Bay Windows - December 16, 2004
Loren King

Brudnoy was diagnosed with HIV in the late 1980s but went public with his condition - and his homosexuality - only after he nearly died in 1994. The dual disclosures, and attendant media hype, quickly made him, somewhat reluctantly, a "poster boy" for both AIDS and homosexuality. After his astonishing recovery, he gradually became an eloquent and candid spokesman for gay and AIDS issues, including the formation of the David Brudnoy Fund for AIDS Research at MGH.

During a deathbed interview Dec. 8 with WBZ newscaster Gary LaPierre, Brudnoy said that he was not dying from AIDS: "The AIDS thing is what I'm not dying from and the merkel is what I am."

A graduate of Yale University, Brudnoy was a longtime Back Bay resident who began his radio career at WHDH in 1976, at the height of Boston's busing controversy. He left WHDH in 1981 and wound up at WBZ in 1986, where he remained for the rest of his career.

Brudnoy used his popular nightly talk show - which he broadcast from his Commonwealth Avenue apartment in recent years - to educate and engage listeners about gay issues and AIDS, as well as numerous other topics from politics to pop culture.

A well-read, well-traveled, intellectually curious man who held two masters degrees and a doctorate in history, Brudnoy's trademark as a radio host was the diversity of topics and guests - he hosted everyone from actors and authors to politicos and philosophers - and his reasoned, respectful discourse. Media pundits both locally and nationally credited Brudnoy for being a lone voice of reason and tolerance in the widening talk radio sea of anger, bigotry and crudeness.

Even as his health deteriorated, Brudnoy kept a rigorous schedule that underscored his appetite for life and work. Besides his nightly talk show, he taught journalism at Boston University and wrote movie reviews for newspapers. He regularly and enthusiastically attended afternoon film screenings, and was the founder and former president of the Boston Society of Film Critics, a professional organization of which this author is a member and current president.

Two years after his remarkable recovery from near death, Doubleday published Brudnoy's autobiography, "Life is Not a Rehearsal," in which the Minneapolis native described his upbringing as the only child of a dentist and a homemaker mother, and an extended family of relatives who indulged "this best little boy in the world."

He also wrote openly, often indulgently, about his sexual history. Opined "Publishers Weekly" in its review: "The reader is as relieved as Brudnoy when at last, on page 73, the then-21-year-old, relentlessly randy, homosexual, Yale junior is delivered of his virginity. With awesome self-commemoration and graphic sexuality, this Boston talk-show host lets it all hang out here: his heavy use of psychedelics as a young man; alcohol abuse; "wild sex with improper strangers," which on a couple of occasions turned violent when Brudnoy picked up psychotics."

Brudnoy was one of six Bostonians with AIDS - a cross-section of classes, races, genders, and sexual preferences - who allowed a documentary film crew to track their day to day regimen of AIDS medications for three years for the 2001 film "Undetectable," directed by Jay Corcoran. He appeared with the director and other subjects from the film at its premiere at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts on Dec. 1, 2001 in commemoration of World AIDS Day.

Brudnoy credited his friend, openly gay Boston film booker George Mansour, with convincing him to participate in the film project. "I thought, 'Oh, George' - I'd just gone through nearly a year of all the television you can imagine, every network, New York Times, People, Oprah, everybody. He said, 'No, this will be different,'" Brudnoy told the Boston Phoenix in a 2001 interview. "[Corcoran] had approached other people along the way and had resisted getting "another gay white man," because there are so many of us who have AIDS, and then decided, after all, that up until very recently that was the predominant demographic of people with AIDS."

Brudnoy's politics were famously libertarian and conservative which made him an anomaly on both sides of the political spectrum. It's one of the reasons his talk show was so successful: he could talk and listen to everyone. That didn't mean he shied from unpopular positions.

A former Boy Scout, Brudnoy publicly took the national Boy Scouts of America (BSA) to task for its exclusionary policy on the basis of sexual orientation.

He hosted a major 2002 BSA fundraiser only because the Boston Minuteman Council, unlike the national organization, had adopted a policy that opposed discrimination in scouting on the basis of sexual orientation. Brudnoy used his podium time to berate the national BSA, based in Irving, Texas, for refusing to change its anti-gay policy. "What doesn't register with the narrow-minded men who run the BSA from Texas is that their exclusion doesn't enshrine traditional values worth upholding, but just enforces habitual practices well worth leaving behind," he told the 325 contributors, who included CEOs from Blue Cross/Blue Shield and NSTAR. "Anyone who says that to oppose the BSA's policy where supported by local councils will harm boys fails to realize that far more harm is done a boy by telling him, in word or deed, that his gay friend is worth less than he, and [that] denying a gay classmate the scouting experience is somehow a fine American thing, than by helping a local council come to its senses."

But Brudnoy, an agnostic, took the non-discrimination policy a step further during his remarks when he questioned whether inclusion also extends to broad religious tolerance." The Minuteman Council should make clear, now, unequivocally, that not only will no one be kept from scouting because of the religion into which he is born or the religion he professes, but also [that] no one will be kept from scouting because he professes no religion," he told the donors. "Just as a boy's sexual orientation is irrelevant to scouting, so, too, his private philosophical or religious orientation, or lack of it, is irrelevant to scouting."

In the 2001 Boston Phoenix interview, writer Tamara Wieder asked Brudnoy if he feared death. His response was vintage Brudnoy: honest, funny, down-to-earth, thoughtful.

"I've always quoted Woody Allen's wonderful aphorism: 'It's not that I'm afraid of dying; I just don't want to be there when it happens.' By which I mean that I'd much prefer to have a piano fall on my head when I'm walking down the street than go through all that [suffering]," he said. "But we have no choice. We really don't. I have, I think, a fabulous life. I think fear would come from feeling that there's no one that cares, or that I've made no dent in the world. I have a big ego; I like making a dent. I take great pleasure in demonstrating that I can mean something. The whole phenomenon of being in the light of day is, for me, a very important one. I feel no fear in my life. I really don't."

Loren King is the Arts Editor of Bay Windows. Her e-mail address is lking@baywindows.com.

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