No, it's not an anniversary, although he would have been 80 next year had he lived. Merely an interest resulting from an article in today's Guardian newspaper about two exhibitions of his work - one in Paris mounted for the city's Festival d'Automne and the other at Manchester's Art Gallery in England. For gay men he was an icon, a star who wore his gayness like a light and who documented his days when suffering from HIV and the AIDS that killed him in 1994.

Derek Jarman was clearly a handsome young man as shown in this 1960 photo of him in front of a self portrait at an exhibition in Watford. 

Photo courtesy of Keith Collins Will Trust and Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/dec/06/derek-jarman-protest-review-manchester-art-gallery-film-paintings#comment-153545682

Knowing before he was 10 that he was gay, he struggled with his homosexuality as a young man, a time when it was still illegal in the UK. He was to go on to become best known in the gay community for his films Sebastiane and Caravaggio. But rather than write about him, we can learn so much more from a television interview he gave in the year before he died, especially about how and why homosexuality became more open in Britain and how being infected with HIV affected his relationships with other people.

 

I knew him when we were both young men. I’d never describe him as handsome as he had an angular face and a very big nose.
 

We had what I’d call a nodding acquaintance as we’d acknowledge each other with a nod when we met. We weren’t friends as he was consumed with his film-making and I was heavily involved in the political aspects of gay liberation.