Anastasia Biographer and AIDS Activist Peter Kurth Come Out With His Own History

“There is no greater outing than an HIV diagnosis,” Peter Kurth says of his own crystallizing moment seven years ago. “When I found out, the scenery changed.”

Kurth is a Burlington, author and board member of Vermont CARES. He describes his relatively new role as an AIDS activist like coming out all over again. Kurth was still basking in the success of his internationally acclaimed biography of the Romanov princess Anastasia, perhaps the world’s greatest enigma, when he ran headlong into the world’s most enigmatic disease. “A friend of mine once said, knowing”you have HIV is like walking in three feet of sand while everyone else walks on the sidewalk,” he explains. “It’s heroic to go on.”

But Kurth had found inspiration, and an occupation, by tracing the footsteps of three irresistibly alluring, iconic heroines. “I was reluctant to identify myself with them publicly,” he says. “I had privately, but not in terms of their characters — rather in terms of their stories.”

Anastasia, journalist Dorothy Thompson and dancer Isadora Duncan are the stories of Peter Kurth’s life. And HIV, he says, will not be the subject of his death.

Anastasia first piqued Kurth’s curiosity when he was still a young boy growing up in Burlington. He was fascinated by his mother’s reaction to an Ingrid Bergman film about a woman who claimed to be the Russian Grand Duchess.

History tells us that Tsar Nicholas II and his striking family were killed in 1918 during the Russian Revolution. Anna Anderson, however, insisted that she survived the slaughter. She spent years in and out of mental hospitals in Germany and was evaluated by emigres of the Russian monarchy scattered across Europe. In 1984, Anna/Anastasia died in Charlottesville, Virginia. She lived long enough to read Kurth’s riveting, meticulously researched acknowledgment of her birthrig

After his graduation from the University of Vermont in 1976, and a brief marriage, Kurth spent five years uncovering the mystery of Anna Anderson. He learned much about his own mysteries in the process. “Anastasia was my real education,” says the now 42- year-old writer. Her struggle for identity became a metaphor for his coming-out as a gay man.

“She was a desperate creature who spent her entire life saying, ‘this is what I am,’ and hearing people saying, ‘no you’re not,'” Kurth says. “The Anastasia mystery is everyone’s deepest nightmare come true. It’s a mirror everyone can read into what they want.”

That mirror also reflects, in some ways, the 20th century “The murder of this family marks the beginning of genocide,” Kurth asserts. “The Romanovs were the image of a functional family despite their political stupidity. They put a human face on the suffering of the century, much like Anne Frank. Their deaths ushered in an age when people are expendable even if they are guiltless.”

Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, first published in 1983 and now in its 14th edition, is considered the definitive book on the woman whom Kurth believes was indeed Anastasia Nicolaievna, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. Both writer and subject found fame through her claim.

“I was biographer of the hour for about an hour,” he recalls wryly “Suddenly, I had a career if I wanted it.” Kurth says he hadn’t set out to be a writer; the story drew him to it. And, of course, there was the tantalizing idea that he might be the one to finally verify Anastasia’s identity.

Anna/Anastasia’s struggle encouraged Kurth to be true to himself, to be without secrets. “I have learned that being gay isn’t a question of acceptance,” he says. “When family and friends said things like, ‘We want you to know that this is okay with us,’ I began to understand why gays are so angry. Sexuality is not to be approved of or disapproved of. It just is.”

Kurth has found that being HIV-positive demands that he be “in your face.” He’s certain that progress is not made by smoothing things over. “If we had waited for understanding,” he says, “there wouldn’t have been a civil rights revolution.”

As a client representative to the board of Vermont CARES, Kurth is a voice for the very people the organization was designed to serve. “It is critical that clients are empowered, not disempowered,” says Bennett Law, chair of the board. “And Peter is someone they can recognize as sharing their concerns. He can leverage his superior communication skills to make sure their needs are met.”

Kurth offers his voice to the public as well, through Vermont CARE’s First Person Speaker’s Bureau, a prevention/ education program. According to Law, the image of HIV that still arises for most people isn’t in any way associated with their own image. Kurth is willing to be the face of the disease for them.

Peter Kurth’s HIV diagnosis came while he was finishing his second biography, about Dorothy Thompson. As the most prominent anti-Nazi in America during the ’30s, and the most prolific journalist on the subject, Thompson was wildly controversial. She had lovers of both sexes, in addition to the dubious distinction of being married to the tempestuous novelist Sinclair Lewis. The pair had a summer home, incidentally, in southern Vermont.

