Longtime AIDS activist Frédéric Navarro, known simply as Fred to those close to him, has died at the age of 65. His funeral is planned for Tuesday, March 3, at the crematorium of Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris.
Photography: Lucie Cipolla for têtu·
“He passed away in his sleep, without suffering. We are preparing a beautiful celebration for him, full of color.” These are the words of his close friends reacting to the death, announced on February 22, of Frédéric Navarro, 65, longtime AIDS activist and who served as its president from 2011 to 2013. “Fred N without Hate, don’t worry, we will continue the fight”, adds the statement published on social media, referring to the phrase with which he liked to sign his messages.
“He joined Christian, the love of his life”, writes Act Up again, speaking of Christian Charpentier, with whom Fred shared 18 years of his life. At the death of his partner, in 2010, Fred is shocked by the way his body is treated at the forensic institute: the prohibition on performing funeral care to preserve the bodies of people living with HIV or with viral hepatitis, dating from 1986, is still in force. This would be Fred’s great fight, crowned by the order of July 12, 2017, signed by Health Minister Agnès Buzyn, which lifts this prohibition starting January 1, 2018.
The Final Patchwork of Fred
“For 25 years, even with his hideous flowered cane, he was at every demonstration, remembers with tenderness his fellow fighter with the same name, Fred Bladou. “We will see his specter follow us in the parades.” It was in 1986 that Fred himself learned of his seropositivity, announced over the phone by his attending physician after a routine medical check-up. He was only 25 years old and, like many of his generation, had little hope of reaching forty under these conditions. Defying the statistics, he survived until the arrival of triple therapy ten years later, but would retain the stigmas characteristic of those who knew the first treatments, which did not dampen his legendary humor. “They had to remove all his teeth, and he found a way to laugh about it,” smiles Drass, his friend of over twenty years. “He loved to tell that without his denture, he gave the best pipes in Paris and that he was nicknamed Velvet Mouth.”
The journalists at têtu· have indeed often crossed paths with this pussycat punk, as the expression used by Drass, with an improvised style and a no-holds-barred sense of humor. Fred always answered our questions with good grace, notably on the recent topic of aging among people living with HIV. Lately, you could find him at the workshops of the Ami·es du Patchwork des noms, an association which in 2025 received the têtu· de la Mémoire LGBTQI+ for its work on AIDS deaths. Fred had taken it upon himself to sew his patch square in tribute to Christian, whom he had chosen to brighten with multicolored companions. “So that he remains in history and that I can write the first days of the rest of my life,” he tenderly explained while describing this symbolic step of his mourning. “He went to the end of the realization of the patchwork for Christian,” the association told in its homage to the late activist. “He did not have time to see it deployed; we will do it for him.” For his funeral, this Tuesday, March 3, at the Père Lachaise crematorium in Paris, his relatives conveyed “a dress code” relayed by Act Up: “Activist and glitter.”.
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