Abstract
The shared silence, inaction and homophobia of the various mainstream institutions like the media, the medical community and the local administration enflamed the AIDS pandemic in the United States. However, these silences gave birth to a literature which questioned, resisted and refused to let status quo continue. This paper is an attempt to deconstruct these silences witnessed during the early years of the AIDS crisis from the early to the mid-1980s in the U.S., through the plays The Normal Heart and As Is by Larry Kramer and William M. Hoffman respectively. Along with these silences, this paper illustrates the perspectives of the larger heterosexual society and the gay community vis-à-vis the AIDS crisis.
Keywords: American Literature, AIDS Literature, AIDS Crisis, Media, Medicine, History, homosexuality, homophobia, Gay male identity.
In the United States of America, the AIDS Crisis was seen, by its mainstream societal institutions, as an unfortunate, uncomfortable and embarrassing situation and condition of the gay male community especially from its onset in the early 1980s to mid-1980s.A corollary of this was the startling silence of the administration, the media, and the medical community. These silences were born out of a collective history of homophobia in the country which considered AIDS to be the problem of the gay community. In order to deal with this collective inaction, the urban gay male community performed many ‘acts of interventions’, as observed by David Román, to tackle this crisis and also address it in public. One such ‘act’ was the performance and production of plays in bars, during memorials and subsequently on the stage. Two of the earliest plays dealing with AIDS are As Is by William M. Hoffman and The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer. These plays focus on the effects and responses of the gay community to the AIDS crisis. They also depict the reactions of the gay men to this inexplicable threat which ravaged their lives. Thus, these workplace their readers in the midst of this medico-historical crisis whilst the gay community and its members were grappling with the horrors of AIDS.
The American playwright, educator and editor William M. Hoffman (b. 1939) has written several plays that include A Book of Etiquette (1978), Good Night, I Love You (1966) and others. However, it is his 1985 work As Is that earned him critical acclaim and awards like the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and an Obie Award. Larry Kramer (b. 1935) is an American playwright, scriptwriter, author, and activist. He has been nominated for an Academy Award for writing the screenplay of the film Women in Love (1966). He became a controversial figure in the American gay community with his 1978 novel Faggots. In order to raise awareness about AIDS and address the issues that surround it, he wrote the plays The Normal Heart (1985) and Just Say No, A Play about a Farce (1988). In 1992 he wrote the sequel to The Normal Heart entitled The Destiny of Me. Kramer has also written the seminal text Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist in 1993. This text is a collection of his articles, letters and speeches.
According to Jan Zita Grover in the essay “AIDS: Keywords”, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is a condition that “itself cannot be contracted, nor can the opportunistic infections” that constitute it (19). Physicians in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco had begun to observe “gay men with cases of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS)”, and “long-term enlarged lymph nodes” as early as 1979 (18). By June 1981, “twenty-six such cases” of KS were reported along with “five cases of PCP” by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) which was published on the June 4, 1981 (Gilman 89). This is the first clinical report on what later was termed as AIDS. As these observations were first seen among gay men, the condition was provisionally named Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID). But in a short span of time, haemophiliacs, heroin addicts and migrants from Haiti also began to display similar symptoms (89). Thus, the acronym AIDS was officially adopted by the CDC in 1982 (Grover 19). Following the CDC report, on June 5, The Los Angeles Times published an article by Harry Nelson entitled, “Outbreaks of Pneumonia Among Gay Males Studied”. The New York Times published its report on July 3, 1981 under the headline, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” by Lawrence K. Altman.
It is important to note that almost all AIDS plays are an off-shoot of the gay theatre. According to James Fisher, “homosexual men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals” have been “traditionally grouped together as ‘gay’ within the realm of drama” (291). The term ‘gay theatre’, however, has come to refer to “a sensibility in which the world is viewed through the lens of gay culture” (291). The term also describes, according to Susan Stanton and Martin Banham, “performances and plays of the 1960s onwards which feature overtly gay characters and situations and/or gay political protest” and it can also “be extended to cover work before and since, particularly camp and drag, which exhibits a gay sensibility and aesthetic (137). With the Stonewall Riots in 1969 in the Greenwich Village, the gay community of New York “took its first direct political action – fighting back against police harassment of gays and drag queens” (137). The gay theatre produced post-Stonewall both in the United States and even Britain has been “explicitly a radical oppositional theatre” (137). And with the arrival of AIDS in 1981, gay theatre “entered its most strenuous campaigning phase” (137). The early AIDS plays, The Normal Heart and As Is in particular, were produced to “educate the gay communities about AIDS and safe sex, to protest against state inertia in the face of the epidemic and to challenge the ‘gay plague’ hysteria” (137). Other seminal AIDS plays include: Kramer’s Just Say No, A Play about a Farce and The Destiny of Me; Robert Chesley’s Night Sweat (1984) and Jerker(1986); Harvey Fierstein’s Safe Sex (1987); Robert Swados’s A Quiet Night (1985); Robert Pittman’s Passing (1989); Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993) plays; Terrence McNally’s Andre’s Mother (1988), Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994); Jonathan Larson’s Rent (1994); Paul Rudnick’s Jeffery (1995), The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (1998), and others (Fisher 36-37).