Thompson struggled as a woman and as a writer. Her lifestyle was considered aberrant, her views eccentric. She tried to warn the world about Hitler and was dubbed a Cassandra. Kurth prefers to call her an inspiration.

“She gave me personal and professional confidence,” he declares. “Her life was a splendid example — filled with integrity, thoughtful and wellinformed.” Kurth admired the fact that Thompson was genuinely concerned about the direction of contemporary society, that she posed difficult questions, under the backdrop of Hitler, about the role of the individual in that society.

With the backdrop of HIV, Kurth turned the questions on himself after An American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson was published, and critically acclaimed, in 1990.

Understandably, Kurth “reacted badly” to his diagnosis. He tried running around and running away: “I decided that I would spend the rest of my life doing whatever I wanted. I went from city to city and place to place,” he recalls. “I didn’t permit myself to have another long-term project for fear of not finishing it.”

It took a life-threatening bout of pneumonia — which his doctors determined was not an opportunistic infection related to HIV — to make Kurth realize he’d been running in place. The illness wiped him out in more ways than one. “Thank God,” he says. “It was so cleansing.”

To make up for lost funds, Kurth began writing for “shiny magazines” — Vanity Fair, Forbes, Cosmopolitan — about everything from men’s fashion to Fergie. He also accepted a commission to create an opulent coffee-table book on the Tsars of Russia. More recently, he wrote the introduction to Burlington writer/artist Eleanor Lanahan’s book about the artistic output of her grandmother, Zelda Fitzgerald — another famous, iconic woman.

To make up for lost time, Kurth started giving serious thought to the prospect of life as a gay HIV-positive man. Healthy and headstrong, he moved back to Burlington in 1995 and started questioning — Dorothy Thompson style — both the gay agenda and the straight community’s sensibilities. If Anastasia gave him the courage to find the truth, then Thompson gave him the strength to speak it.

“I had to challenge myself on how many of my ideas were mine because I thought them or because I was told to think them,” he explains. “I’m not politically correct. I don’t actually believe the government has been murdering us all these years.”

Kurth notes that some may view him as right-wing or heretical when he suggests that everyone should be responsible for their own actions. “Yes, the government can help or hurt, but they aren’t sticking needles in our arms,” he says. “And I don’t believe the response [to AIDS] has been slow. It’s been going on for 15 years and there has been a huge amount of progress.”

Kurth hangs tough on other unpopular views as well. Like same-sex marriage. “Why do we want access to an institution that isn’t working for anybody?” he asks. “Let’s put this energy into laws that protect everybody. Maybe there should be a legal waiting period for all marriages.”

Isadora Duncan, the subject of Kurth’s third biography, still in progress, would surely have agreed. The unconventional “mother of modern dance” performed for President Roosevelt when she was six months pregnant — and unmarried.

“She was the flower of this struggle for individuals to fulfill themselves completely and at all levels — spiritually, emotionally, intellectually,” Kurth enthuses. “She was relentless in her attention to them and she was ridiculed for her beliefs,” he explains. “But when she danced, she was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever seen. And she would say, ‘I have only danced my life.'”

In some ways Duncan is both a culmination and combination of Kurth’s previous literary subjects. “She had the childishness of Anastasia and her determination. She had the education of Dorothy Thompson, although she was self-taught. She knew what she was doing and had a damn-theconsequences attitude,” he says.

Furthermore, Kurth adds, she doesn’t need him. “She was entirely independent, a free spirit.” He discloses that his approach to writing Isadora is completely different than with the other women. “The rhythm of my prose has to match her dancing. There’s no film record of it, so I want people to feel like they have seen her dance by reading this book.”

Duncan’s life was fractured by the tragic drowning of her children. At the time of her own infamous death — one of her long scarves caught in the wheel of a convertible and broke her neck — she was a very tortured woman. But Duncan never stopped dancing; her final work was considered genius. Her last words were said to be, “Good-bye friends, I’m going to glory.”

Kurth relates to Duncan’s tragedy through the friends that he has lost. Their stories, too, have a sharp dividing line — before AIDS and after. Kurth plans to write about this particular struggle not through the lives of long-dead famous women, but in “something more autobiographical.”

“The world looks so different with HIV, but knowing that there are people who went before me is one of the few comforts. I hope I can do that for somebody. I don’t regard myself as some great humanitarian,” Kurth proclaims. “But I do feel so strongly about these issues that, if I weren’t gay, I’d have to be.”