Rock Hudson

Not one of his ten planets sits in an air sign. Water takes five, fire three and earth two, with four of the ten fixed. The Sun, Mars and Saturn spread across twenty two degrees of Scorpio. The record says Hudson was a leading man for thirty years who was gay throughout and could not say so, and that his announcement in 1985 that he had AIDS changed the public conversation about it more than anything before it.

Two things in this chart will stop a reader and both need handling rather than reading. The first is that there is no planet at all in air, which is the element a reader will have been told means what gets said, compared and circulated, in a man whose record turns on something he could not say. The second is the Sun square Neptune at twelve hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact here, whose printed reading is the self obscured.

Both are coincidences of vocabulary, and the reason matters. The self obscured is a reading about an internal state: confusion about direction, and vitality that comes and goes for no clear reason. What the record describes is not an internal state at all. It is a studio system, a set of laws and an audience, which between them made one sentence unsayable for thirty years. A man silenced from outside and a man confused inside himself are different things, and this chart cannot tell them apart. The element count is the same mistake in a cheaper form: air in a chart is a temperament, and what stopped him speaking was an industry.

The Moon sits at an awkward angle to Pluto at under half a degree, need turning into compulsion, and its sign is certain at fourteen degrees of Sagittarius. After those two the chart is empty, because nothing else comes inside a degree and a half. Uranus and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. He died at Beverly Hills on 2 October 1985, at fifty nine. Saturn stood conjunct his natal Sun at fourteen hundredths of a degree that day, Mars sixty degrees from his natal Pluto at sixteen, and Saturn square his natal Neptune at just over a quarter, so the day reached both halves of the chart's closest contact. The Moon was full and eighty eight per cent lit, a phase that sees a thing clearly and usually through other people, and the record's last sentence is about something finally being seen, which is a coincidence of phrasing and a fitting one.