Richard Sax and the Silence of AIDS
By 1979, thirty-year-old Richard Sax had pulled off the kind of reinvention that was possible for young lesbians and gay men who moved to New York in the decade after Stonewall, when Greenwich Village shook, old walls toppled, and ambition started to wrap itself in the colors of identity. Nick Malgieri, a pastry chef and writer, met Sax that year. He was dark and lanky, with soft eyes and a chin dimple set just off plumb from the centerline of his lips. Malgieri noted how meticulously Sax had assembled himself, his jeans, flannel shirt, and cowboy boots: a look as tight as flexed muscle.
That same year, Food & Wine founders Ariane and Michael Batterberry hired Sax to carve a test kitchen out of their rambling editorial offices, filled with the Batterberrys’ collection of antiques and odd knickknacks, on Third Avenue at East Forty-Seventh. Sax and the Batterberrys were assembling the template of the modern glossy food mag.
Three years earlier, Sax was a high school English teacher in Clark, New Jersey. Even there he’d begun a personal transformation, sort of Venice Beach coffee-house poet, Earth shoes and studiously carefree surfer hair. He had ambitions to be a great cook. On weekends he catered, mostly hors d’oeuvre parties, prepping in his apartment kitchen in Orange.
In the summer of 1977, he took a job running the Black Dog Tavern on Martha’s Vineyard, a place of creaky, raw-board floors and clenched New England restraint. Sax saw the romantic possibilities: white tablecloths and votive candles. Fishermen wheeled pre-dawn hauls to the back door; there was local corn and tomatoes, and watercress that some enterprising hippies foraged in the creeks.
The next year Sax went to Paris to study at Le Cordon Bleu, followed by a kitchen apprenticeship at the Hotel Plaza-Athénee. In London, he went to work for Richard Olney on the Time-Life Good Cook series, the multi-volume subscription cookbooks memorable for step-by-step technique photography. Unfortunately for Sax, Olney gave him responsibility for the volume on offal, a subject that made Sax queasy. At first he refused to style the split and baked lambs’ heads, but Olney insisted, made Sax peel the lips back and brush the teeth so they’d shine for the camera. Eventually, Olney, who was often absent, accused Sax of moonlighting, sneaking into the studio kitchen to test recipes for a book of his own. Olney fired him.
Back in New York, Sax worked for Food & Wine while writing a string of books: Cooking Great Meals Every Day, in 1982, with David Ricketts; The Cookie Lover’s Cookbook in 1986, same year as From the Farmers’ Market, with Sandra Gluck. It was during this period that Sax fell in love. Michael Violanti had moved to New York from Detroit, a first-gen techie who would launch a telemarketing company. He was gorgeous and funny, with curly dark hair and intense eyes.
Violanti and Sax moved into a big loft in NoHo, a minimalist space in black and gray on the eighth floor, with a bank of windows looking onto Broadway. Sax hosted cooking classes there. On summer weekends, they escaped to Fire Island, eventually buying a place of their own in the Pines. Gluck and her husband would go out to stay, partying in the gay crush of Violanti and Sax’s friends, in a haze of tea dance DJ sets, blue margaritas, poppers and weed. The house had a small lookout at the top of a ladder, an antique avian garret known as a cockloft, though of course its double meaning made it extra delicious. When the men, drugs, and hot-club play mixes started to feel like too much, Sax and Violanti closed themselves off from the scene on the island. They foraged blueberries and cooked.
There were 6,871 new AIDS cases reported in New York City in 1989, nearly double the number from three years previously. Nationally, deaths from causes related to AIDS and HIV spiked to 19,241, up fifty percent from 1988. In 1989, Nick Malgieri met Sax at a new restaurant in the West Village, to talk and sample the food. It was late afternoon and the place had cleared out. Sax, who’d seemed preoccupied, turned to Malgieri and told him Violanti was showing AIDS-related symptoms. “That was the start of our friendship,” Malgieri says, because in those days—when the fear and stigma of AIDS haunted a city already ravaged by the pandemic—you didn’t talk about infection with someone you didn’t trust.
Violanti died in 1991. Devastated, Sax sold the loft and bought an apartment a few blocks north, on East Tenth Street. And though he worked hard to stay healthy, his friends saw a change. “I knew the writing was on the wall,” says Marie Simmons, his coauthor for a monthly recipe column in Bon Appétit magazine. Malgieri was at Sax’s apartment for a meeting of the culinary group Bakers Dozen East. Malgieri got there first, and on Sax’s kitchen counter noticed a ramekin of pills: AZT (azidothymidine), an antiviral that can delay the onset of AIDS, a sure sign that Sax had been diagnosed with HIV. “Nobody took AZT for fun,” Malgieri says.
Meanwhile, Sax had begun work on cookbook he hoped would be his legacy: a sprawling compendium of American home desserts. It was to be a synthesis of historical and modern recipes in the mold of James Beard’s American Cookery of 1972. Sax spent long hours in the New York Public Library’s vaultlike Rare Book and Manuscript Collection room, poring over recipe notebooks and early cookbooks. For inspiration and recipes, he asked friends and colleagues, a Rolodex of pastry chefs and recipe developers that included Malgieri and David Lebovitz. He collected quotes from literature to grace the margins of the pages. Sax’s research was meticulous, yet he worked at a frantic pace, against time and the infection.
