Ari Getty and a Camelot of her own creation
Ariadne Getty (Photo courtesy The Ariadne Getty Foundation by Ricky Middlesworth)
Heads turned. Conversations stopped, then started up again as whispered buzzing: who are those people, resplendent, wildly colorful, statuesque, square jawed, proudly wearing the weight of some mythical legacy while gliding into new spaces and creating their own? If pop culture America had royalty, it would be these Gettys – haute couture fashion designer August, street designer Nats and bubbly-beautiful social media star Gigi Gorgeous, escorting into the LGBTQ charity event Ari Getty and Louie Rubio, her partner of 12 years.. Nonprofit CEOs and glamorous drag queens delight in recognition as Ari and her entourage are seated at the majestic center roundtable as if, for this night, in this place, a new Camelot community has come together to celebrate protecting the disadvantaged and pledging to work hard on problems yet to come.
Ari Getty’s broad smile reveals her secret: the wealthy heiress is a momma bear in real life. It’s as if her shyness provides protective boundaries containing an abundance of love and joy that she heaps on her LGBTQ children and their friends and that she shares through her Ariadne Getty Foundation (ariadnegettyfdn.org). She’s donated millions to the Los Angeles LGBT Center and GLAAD to protect and create a better community for LGBTQ people. It is that contribution that prompted the Los Angeles Blade to give Getty this year’s Hero Award.
Ariadne Getty speaks on a panel hosted by GLAAD, The Ariadne Getty Foundation, and OmnicomGroup at the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland
“Ari is an incredibly authentic person through and through. In November, I had a family crisis that included both my mom and I having COVID. She heard about it and decided she wanted to make sure the papers were OK and that I could focus on my health. I didn’t ask her to do that,” says LA Blade publisher Troy Masters. “That’s pretty Heroic.”
Los Angeles Blade January 29, 2021 Cover, featuring Ariadne Getty
She also facilitated the creation of the Ariadne Getty Foundation Youth Academy and the Ariadne Getty Foundation Senior Housing complex at the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Anita May Rosenstein Campus in Hollywood.
“I don’t say this very often, especially in this town, but Ari Getty is the real deal,” Los Angeles LGBT Center CEO Lorri Jean told Variety about her friend in 2019 when Getty received Variety’s Philanthropist of the Year Award. “She gives because she sees that there are important needs that must be met and she wants to help. She gives because her heart is filled with compassion and empathy. She gives because she feels she has a responsibility to make a difference.”
Ariadne Getty and Lorri Jean. (Photo by Getty Images)
“I’ve been very close with the Center and very, very close with Lorri. She’s been gracious enough to have us to her house with her wife, Gina, and cook steaks for us. I love our friendship and the work that she does at the Center is unparalleled. I always thought that the Center of Los Angeles should be the model for most large cities to basically be the same format and provide the same services — everything from meals to the health services,” Getty tells the LA Blade. “They have a huge industrial kitchen there for the youth to make food so they’re a learning skill, so they can go out and apply for jobs.”
Rendering of the Ariadne Getty Foundation Senior Housing Complex. (Photo courtesy LA LGBT Center)
The Senior Center will open when COVID is controlled. “I’m particularly excited about the seniors,” Getty says. “My heart goes out to them so much because they’ve lost lots of their friends and they’re lonely and the Center provides such a hub of activity. And I love the fact that we’re going to be joining the youth with the seniors, because the seniors will be able to educate the youth about really the history and the hardships of getting to where we are today, where we still have so far to go. But this is a far cry from being gay in the ’40s or the ’50s — let alone during the ’80s with AIDS. I think people, as they get older, get afraid of new things like technology and I think that the youth can help the seniors with just staying up to date and feeling a part of that side. That’s definitely the thing that makes me the happiest: they’re in a Center where they’re surrounded by people. There’s no room for loneliness.”
So much is expected of Ari Getty, it’s hard to imagine how she became the person she is today. It’s surprising to hear that, while Hillary Clinton may have written the rhetorical ideal that “it takes a village” to raise a child — Ari actually experienced it.
“I grew up in a really unusual household, you could say,” Getty says, “very close to my siblings. It was just an unusual upbringing. We had a house in the countryside in Italy, and it didn’t have electricity. So my chore was to go and start the generator every night with my stepfather and go to the vegetable patch and pick out the vegetables. It was kind of the most ideal. It’s like a fantasy. It’s like a storybook.
“Basically everybody in the village was elderly,” she continues. “So I would go after I finished my chores at home, I would walk down to the village, which was two miles, and I had all of my senior friends that I would help. One summer it would be making Bic pens. I would put the ink stick into the plastic receptacle. And then another summer, I would be attaching the leather strap to the wood scholls. Scholls aren’t around anymore, but they were sandals. I had a very close relationship with them. I really was raised by a village, in the true sense of the word. I literally was raised by a village.”
The villagers would make the young girl lunch. “I would grate the cheese while they were making the pasta and I would go from house to house. Sometimes they would give me a little glass of wine at the tender age of seven. “And we would play with the hay on the haystacks at the dairy farm. There was everything you could do without having toys. Even the youngest people, they took to me. I think I’ve always had that connection. And my mother still lives in that town. It’s about 60 people, if that, maybe 40. But I just always knew that I wanted to help. It’s just been in my nature, I think, having the goal to help.”
