Early victim of the immunodeficiency disease AIDS
Then something happens that finally thwarts the myth of the unearthly and unapproachable: Klaus Nomi becomes infected with a sexually transmitted pathogen, plunges into a health crisis and becomes frail. The image is obsolete. The carefully constructed shell, which shimmers on the outside and protects on the inside, dissolves. Klaus Nomi is one of the first to get sick with AIDS. Little is known about this yet. The "human immunodeficiency virus" (the abbreviation HIV has not yet become established) could only be identified a few months earlier. Effective drug treatment is a long way off, while hysteria and fear of gay men are spreading throughout the Western Hemisphere. There is also great uncertainty within the community – and fear of infection.
A few weeks after Nomi's health breakdown, on February 10, 1983, an inconspicuous text appears in the "Akron Beacon Journal", a daily newspaper from Ohio, where he had made some celebrated appearances three years earlier. He had also met a few people there more closely. It is not clear whether this article is an editorial message or an advertisement that someone posted for him. Under the heading "Do You Nomi?" it says: "Klaus Nomi (...) is currently suffering from pneumonia and other complications, he is in the New York Hospital (...). Klaus says he would be happy about news."
A harrowing document of loneliness: message in the "Akron Beacon Journal"
The newspaper clipping conveys an idea of the loneliness and despair that Klaus Nomi suffered from in his last phase of life. The Frankfurt literary scholar and Nomi biographer Monika Hempel found it in a US newspaper archive.
"Klaus Nomi has given the AIDS crisis a face"
After the publication of the advertisement, Nomi's condition worsens. With the exception of his girlfriend Maxine St. Clair, who took the cover photo of his second album "A Simple Man", most of his acquaintances keep their distance. Nomi's mother still visits him in New York, but flies back to Germany before his death in order not to let the ticket expire. When he died at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on August 6, 1983, impoverished and largely isolated at the age of 39, the public found out about his infection. The news goes around the world. Klaus Nomi becomes the first prominent death victim of a new disease, which is stigmatized by some with the term "gay plague". Only a year later it will hit Rock Hudson, and another eight years later Freddie Mercury. About a month after Nomi's death, the first AIDS relief organizations are established in Germany.
"Klaus Nomi has given the AIDS crisis a face," says Hempel, who is currently writing a book about him. Although at that time this face could not be more than a do-you-nomi projection screen. However, the dazzlingly uncertain and ignorant corresponded to the level of knowledge of the majority population at that time compared to the main risk group. Even before the outbreak of AIDS, this was vilified with unsightly regularity by campaigns of tabloid newspapers such as "Bild".
Klaus Nomi biographer Monika Hempel with a mascot and the linocut print "Klaus im Dirndl". Her book is expected to be published in the spring of next year
In order to get to the bottom of the Nomi-Sperber phenomenon, Monika Hempel spent a week rummaging through the estate in the theater library at Harvard, which was distributed over fifteen boxes - and discovered something quite surprising in the process. "I found his drawings particularly touching, including some costume designs. Even as a child, he drew, among other fairy-tale characters of Walt Disney." The script of a short story was also there, probably the concept for a planned stage show. It is titled "NOMI, or How the Musical Was was won!"
"Nomi styles herself as an alien, the child of a love marriage of Maria Callas, queen of opera, and Elvis Presley, king of rock'n'roll," says Hempel. "The baby Nomi is a redeemer figure, called to overcome not only the musical war, but all the military conflicts on earth and in space. His mother sends him to earth to deprive him of the influence of the father."