The selected plays The Normal Heart and As Is share a few similarities which have been observed by playwright of the latter work. In the article “AIDS-Involved Drama Syndrome”, Hoffman states that “both plays centre boldly honest but graceless Jewish men who are forced to deal with their ungrateful...Christian lovers who are dying of the virus” (3). He also observes that “both Jewish men have brothers who treat them badly but are capable of changing their ways...both heroically conquer all odds and marry their intendeds on their deathbeds” (3). These plays may share these unintentional similarities but they certainly respond to the AIDS crisis in different manners in terms of their plots, tone and even mood.
The chosen plays concern themselves with gay men affected by AIDS in New York City. Temporally set in 1985, Hoffman’s As Is has over thirty characters that appear on stage within a single act. The principal characters of this work are Rich Farrell, Saul, the hospice worker, Chet, Brother, and Lily. In this play, the playwright mentions the death of over 28 unseen characters through the chorus. This chorus also serves a device to educate the audience and the readers about the symptoms of AIDS. The play even shows a female PWA (person with AIDS), but he does not show any character dying on stage.
On the other hand, temporally Kramer’s work begins from July 1981 and extends up to May 1984. It has fourteen characters with Ned and Ben Weeks, Felix Turner, Bruce Niles, Mickey Marcus and Dr. Emma Brookner as the principal characters. It is divided into two acts with seven scenes in act one and nine scenes in act two. In The Normal Heart, Kramer names almost twelve gay men who have died of AIDS-related complications, and even shows the death of Craig and Felix on stage. While Hoffman uses the name ‘AIDS’ in his play, Kramer it seems, to be deliberately resistant in using the name of the condition.
As Is depicts the personal horrors of the former lovers, Rich and Saul, in midst of AIDS crisis. Rich has abandoned Saul for a younger man named Chet. Both the men are in their 30s. They are white, urban and educated. Rich is a writer, poet, and he owns a successful catering business. Saul is a photographer. The play’s action begins with the two of them dividing their once-shared assets including their cat, Henry. It is here that a frightened Rich announces that he has “it” (Hoffman 17). He is afraid to utter the word AIDS. From this moment onwards, the play concentrates on the reactions of those around him regarding his viral status. His unnamed brother, business partner, his friend Lily, his new lover Chet, and the doctors – all are terrified of him of touching him. It is only Saul who accepts Rich and promises to “take (him) as is” (55).
The play focuses on several issues like: the sexual revolution of the 1970s in the gay community; the doctors and their lack of knowledge about the syndrome; the information available, and its lack, in the media; the support groups with PWA; hotline services disseminating information about AIDS; and being gay in a largely heterosexual and homophobic society. All these issues are presented on the stage with the chorus masquerading as different characters. These issues are woven around Rich and Saul as they deal with the former character’s seropositive status.
The Normal Heart, on the other hand, is a love story and a political play. Kramer juxtaposes an important event in a man’s life, falling in love, with a historical event. It is a play about fund-raising and educating its viewers and readers about the mysterious illness that had fallen on the gay community and indifference of the New York City’s administrators. Ned is a writer who became an activist to confront the failure of the government, media and medical organizations “trapped within a tradition of homophobia” (Fisher 36). He is angry at the system, the gay men themselves and his homophobic brother. But most of all, he’s furious at himself for being unable to save Felix, his dying lover. Felix is works for The New York Times. He was once married to a woman because he “thought (he) was supposed to be straight” (Kramer 66). He is in the closet and refuses to jeopardize his job by joining Ned’s gay organization.
The play sheds light on and heavily critiques: the passivity and inaction of the American medical organizations; the refusal of these organizations to collaborate with their French counterparts; lack of funding for research; The New York Times; Ed Koch (the Mayor of New York back in the early 1980s) and the city council; gay men in the closet; the fear and inability of gay organizations like the GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis) to take any political actions; the conspiracy theories on the origin of AIDS; the Stonewall riots and the sexual liberation of the gay men; the silent, unnoticed gay culture and others. Most of these issues are presented through Ned or on occasions Emma and once through Mickey. Kramer also discusses the issue of gay marriage at the end of his play. And he deals with these issues with an explicitly direct language and in a frantic, angry yet exasperated accusatory tone.
