Joanna Wane looks at the enduring legacy of artist, activist and canonised ‘saint’ Derek Jarman All sorts of patients ended up in the two HIV wards at London’s St Mary’s Hospital, where nurse Sally Rowe worked in the late 80s. A violinist from the philharmonic orchestra. A stockbroker.
A dresser in the West End. A man with a male partner whose ex-wife would visit him with their kids. Nurses like Rowe got to know some of them so well as they cycled in and out of hospital that they went to their funerals.
Not normal practice for medical staff, but there was something special about that time, she says, and the way the gay community supported one another. One patient told her he’d lost 35 friends to Aids. Rowe remembers Derek Jarman as an “incredibly positive”, good-looking man who was always surrounded by visitors, although when he died in 1994 at the age of 52, it was at a different hospital across town.
“I knew he was a film director,” she says. “But he didn’t act like that. He was always really well-mannered.
Kind and funny. And he was obviously a strong person mentally, because gay activism in those days wasn’t a big thing.” In his lifetime, Jarman was many things to many people.
Filmmaker, artist, activist, set designer, writer, poet, performer, gardener. Towards the end of his life, he was even canonised as a living saint by a group of queer “nuns”, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, to highlight the UK government’s lack of care during the.