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own life had been with another teenage boy at school.
In sharing that confidence, Hitch opened up a level of trust
with Doug which was never shaken thereafter, even when
Hitch, to Doug’s horror, defended the invasion of Iraq. The two
men had much else in common: both were socialists, militant
atheists, and incisive wits, and often they’d leave parties to-
gether and continue to drink and talk through the night. Doug
went through Hitch’s painful divorce from his first wife, and
Hitch, in turn, was there for Doug during one of the darkest pe-
riods in his own life—the death of his beloved companion
Hervé Couergou.*
Doug had had a previous relationship with the much older
Jonas Mekas—often called “the godfather of American avant-
garde cinema”—but when a filmmaker friend in Paris intro-
duced him to Hervé, who was twenty years his junior, his
“intelligence and rebellious spirit” (as Doug later wrote), his
“visceral compassion for the poorest and most oppressed of any
color,” captivated him. Hervé was the son of Catholic working-
class parents who were also communists—thus, as Doug put it,
“doubly homophobic”—and Hervé had left home at fifteen,
hoping to succeed as a writer. After a year of seeing each other
constantly, Doug was certain he’d found what he called his
“One Great Love” and the two made a lifelong emotional com-
mitment to each other; they talked about “what it would be like
to grow old together, making plans for a cottage in Brittany and,
perhaps, for raising a child.”
It was not to be. Their dreams were cut short when Hervé
was diagnosed as HIV-positive. Hervé told Doug that he wanted
to see the States before he died, and Doug returned to NewYork
to lay the groundwork for Hervé’s arrival. Just two months be-
fore the move was to take place, President Clinton renewed
George H. W. Bush’s executive order barring admission to any
non-citizen who was HIV-positive—an action that turned
Doug’s dislike of Clinton into hatred and fueled a series of ven-
omous articles about him. Hervé was able, on a tourist visa, to
make several brief trips to the U.S., but as his health deterio-
rated, he could neither work nor travel. France had a decent pub-
lic health system, but it didn’t pay for all Hervé’s medical
expenses, nor, of course, did it cover rent and living expenses.
To provide those, Doug had to stay in New York most of the
time to work the political scene. He found the separation “un-
bearable.” He longed to nurse Hervé himself, to provide “the
loving presence and moral support that are so crucial to fight-
ing AIDS.” Hervé died alone in 1994, and Doug fell into “a
black hole of depression,” seriously contemplating suicide.
He credits Hitchens with holding him back from the brink.
He “knew me well enough,” Doug later said, “to have sussed
out, without being told, that I was seriously considering ending
my own life.” Hitch spent hours and hours with Doug trying to
make him understand what a disservice it would be to Hervé’s
memory—how deeply ashamed Hervé would have been had he
known he’d caused Doug’s death. Hitch’s argument worked,
and Doug drew back. Ever after he credited Hitch with saving
his life. Doug also credited him with never turning down his re-
quest to help with this or that queer cause—even after the two
came sharply to disagree about Iraq. Hitchens denounced ho-
mophobia in print, once writing: “I say that homosexuality is
May–June 2015
23
Felice Picano
TomBakerBooks.com
* Doug Ireland, “Remembering Hervé,”
The Nation
, June 24, 1996.
not just a form of sex, it’s a form of love—and it commands our
respect for that reason.”
Doug was never able to claim the same responsiveness for
two of his other friends, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag. Not that
he ever wrote a critical word about their refusal to identify with
or lift a finger for the gay political movement. That would have
gone against the grain of his totalizing view of friendship. Once
Doug clasped you to his bosom, he showered you with hyper-
bolic praise, seemingly incapable of admitting any evidence of
human folly or frailty. His treatment of Sontag is a case in point.
On her death, Doug wrote about her “humor and wit ... her ca-
pacity for lucid self-analysis”—and how amusing she could be
“in recounting her own amorous adventures with women.”
Praising her as “the epitome of the
intellectuelle engagée
,” he
claimed that “she never shirked the responsibility of living in
her time.” Yet “her time” included the rise of the LGBT move-
ment, from which she kept a rigidly fastidious distance.
I
N HIS LATER YEARS
, Doug was himself a sharp critic of
the organized gay movement, in particular the Human
Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT political group.
Doug denounced it, accurately, as “corporate oriented”
and hell-bent on assimilation, on winning mainstream ac-
ceptance at the cost of denying the invaluable “different-
ness” of gay people—and being just as indifferent as the
mainstream to the plight of the poor, gay, or otherwise. He in-
dicted LGBT people in general, not simply their organizations,
for their ignorance and lack of interest in the widespread, ongo-
ing persecution of LGBT people in countries like Russia, Iraq,