by Katie Zavadski
The HBO adaptation of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” an autobiographical tale of the onset of AIDS and the births of Act Up and GMHC, premieres this Monday. And Larry, visibly aged in the video seen above, was by all accounts as active on set with director Ryan Murphy as anywhere else. Patrick Healy looked into the making of the film (NYT):
Mr. Murphy said that he and Mr. Kramer, in the hospital, worked for months on the screenplay by email. They were determined, he said, to create a movie with “real immediacy” — visually graphic scenes that would pack a punch for New Yorkers who lived through the 1980s and that might motivate those continuing to fight for gay rights today. Harrowing monologues in the play, like the description of one character’s physical disintegration on a cross-country flight, have been opened up into fully rendered moments that show the agony of AIDS.
“I wrote the word ‘true’ on a notecard and put it on my computer,” Mr. Murphy said. “Larry was always trying to be on the right side of the angels, but he can be so abrasive, and he was so hurt by how he was treated by his friends and enemies in the ’80s. I wanted the movie to be true to all sides of him.”
After finding fault in so much, Mr. Kramer found little with the movie, and none with its depiction of his life’s work. “It’s about speaking up, being a buffalo if you have to, being mean if you have to,” Mr. Kramer said. “You do not get more with honey than with vinegar.”
Larry’s comments on Truvada in that interview, I’m sure, will get addressed by Andrew next week. But according to Richard Cohen, the original’s vinegar is still there:
The HBO movie is rough on Reagan and Koch.
They earned it. Reagan had gay friends and associates and was in no way a bigot. But he was clearly afraid of alienating his conservative base. The Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell characteristically said later that “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.” Reagan did not even mention the word AIDS until the disease was impossible to ignore and his friend Rock Hudson had died from it.
As for Koch, mayor of a city hugely impacted by the epidemic, the movie flat-out declares him to have been a closeted homosexual — afraid to acknowledge the reality of AIDS lest his own secret be revealed. Koch always put his private life off-limits. He was entitled to this — but not at the price of ignoring a public health menace that needed immediate attention. The tendency then and somewhat still today was to blame gay men for their plight. The proposed remedy was to deprive them of their sex life — a remedy some felt was worse than the disease.
Emily Nussbaum reflects on the importance of the movie:
There are grittier routes to the history of this period, including excellent documentaries such as “gay Sex in the 70s” and “How to Survive a Plague.” There are more expansive books, like Randy Shilts’s “And the Band Played On,” and more richly philosophical plays, like “Angels in America.” Yet there’s something implacable and pure about “The Normal Heart,” not despite but because of its message-in-a-bottle specificity. Not for nothing was a 1994 book by Kramer titled “Reports from the Holocaust”; as a gay Jew, he saw one identity as a metaphor for the other, with a built-in warning system. When people began dying, the choice was clear: you could be the Warsaw resistance or you could be the American Jewish Congress, beggars who stayed behind the scenes, lobbying for help that never came. Even in 1985, Kramer knew the effect of this obsession on others. “All analogies to the Holocaust are tired, overworked, boring, probably insulting, possibly true, and a major turnoff,” Felix says. “Are they?” Ned replies.
In 2014, AIDS and gay identity are no longer tied together in a three-legged race. The idea of making real change through the system is no pipe dream, either: each day, more Bens switch sides, now that gay rights has become a safe, default liberal perspective. But Murphy’s adaptation is a useful time machine. It’s a corrective to complacency, a reminder of a period when rage itself was a necessary tonic, a caustic application that could burn through the misery of shame and isolation. What’s the use of an alarm, after all, if it’s not loud enough to wake people up?
I remember sitting with a copy of And The Band Played On in high school, pairing Larry’s characters with their real-life counterparts. That interest must have, on some level, been triggered by growing up with my own stories of the Jewish Holocaust: To borrow Larry’s analogy, it made sense to remember this one, too.
And yet, a time machine may just be needed. The other day I asked a friend, a gay man in his mid-20s, whether he would watch the film version of the play with me. “Sure,” he replied. “What’s that about?” One of the film’s stars, Matthew Bomer, is just a decade older. It’s telling that his experience with the story is so different:
There’s a headline that keeps circulating from a quote that you gave, where you said, “Larry Kramer probably saved my life.”
Yeah. I’m sure he did. At the time I first read it, my first sexual relationships were with women. But even then he put the fear of God in me! (Laughs) He educated me in a lot of ways. It was a very useful fear. But it was also the education to be smart and be safe, and that carried over into my later relationships and also when I started to have relationships with men.
But I think he saved me on a more profound than practical level. Even at 14 when I still didn’t know who I was when I read this piece—I was still figuring out who my most authentic self was—to have this voice that was such a firebrand and so honest and so authentic, to know that that reality was out there, even though it was nowhere near my immediate experience in suburban Texas, to know that somewhere it was out there gave me a sense of hope. And I think I knew on some level that a part of me that hadn’t been acknowledged yet was going to be OK.
Read Andrew’s look back at Act Up here, and Larry’s response here.
The Dish 