@shawn4455, Hello and welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board.
While it’s true that, on this board, when assertions are made we generally expect something to help convince us, something more than “I believe.” You have offered an argument, however, so I think that’s enough to start with. I would like to explain to you why I think your argument doesn’t work.
First, Jim Henson’s fame as the creator of the Muppets and Sesame Street was largely among adults. Children like the programs and characters, of course, but as children they neither knew nor cared who was behind the scenes, nor who was behind the muppet bodies and voices.
Second, HIV/AIDS is a disease, not a disgrace. There is nothing shameful about having and dying of a disease, even one that is only sexually transmitted (which HIV is not, there are other ways it can be transmitted). Your unspoken but fairly obvious point is that dying of HIV/AIDS would mean that Henson was probably gay (I have no information either way on this matter), a possibility which you think millions of children would have cared about enough to find shocking. This is a very regressive notion, and was, even in 1990 when Henson died. Perhaps you find the idea that he might have been gay to be shocking. I don’t think you will find very many on this board who share that view. If you want to continue to propound it, that is where you will need to supply supporting information from reliable sources.
I’d disagree. In 1992, less than half of Americans thought that gay relationships should be legal at all:
There’s no datapoint for 1990, but in 1988 it was just 35%. Obviously, being gay carried an immensely greater stigma in 1990 than it does today; certainly to the point where someone might be inclined to cover up evidence of it. Not that this says anything about Henson specifically, just that it’s hardly outside the realm of possibility for the time. And while the kids might not have cared, it’s the parents that get to choose what their kids watch.
Welcome to the Straight Dope, @shawn4455. This message board was created to support the Straight Dope newspaper column, and our mission has always been to fight ignorance. As was already mentioned, our culture here is to get to the underlying truth of things, i.e. the “straight dope” of the issue.
This is not the type of place to post conspiracy theories and the like. Our culture here is that if you post something that is contrary to established facts, you are expected to back up your assertions with some sort of cite. Our message board is dedicated to fighting ignorance, not spreading it.
Again, welcome, and we hope that you enjoy your time here.
So I assume neither did he have the boogie-woogie blues?
As an example along the same lines, Isaac Asimov died of AIDs-related complications. His family kept it quiet, IIRC, for many years, even though in his case it was due to contaminated blood during an operation, not sexual activity. At the time, any hint of AIDS wold be treated like leprosy (for no good reason other that social hangups). It was front page news when Princess Diana actually hugged an AIDS patient in hospital. Horrors! /s
Just another anecdata point for the benefit of @shawn4455. My nephew also contracted Group A streptococcus pneumonia, and went from feeling perfectly healthy to near death in less than a day. He ended up with multiple organ failure, barely survived and lives with heart and kidney damage. He was (and is) not HIV-positive.
It doesn’t take AIDS to develop a lightning-fast and deadly case of pneumonia.
My cousin who was a very healthy 50 year old developed another form of sepsis from the flu and died very quickly. Went from just feeling crappy to collapsing on the bathroom floor to death in 2 days.
Sad part is like Natasha Richardson, had he gone to the hospital when everyone told him to, he probably would have lived but by waiting a couple of hours it was too late.
It’s not at all unlikely that, if Henson had died of AIDS, his survivors would have tried to cover it up. AIDS hysteria was a real thing, and people got super weird about it, especially for celebrities or people who worked with children in some manner. When I was in middle school, we had a bad run of teacher deaths due to unrelated illnesses - one year, a teacher died of a heart attack over the summer. The next, the woman who ran the computer lab died of cancer. In 8th grade, a popular science teacher died, and all of a sudden all the adults were super cagey about discussing what he’d died of, so we all figured it was probably AIDS.
This was, IIRC, the year before Henson died, so it’s entirely believable that, if he had died of AIDS, his family would have covered that up. But, it’s been over 30 years, the stigma around AIDS is almost entirely gone - if it had been anything other than a terrible case of pneumonia that he didn’t get treated in time, we’d probably have heard something of it by now.
In any given year, about 1 in 50,000 people exhibiting no symptoms or prior health problems will die. This is not the overall death rate, but rather the rate for sudden, totally unexpected death in seemingly healthy people.
About a tenth of that group, or 1 in 500,000 healthy people, will die with no explanation for the death ever determined post-mortem.
The U.S. population was about 250 million when Jim Henson died and about 330 million today. There will be thousands of entirely unpredictable deaths every year. People are bad at statistical thinking and think “the chance of a given healthy person suddenly getting a fatal illness is so low that it can’t have happened that way.” But the chance that it will happen to at least one person is 100%, and so on for up to around “at least 6500 people.” You have to incorporate all the people walking around who didn’t die for no reason into your analysis.
This applies to any conspiracy theory about a given person’s death, but also to other phenomena. Amazon has 1.5 million employees. Statistically, 30 of them will drop dead every year for no reason that can be anticipated - that’s on top of any who actually have a diagnosis. But when they actually have 3 on-the-job deaths per year the assumption is that it’s due to working conditions.
Obviously, this is just speculation, but Henson died in May of 1990. Magic Johnson announced he had HIV in November of 1991. At the time, it was considered a death sentence, but he didn’t try to hide the diagnosis.
And it was considered a huge deal at the time and a brave act. On the other hand, as mentioned above, Isaac Asimov died of HIV in 1992 and it was kept secret until 2002. HIV acceptance was by no means evenly distributed in the early 90s.
Merle Haggard died from pneumonia. He was hospitalized in December and seemed better in early Feb. He even announced a planned return to touring. He was hospitalized again in March and died April 6, 2016 from pneumonia.
He had a long history of smoking and toking. His lungs weren’t in great shape.