The virus had its own schedule. Sax developed Kaposi’s sarcoma, a form of cancer that can cause purple lesions in the skin and organs. They’d developed in Sax’s lungs—his breathing sounded labored. He’d submitted to chemotherapy; he lost much weight and most of his hair. He wore straw hats in public. Sax was asked to present an award onstage at the annual IACP convention in 1994. He had the courage to stand at the lectern and show himself to a hall full of colleagues—a forty-five-year-old man whom illness had transformed. “He was wearing old-fashioned rimless glasses,” Malgieri recalls, “and he looked like Richard Sax, eighty years old.”
Southern cookbook author Nathalie Dupree ordered him to gorge. “Now Richard,” she said, “you go home and make a pan of brownies and eat every one of them!” Malgieri would invent excuses to stop by his apartment with food—he’d say he had cookies he’d tested and wanted to get rid of, for example, and bring along fried chicken.
Sax’s grand book, Classic Home Desserts, was published in 1994. He dedicated it to Violanti, his “beloved friend”—a muffled coming out. At the 1995 James Beard Awards ceremony at Manhattan’s Marriott Marquis, New York City First Lady Donna Hanover Giuliani and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous host Robin Leach presented Sax with a medal. Four months later, forty-six-year-old Richard Sax was dead. Before he died, he planned and paid for his memorial lunch at The Four Seasons, where waiters poured rare wines he’d collected but didn’t live to taste. It was the final gesture in Sax’s twenty-year act of self-invention: a man of inspired taste, zhuzhing the things of the world to make life better and more beautiful.
His obituary in the New York Times cited lung cancer as the cause of Sax’s death. Out of respect for his mother in New Jersey, who would have been embarrassed by a public acknowledgment, there was no mention of his coping with HIV/AIDS, the why of his cancer. Despite growing visibility of the disease (and belated action in Washington) fear and stigma had largely quarantined the subject of AIDS, except in queer and activist communities. America’s restaurant industry and food media, devastated by the disease, were no different.
There were exceptions. In 1986 and 1987, Alice Waters and Zuni Café’s Vince Calcagno had organized Aid and Comfort, a pair of AIDS fundraisers that gave witness to the losses invisibly ravaging Northern California’s most visible restaurants. And James Beard Foundation founder Peter Kump, whose onetime partner, landscape designer Doug Campbell, died of complications from AIDS, talked openly in the foundation newsletter about his ex-lover’s disease. But mostly, food media remained silent about the truth, as people such as Felipe Rojas-Lombardi—the Peruvian-born chef credited with introducing tapas to New York, who succumbed to the disease at age forty-six—were memorialized in obituaries that avoided mention of HIV or AIDS.
Before Stonewall (and even after), queers were used to grieving mutely. Horace Gibson, a friend of James Beard’s who, with his lover Paul Burke-Mahony—first cousin to John F. Kennedy—ran an elite English-language school in Florence, Italy, for the children of American and British expats. Though they’d been together for nearly twenty years, the truth of their relationship had to be a secret. In 1968, Burke-Mahony died suddenly. Gibson couldn’t mourn publicly. “Being firmly in the closet as far as school was concerned,” Gibson wrote in his memoirs, “I couldn’t let my grief show.” Nor could he attend the funeral Burke-Mahony’s family organized in Boston. Any memorial Gibson would have held for his partner was possible only in his thoughts: a lonely, silent wake that would stretch on for years.
Sax, however, left a memorial of his own, on page 644 of Classic Home Desserts. Next to the recipe for Slushy Melon Ice with Cointreau is a quote from Armistead Maupin’s Sure of You from 1989, the sixth book in his Tales of the City. In the novel, Thack Sweeney has to face the possibility that his boyfriend, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, might soon die of complications from AIDS. Sweeney talks about it with a friend, after they’ve decided to get ice cream. The friend asks Sweeney if he’s frightened.
“Thack shrugged. ‘All we’ve got is now, I guess. But that’s all anybody gets. If we wasted that time being scared . . .’” He trails off; his attention pivots to ice cream. Maupin is telling us that fear of future suffering—even of a loss that seems near—must not infect us. It was the message of Sax’s generation, of queers who created lives of new possibility, who made beautiful things that seeped out to the culture, far beyond the city’s boundary. Queers who faced AIDS mostly alone, and without the witness of history, or in other words a truthful obit in the Times.
Richard Sax planted a reminder for us—the living—in his book. He told us to resist fear, to keep death from taking more than it has a right to. Not to die before we’re dead, but to enjoy the slushy melon ice in front of us; to really lose ourselves in it. As if for Sax, after thinking for so many years about what to eat, the disease and its devastation had shown him how to eat.
Not long after Classic Home Desserts came out, Sax talked about the book with Nick Malgieri for New York’s Daily News. “I’ve tried to bring food to life in a bigger, more human context in this book,” he told Malgieri. “The world has enough recipes, already.”