Aug 15, 2003  |  By: BRYAN ANDERTON  | COMMENTS     

For Matthew Cusick, working for the popular circus troupe Cirque du Soleil was to be a dream come true.

It was the end of March, and in a matter of days he was set to begin performing in their Las Vegas show, “Mystere.” He had been training and performing for the role for months and was in the midst of costume fittings and other final preparations.

But then the company fired him without warning. They told him that because he is HIV-positive — a fact the Silver Spring, Md. resident had previously disclosed to Cirque’s doctors — they could not allow him to perform for fear of putting others at risk of contracting the disease.

“I was crushed,” Cusick said. “I saw a dream that was happening, and now it’s not. Now it’s just something that’s not coming true.”

Cirque du Soleil’s actions led Cusick, who turns 32 next week, to file a federal discrimination complaint against the company.

With help from the Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund, Cusick’s complaint was filed July 15 with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Los Angeles. In the complaint, Cusick said he disclosed his HIV status to the company months before he was fired, and had been cleared twice by the company’s own doctors as being a healthy athlete who was perfectly able to perform.

But Cirque du Soleil said the company couldn’t risk other performers or patrons getting infected.

“It was one of the most difficult decisions that Cirque has had to make because in our usual corporate attitude we’re known to be a very open-minded organization, … but we had to make it for safety reasons,” said Renee Claude Menard, a spokesperson for Cirque.

“We had to evaluate that the act that Mr. Cusick was asked to perform is an aerial act, one that is very high-risk. We could not take that safety risk for any of our other employees or our patrons, so we had to terminate that contract,” she said.

Cusick, who has lived in the D.C. area since he was 12, was previously a bartender at the gay club Cobalt and currently works as a personal trainer. But he’s been a gymnast for much of his life, and was even a gymnastics coach for 14 years. He left his job at Cobalt after being hired by Cirque du Soleil.

Working with the circus, he said, would have been the pinnacle of his career.

“It’s actually a job that most people who want to stay in the sport kind of aspire to,” Cusick said. “It’s the top of the sport in a way because you don’t really have professional gymnastics so much, you just have to do shows and stuff like that. So they’re the best.”

‘He said I was fine’
The Canada-based Cirque du Soleil currently operates eight shows in North America, Europe and Asia, which are seen by about 7 million people a year. “Mystere,” the show for which Cusick was hired, is currently being performed at Treasure Island in Las Vegas.

After making it through a rigorous audition process, Cusick was hired to be a high bar catcher for two acts — the Chinese poles and the Russian high bar. In the former, gymnasts perform individually and do not interact with each other; on the latter, gymnasts hang by their legs from a swinging structure and catch other performers coming off a bar.

Once he was hired, Cusick began training in July 2002. During training, he had two separate examinations by the company’s doctor, whose notes said Cusick was a “healthy athlete” who “should be able to perform,” according to Lambda Legal. Cusick, who has been HIV-positive for about 10 years, said he disclosed his HIV status from the beginning.

“[My HIV status] came up in conversations at the beginning of training last year,” Cusick said. “We had to go through a physical evaluation to check to see if our joints were okay, if we had any broken bones, and that’s the first day we got there.”

“He said I was fine,” Cusick said of the company’s doctor.

Hayley Gorenberg, Lambda Legal’s AIDS Project director and Cusick’s attorney, said the doctor specifically cleared Cusick to work for Cirque du Soleil. She also noted that a number of athletic organizations, including the U.S. Olympic Committee, the National Basketball Association and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, have all said athletes have virtually no risk of contracting HIV during competition.

“They all concluded that [HIV-]positive athletes should not be exempted from competition,” Gorenberg said. “It’s not ...