Ari Getty had a dream. “My goal has always been that I’ll be somebody that would give to community, to be a part of philanthropy on a larger scale,” she says. “It’s been many years that I’ve known that — I can’t shy away from the question completely — that I would inherit money. And the first thing that I did was set up the foundation and that’s become my passion.”
Getty has always been highly aware of the need for community, including how LGBTQ people rejected by their own families created their own sense of community during the AIDS crisis.
“COVID is not nearly as scary to me as AIDS,” Getty says. “When my sister [Aileen Getty] was diagnosed HIV positive and I had just lost my best friend, Darryl — Nats was two weeks old when my sister was in the hospital. She had something like 7 T-cells. I remember calling my pediatrician saying, ‘Is it safe for me to go and see her with Nats being a baby?’ And he was like, ‘Go. She’ll be fine.’ Those were really scary days — really, really scary days. The landscape is somewhat different today, luckily.”
(L to R: Gigi Gorgeous Getty, Nats Getty, Ariadne Getty, August Getty) The Ariadne Getty Foundation celebrates the victories won by the LA LGBT Center at the 2019 Vanguard Awards (Photo courtesy Troy Masters)
Ari Getty has not only loved and empowered her gay children August and Nats but rejoiced and welcomed transgender activist and social media star Gigi Gorgeous into the family when Nats and Gigi married. There was no hand wringing. No fuss. No hysterics about what the neighbors and the world would think. Just love.
Ariadne Getty, Nats Getty and Louie Rubio pictured here at the 2019 wedding of Nats and Gigi Gorgeous.
“It’s so easy,” Getty says. “I gave birth to two children, two individuals, two babies, and I made sure that they learned their ABCs. I made sure that they were fed, cleaned, and loved more than anything. We didn’t have a television. We spent our time playing together. And I’ve always trusted them to make the right choices because they never gave me any indication that they weren’t able to do something unsafely. When August told me that he was going out with someone from the room service staff at this hotel we were living at — I just went to West Hollywood, found one of those vans that are on the street at night and have all of the information and I got all of the packets of information and the condoms — I just wanted to be extra careful — and gave it all to August.
“As long as they’re informed and what they need to do to feel like they’re their true essential selves, I encourage 100%,” Getty says. “Nats went public with a statement letting everybody know that they had top surgery done and I couldn’t be more proud of the decision that they made to actually go ahead and do it, rather than wait 10 more years feeling uncomfortable in the body that was. So, I trust them to govern themselves.”
Getty is also aware that coming out is difficult and parents might feel shame themselves or be afraid for their children’s safety.
“I understand because that’s a real fear and it was one of mine when they were younger and going out. Nats got yelled at because there was a public display of affection somebody yelled in a restaurant — which isn’t acceptable at all,” she says. “But what I would say to any parent is, ‘You gave birth to a child. It’s not for you to decide the nature of the child. You actually gave birth to a human being who has their own identity.’ I would honestly just say, ‘Please love your children, because you have them and you’re not going have any more probably, and love them as much as you can, because it’s a relationship. You can’t deny all the years of taking care of them as babies — and there’s love there. And don’t think about the neighbors or what the neighbors have to say — they mean nothing. They’re inconsequential to the whole topic. It’s just, ‘Love your children over opinion.’”
Interestingly, as creative and thoughtful as she is, Ari Getty would not do a do-over of her life if given the chance.
“I’m in exactly the life that I want to be living in — all through the struggles and trauma and the joy and the happiness — I wouldn’t change a thing because I wouldn’t be at where I am right now,” Getty says. “I’m in a really amazing place. I have a partner who I’ve been with for 12 years, and my children are living their truth, and I can look them in the eye and be really proud of them as human beings and the work that they do. They do philanthropic work, and I’m so proud of that…We’ve talked about when I’m too old to make decisions, we’ve talked about how the foundation is going to be run, and they’ll take over. But they have their own foundations — and I have a life of purpose and a life filled with wonderful friends and wonderful people that I meet, and I couldn’t be luckier.”
Ari Getty is also grateful to be receiving the Hero Award from her friend Troy Masters.
“I love Troy. He’s an angel,” she says. “I actually don’t really have words. I’m just sort of blown away. I don’t think that I could imagine that I would get a Hero Award. But it’s on my counter and it’s not going anywhere. But obviously with the work that I do, it’s not necessarily me that wants to get recognized — it’s the work. And if I’m able to influence anybody else that has income, extra income, disposable income, if I can be an example to anybody, that’s the bonus, and I’m incredibly honored to receive the award. It means the world.”
The Camelot legend refers to the myth about the idyllic world of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable who pledged to do good work to benefit the people and their happiness. Jacqueline Kennedy revived the myth when talking about the legacy of her assassinated husband, John F. Kennedy, and the world he inspired during his too-short presidency. West Hollywood was joyfully dubbed the “gay Camelot” after its founding in 1984. Today, the roving band of philanthropists under the loving tutelage and gaze of Ari Getty brings that shiny spot of possibility, creativity, freedom of expression, and abundant love to whatever space they enter. They were brought up that way.
Original Post on Los Angeles Blade by Karen Ocamb