STORIES

Peabody Award winner and Primetime Emmy nominee, Joseph Lovett, the broadcast news producer and documentary filmmaker, was a pioneer in the early days of the HIV & AIDS epidemic.  Joe was angered by the Reagan government’s inaction to AIDS and the lack of urgency in the media. He used his position as an openly gay man at network TV to make one of the first long-form news items on AIDS.

The May 1983 groundbreaking story for the ABC’s 20/20 program was made at a time when mainstream TV had largely neglected the deepening AIDS crisis in the USA.  A young Geraldo Rivera raised the alarm through interviews with public officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, patients, researchers and activists including Larry Kramer.

Speaking about Joe in an interview, Mr. Rivera recalled that “He dragged television audiences kicking and screaming into understanding the epidemic … He was nonstop. Once he got wound up, he was determined.”

The New York Times ran its first front-page article about the AIDS crisis within a week of the 20/20 investigation. Mr. Lovett remained a steadfast chronicler in follow-up segments, including one about Rock Hudson’s death and another in which Barbara Walters held a toddler diagnosed with AIDS, to dispel public fears about skin contact.  Joe gained a reputation of being a crusading journalist. He was just the kind of ally we in the HIV population needed.

I’m playwright and filmmaker Ash Kotak, founder of AIDS Memory UK, the nonprofit set up to deliver the AIDS Memorial in London. I met Joe and his partner Dr. James Cottrell, a pioneer of neuro-anesthesiology, through my lover, the BBC film maker, Nigel Finch, who died of an AIDS defining illness. I remember them showing me a photo album of a busy New Year Eve party they had thrown in 1979, filled with 20- and 30-somethings.

Joe’s aim to shock me worked when he remarked, “Nearly all the people in that album are now dead.”

When Joe set up his independent film production company, he made documentaries “with a trauma-informed focus to minimize suffering, maximize empathy and inspire action on health and social justice issues.”

Joe never gave up on us. Driven by fury at the rampant and targeted abuse towards people living with HIV, the continued attacks in the media, and the rejection of individuals by family and friends, he created “In a New Light,” a yearly series of star-sprinkled specials hosted by Elizabeth Taylor, Arsenio Hall, Paula Abdul, Barbara Walters and many more. It was intended for teens and parents to watch together and ran from 1992 to 1996 with excellent ratings.

His aim was not only to continue to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS in America but also to reduce the extreme stigma against us and to help us get through this crisis. It felt so lonely and programs like this made us feel we had not been discarded, ostracized, and forgotten. Funding to fight AIDS had to remain in the public consciousness and Joe knew this.

He produced State of Denial, a 2003 feature film on President Mbeki’s AIDS denialism in South Africa.  He directed the 2005 documentary, Gay Sex in the 70s, which expertly mixed archival footage with new interviews to create a stunning visual document of New York during the decade of gay liberation, from post-Stonewall up to the outbreak of the AIDS crisis only a decade later.

Joe grasped the destructive and dissociative effects of trauma and the strength in our scars. When only 13 years old, Joe had witnessed the tragic death of his mother in a car accident. We spoke often of the effects of having witnessed so many loved ones die in the most horrific way and the resultant cumulative grief.  He explored his mother’s death in his film The Accident and the death of his father and three siblings in the intensely personal film Cancer: Evolution to Revolution. The documentary won a 2001 Peabody Award and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy in 2000.

Joseph F. Lovett: a brilliant storyteller, an ally to people struggling with health issues and societal abuse, a trusted and fiercely intelligent friend. A life very well lived.