through the door of City Center, with an IV hooked up to his arm, shouting something, and the fact that he didn’t frightened me, a lot,” Pinkleton added. “This was somebody I’d watched be an aircraft carrier for 10 years, and he turned into a baby bird.”

A friend admitted that Friedman could have contracted the disease years ago. 

“As near as I can tell, he hadn’t actually been to a doctor or gotten tested for a couple of years, and only in July did he find out that he was HIV positive,” Oskar Eustis, director of New York's Public Theater, said “That’s just staggering -- staggeringly wrong of Michael, staggeringly upsetting.”

He pointed out that this was "a real warning shot across the bow for anybody who thinks this disease isn’t deadly anymore.”

It is very likely that Michael would be living a normal life now, continuing to do what he loved and bringing joy to his friends and fans of his creations -- if only he had been tested for HIV earlier. 

Brilliant, 41 and lost to AIDS: the theater world asks why  [New York Times]