Or it may
be that the author, Larry
Kramer, has a peculiar
talent for rubbing people the wrong way; in his book Faggots, he criticized the disco-loving, druggy, superficial
lifestyle of the seventies and eighties. News flash—it was a period when some
of us were having a lot of sex with a lot of people, not all of whom we knew.
So when
Larry Kramer wrote The Normal Heart, in 1985, he had already pissed off a
substantial portion of the gay community by making a quite unequivocal statement:
gay men were going to have to stop having sex.
OK—let’s
back up and revisit those days. For a generation now, AIDS has been a chronic
and manageable disease for—you listening, here?—those people blessed to live in
developed societies and blessed to have health insurance. But it really isn’t
possible to imagine the sheer terror and fear that some of us lived with for
the first decade of the epidemic.
Consider
the times: Stonewall,
yes, had happened a decade and a half earlier, in 1969, but having gay sex was
illegal in many, many states and cities. In 1998, for example, a Texas sheriff
arrested two gay men who were having sex in their bedroom—the case made it all the
way to the Supreme Court, which at long last threw out the sodomy
laws in 2003. And in how many states was sodomy still a crime? Ten.
But it was
hardly that being gay—or acting on it—was illegal. Being gay was treated as
either the darkest sin imaginable, or as the most horrifying consequence
possible of bad parenting. It was shame, dishonor, a disgrace. Oh, and did I
mention that if your parents ever, ever found out, it would crush them,
ruin them, flail them for every minute of their—very likely—now shortened
lives?
“You must
never tell the parents, it would kill them,” wrote Eric, my eldest brother,
when I wrote to tell him I was gay.
It has to
be said, coming out is as much an internal as an external process. Which is to
say that you have to weed out a number of prejudices, assumptions, habits, ways
of thinking. We had come out to everyone, or so we thought, but had we shed all
those years of crushing negativity?
The other
problem? We were having a lot of sex in a lot of sleazy places—parks,
bathrooms, the baths, and of course, the backrooms of bars. And a lot of us
didn’t feel too good about it; there was a good deal of shame and guilt left in
us, which came stinging back to us those mornings after those nights of drugs
and orgies.
To be fair,
there were relatively few outlets besides the bars and the baths: they were
virtually the only outlets for gay men, besides the gay choruses. And to come
out was to put a wall between you and the straight world—yes, you had straight
friends, whom you saw and with whom you hung out before…
…you headed
out to the bars.
Since it
was denied us, we had decided that we didn’t want it: marriage, we argued, was
a heterosexist, patriarchal system enforcing submission and subjugation on
women (in heterosexual relationships) or on the more compliant party in a gay
or lesbian relationship. So unbridled sex was part of being “liberated,” of
fighting off the repressive, heterosexual stereotypes that we had decided we
were above living.
“Hey,
Jorge, when did you move to San Francisco?”
“1989,”
says Jorge, taking a break from mopping the floor.
“Wow—right
in the worst years of the epidemic,” I say, “so what was it like.”
“Terrible,
horrible. You would see deadly ill, pale, gaunt, skeletal figures everywhere.
They were everywhere in San Francisco, not hidden away, but everywhere. I
remember seeing this handsome guy coming out of his house, and coming down the
steps to get on to his motorcycle. And then I realized—he was carrying his
partner on his back, so I stopped to help. And the partner was so weak that the
healthy one feared that he couldn’t hold on, so he strapped his sick lover to
him, and they rode off to the hospital together.”
People were
dying agonizing deaths—and very often the people who were dying were cared for,
if they were cared for at all, by someone who was also infected. Friends
abandoned you; family abandoned you.
Not, of
course, in all cases. But a lot of gay men ended up in New York or San
Francisco for a very good reason—the climate in those cities being considerably
more welcoming than, say, Macon, Georgia. Not a few parents were dealing with
the discovery that their son was gay at the same time that they were hearing
that he had a death sentence.
“The only
treatment was AZT,” said
Jorge—and getting that was a struggle: any nurse who had access to the drug in
the clinics was besieged with requests to steal it.
Death was
everywhere, in medieval proportions; skeletons walked the streets, and had to
be carried up steps. The black marks of Kaposi’s sarcoma
disfigured faces; it was routine to see the bones of the lower arms under the
saggy skin of the victims.
The fear
was of backlash. They hated us, the thinking went, they’re terrified of this
disease. The Alex
Joneses of the day were saying it outright—they (for me, we) should
be quarantined, for the sake of everyone, especially the children.
Hysteria
time—is it safe to eat with someone who has AIDS? What about going to the
beach? What happens if a mosquito bites the guy lying next to me—and he has
AIDS—and then the mosquito bites me? What if a kid—often a hemophiliac—starts
to bleed, and my kid comes into contact with it?
Since
nobody had any idea what was going on, nobody could give answers, and so the
health “experts” were issuing vague reassurances that made the situation worse.
And they
knew nothing because, guess what? Nobody was funding research, because—and it
was hard in the general hysteria of the time not to be paranoid—it was after
all a “gay” disease, so who cared? When the
Legionnaires got sick in Philadelphia, or wherever it was, how much money
did they spend? But a bunch of sick faggots? Huh—they’ll let us die with smiles
on their faces!
Yes, for a
time, it was very much “us versus them,” and it had to be, if anything was
going to change. Reagan was dozing away in the White House, the FDA was
perfectly happy with a testing process that took over a decade, the mayor of New
York was an unmarried gentleman—Ed
Koch—whom everybody thought…well, here’s
Gay City News:
He
was 88 years old and died without ever publicly acknowledging his
homosexuality. And his inaction during the crucial early years of the AIDS
pandemic –– which emerged in 1981 on his watch –– has never been forgiven by
large numbers of gay men and others who lost so many loved ones and friends to
the virus.
The
article, by the way, is titled “Ed Koch: Twelve Years as Mayor, A Lifetime in
the Closet.”
And
certainly one of the men who never forgave Koch was Larry Kramer, who cofounded
the Gay Men’s
Health Crisis (GMHC) and later Aids
Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). And Kramer was never one to worry
about getting into someone’s face and screaming. Which, in fact, turned out to
be the right thing to do, as well as necessary. In the clips below, you see
people “dying” on Wall Street, or in the office of the FDA or the New York
Commissioner of Health. For all his stridency, for all his arrogance, Kramer
had a part to play.
And so in
1985, Kramer came out with his play The Normal Heart, which features a man quite
intentionally resembling the author. Which means that for much of the play,
it’s an extended rant against, on the one hand, a bureaucracy perfectly content
to watch the eradication of a generation of gay men, and those gay men
themselves, who won’t stop fucking. And after years of having various people
hold the film rights to the play, it’s finally been made into a movie, and
will show on May 25 on HBO.
Not
everyone is happy, of course. One critic, Charles O’Malley, notes
that Kramer’s play is mawkish, sentimentalizing what was a decade long horror
scene. And it’s all about upper-class gay men—no women, no people of color. And
the message is anti-sexual and self-hating.
O’Malley
fears that seeing this film will somehow assuage the liberal hearts of some
viewers—that was then, this is now; O’Malley quotes Manohla Dargis: “it’s about making the audience feel good about a
historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful
interpolation.”
Yes or no? I
won’t know until I see the film, since it’s been years since I’ve seen the
play. But I have gone to reread September 1, 1939—the W. H. Auden poem from which Kramer
took the title, “The Normal Heart.” And came across this fragment, which only
hints at how terrible those days really were….
Waves
of anger and fear
Circulate
over the bright
And
darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing
our private lives;
The
unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
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