VITO RUSSO

FILM HISTORIAN, GAY ACTIVIST

A pioneer film critic, Russo revealed the consistently negative way commercial films have portrayed lesbians and gay men. Wit and charm were among his weapons as an activist, and they also made him a beloved figure in the gay community.

Vito Russo was born in 1946 in New York City and grew up there. After studying at Fairleigh Dickinson University, he got a master's degree in film at NYU in 1971. While working in the film department at the Museum of Modern Art, he began his study of the way lesbians and gay men are depicted in movies, which resulted in his book The Celluloid Closet (1981, revised 1987). He concluded that movies contribute to homophobia by creating negative images of homosexuals in the public mind. A witness to the 1969 Stonewall uprising, when gays fought police at a raided New York bar, Russo became an activist in 1970. He was a founder of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and ACT UP (see card 105).

In memory of his lover Jeffrey Sevcik, who died of AIDS in 1986, Russo made a panel for the AIDS Memorial Quilt (see card 106), and he was shown working on it in the film Common Threads. In an interview with Eric Marcus for the book Making History (1992) Russo spoke of his own HIV infection and of Sevcik's death. "It was very painful. I miss him terribly. He's been gone three years now [1989], and I'm still sick and I'm very lonely. It's hard to live alone and be sick alone." But he fought to stay alive. The character who represents Russo in The Destiny of Me by Larry Kramer (see card 97) refuses a morphine drip as he nears death: "1 want to stay a little longer." Russo died of AIDS November 7, 1990. Next Card 49: SISTER ROMANA MARIE RYAN: Roman Catholic Nun