"Nicholas de Jongh, film critic of the London Evening Standard, was among those at Jarman's bedside on Saturday night. 'People visited non-stop, of all sorts, genders and all sexualities,' he said. 'He was hugely adored. He was remarkably in control until quite late on'."
"Mr de Jongh said: 'He came out before coming out was fashionable. People felt he was the first homosexual man to tell it as it was, or is, or has been. To some people his bravura was distasteful and they even suggested he deserved to be dying - he reacted with puzzled regret'."
"Angela Mason, executive director of the lesbian and gay lobbying group Stonewall, said: 'His courage, intelligence and indeed anger gave heart and hope to thousands of lesbians and gay men.' She added: 'Derek's contribution will live on in his work and in the political movement for lesbians and gay men he helped to forge'."
Stephen Ward, The Independent, 21st. February, 1994

"When Rudolf Nureyev died of Aids last year, Derek Jarman called it 'a personal loss, not an artistic tragedy'. So it is with Jarman himself. His work - films, paintings and writing - was often inspiring, occasionally moving, sometimes funny, but those who met him will remember them far less than their creator.
"I only met him once, last August, and the memory is vivid and cherished. I had arrived in his sparse flat off Charing Cross Road to talk about Blue, a stunning artistic interpretation of his illness. He knew it would be his last film, and he was happy with it: happy that he had 'given people an idea, at least, of what dying like this is like'."
"He was loved by so many. The famous used to come round for chats - Jodie Foster, David Bowie, Lady Helen Taylor - but they were heavily outnumbered by a young generation of gay men awed by his courage and outrage. Jarman became an icon, a saint even, for no one spoke with such eloquence of being gay, or having Aids."
Simon Garfield, The Independent, 21st. February, 1994

"The two most important facts about Jarman's life and works were his sexuality and his nationality. His greatest pleasures in life were provided by his homosexuality and by England: the outrage that fuelled his art was occasioned by those who would deny and repress homosexuality and who would travesty the traditions of his country. These two themes came together in what is probably his most personal work, The Last of England (1987), a deeply autobiographical investigation of the destruction of the country which he had loved so much, composed immediately after he had discovered that he was HIV positive." Colin MacCabe, The Independent, 21st. February, 1994

"On the personal front Derek was handsome, funny, stimulating intellectually and irrepressibly energetic. His sexual magnetism to men and women alike was legendary. All of these gifts he marshalled for the benefit of others without any selfishness. He loved to share his passionate enthusiasm about life and art and although he had a rigorous critical mind he was never malicious despite his demonic public image. He displayed exquisite old- fashioned British manners (I never heard him use a swearword), but to me his most important personal quality was his enthusiastic generosity of spirit."
Don Boyd in The Independent, 21st. February, 1994

"Since his death from Aids earlier this year, Derek Jarman has been canonised. He is now an authentic martyr, an accredited representative of what Robert Hughes bitchily dubbed 'the culture of complaint' - Britain's answer to Robert Mapplethorpe. Many ironies surround this fact. One is that Jarman and Mapplethorpe detested one another. In his biography Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera, published in America next week, Jack Fritscher tells how the two men ran into one another one night at Heaven, the gay disco. Jarman 'was going down one stairway as Robert Mapplethorpe was climbing up another, and Robert shouted out, 'I have everything I want, Derek. Have you got everything you want?"
"He knew, of course, that the answer had to be 'no'. All his life, Jarman struggled against financial odds, as well as bucking homophobic prejudice, while trying to get ambitious projects off the ground, often seeing them maimed in the process. By that time - it was the mid-1980s - Mapplethorpe had already scaled the heights of celebrity and accompanying financial security. If one thing is certain, it is that Jarman didn't leave an estate valued at 228m dollars."
"The paintings in the exhibition 'Evil Queen', at Manchester's Whitworth Gallery, are, however, part of the Jarman legacy: the final series, done just before he died." Edward Lucie-Smith, The Independent, 13th. September, 1994

"Ten years after it was made, Derek Jarman's first film, Sebastiane, was finally broadcast on British television. It was aired late at night to an unparalleled deluge of complaints about its graphic homoerotic content. The screening prompted scandalised reproach in Parliament and led in part to the 'Video Nasties' Bill. It seemed half-glimpsed erections and depictions of sanctified gay sex didn't go down too well at Westminster."
"Applauded equally by the arthouse set, Derek Jarman is esteemed for his sexually liberating modernism and his ardent gay campaigning, aspects which fuse his work. His films defy vogue and prohibition and unfettered by his critics, who became increasingly vocal throughout Thatcher's 1980s, Jarman is gay cinema's rebel without a Clause."
". . . Jarman also challenged what an artist could and could not do. He surfed genres."
David Perry, The Pink Paper, 3rd. May, 1996, issue 428, centrefold spread, p. 20-1

"Derek Jarman lived to become a gay icon in his time, a maverick genius whose life constituted an individually defiant and often heroic celebration of creativity. Whether his expression was that of controversial film-maker, iconoclastic artist, outspoken gay activist or acutely self-reflective diarist, Jarman's dynamic shone brightly for its singular vision. Smiling in Slow Motion, the successor to the acclaimed Modern Nature, published in Jarman's lifetime, picks up the story from May 1991 until a number of weeks before his death in February 1994. Writing either from his diminutive studio flat at Phoenix House, Charing Cross Road, or from Prospect Cottage at Dungeness in Kent, Jarman's last journals concern themselves with the big issues: life, love and death." Jeremy Reed, The Times, 5th. July, 2000, p. 19

"He changed my life and the way I see my gay world". Kristian Digby (T.V Presenter) in AXM, Sept 2005, p.45. See scan of the article

"I feel that I have much to thank Derek Jarman for; he opened my eyes to a world that I would have known nothing about if I hadn't seen his films and been spellbound by those images. I grew up a bit of a loner, right out in the country and lost in books most of the time, then I discovered Lindsay Kemp and saw some of the pictures of his incredible stage shows from the 1970s. Then Channel 4 showed Sebastiane. The Lindsay Kemp/Derek Jarman connection was made and I was just hooked. I loved Derek's vision; seeing a film like The Garden for the first time is such an incredible experience, almost breathtaking. So many beautiful images, but a different kind of beauty from any that I'd seen before. A different voice. It was almost as though it opened a secret door into an amazing parallel world of fantastic colours and sensations that runs alongside our own, but most people never get the chance to see. It was a world I wanted to touch and be part of. Without Derek opening that door for me, I feel I would now be living a blinkered, monochrome, mundane world without any idea of the carnival of colours, people, creativity and sensuality that were all around but hidden from day to day sight. Derek's visions seem to speak to the soul, and anyone who is lucky enough to hear that voice is blessed." Sister Morticia, An E-mail to SlowMotionAngel.com, October 2005