These plays can termed as “immersive” writings, to use Joseph Cady’s term (qtd in Brookes 161). In the ‘immersive’ writing about AIDS, Cady states that “the reader is thrust into a direct imagination confronting the special horrors of AIDS” (161). Such writings willingly challenge the dominant culture or general population which would prefer AIDS to remain contained within the risk groups (161). In other words, this writing defies the notion of AIDS being ‘not ours’, that is the general heterosexual population, it belongs to ‘them’, the urban homosexuals. It remains faithful to the “emotional and social anguish of people affected by AIDS” (161). In case of the selected plays, the playwrights do not shy away from mentioning the horrors of AIDS and the discrimination faced by the gay community.
In order to look into the primary concern of this paper, it is essential to understand the construction of the homosexual in the Western world. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault had observed in The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality Volume 1, that there had begun a
new persecution of the peripheral sexualities [which] entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals...sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual become a personage, a past, a case history...in addition to being a type of life...with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away...the homosexual was now a species. (42-43)
The homosexual was and is still seen as a ‘species’ with an ‘indiscreet anatomy’ and ‘physiology’. The homosexual was and is seen as a deviant even to this day. Homosexuality was defined as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. It was only after the Stonewall Riots, when this association was “forced to redefined homosexuality...as part of a range of normal behaviour” in 1973 (Brookes 73). However, the arrival of AIDS once again revealed the deep-seated homophobia of the larger society that had historically considered the homosexuals to be unnatural. The selected plays reveal the homophobia of the administration, the media and also the medical organizations.
In Kramer’s work, Ned Weeks heavily critiques the unnamed mayor of the New York City. Ned and his organization repeatedly attempt to get in contact with the mayor but he remains unavailable. He angrily states, “fourteen months is a long time to be out on lunch!” (Kramer 81). When he and his group finally get an appointment at City Hall, the meeting is held “in a basement, windowless, dusty, a room that’s hardly ever used” (74). Tommy Boatwright, a member of Ned’s organizations rightly asks, “What kind of tomb is this they have put us in? Don’t they want us to be seen above ground?”(76). Tommy’s accusations are telling for the location of the meeting illustrates that the administration would rather not be seen outside, in public, supporting anything to do with the gay men. The local government would rather have them entombed for being who they were and for also being the face of the unknown, scary and embarrassing new fatal disease.
Hiram Keebler, the mayor’s assistant in the play, is “an hour and forty-five minutes late” (78). Hiram further infuriates Ned when he states, “The mayor wants (them) to know how much he cares and how impressed he is with (their) superb efforts to shoulder your own responsibility” (78). The choice of the words of the phrase, “your own responsibility”, implies that the mayor, and by extension the administration considered AIDS to the responsibility of the gay community. After years of begging for research funds, the mayor allocated Ned’s organization a measly “nine thousand dollars” (99). This was an inadequate amount because the organization had been “fielding over five hundred calls a week on (their) emergency hotlines... (and they were) visiting over one hundred patients each week in hospitals and homes” (79). The ‘rare cancer’ among forty-one homosexuals in July, 1981, had become “two hundred and fifty-six dead” by October, 1982 (81). Kramer’s writing reveals a sense of urgency and rage especially when Ned states,
We’re all going crazy, living in this epidemic every minute, while the rest of the world goes on out there, all around us, as if nothing is happening, going on with their own lives and not knowing what it’s like, what we’re going through. We’re living through war, but where they’re living it’s peacetime, and we’re all in the same country. (99).
The administration and the larger American society would rather remain blind to the plight of the gay community. Early in the play Emma prophetically states, “I’m frightened nobody important is going to give a damn” because the condition seemed to be happening mostly to gay men and “Who cares if a faggot dies?”(22).
It was only after the Hollywood actor Rock Hudson died due to AIDS complications on October 2, 1985, which is four years after it was first reported, that the local and federal administrations, the media, and the American society at last took notice of the AIDS rampant crisis (Shilts xxi). In his text And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987)Randy Shilts reports that by the time Rock Hudson died, “some 12,000 Americans were already dead or dying of AIDS and hundreds of thousands more were infected with the virus that caused the disease” (xxi-xxii). But few had paid attention to it. This above mentioned inaction of the administration is also discussed, in much detail, by Shilts as well. He heavily critiques the Reagan Administration and states that during the month when Ronald Reagan was “re-elected president (in November, 1984)... the AIDS caseloads surpassed 7,000” in the United States (495). President Reagan had entirely avoided discussing AIDS at all public platforms and by the time he had “delivered his first speech on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed...(and) 20,849 had died” (596). Right-wing commentators in the US like Patrick J. Buchanan, a speech writer for former President Nixon, wrote, “The poor homosexuals – they have declared a war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution” (qtd in Shilts 311). These words reveal a shared societal homophobia that would rather have the homosexuals dead than alive.
Another character in Kramer’s play, Mickey Marcus, comments on the hatred that homosexuals, in this case, gay men in particular face,
We’ve been so oppressed! ...We were a bunch of funny-looking fellows who grew up in sheer misery... All my life I’ve been hated. For one reason or another. For being short. For being Jewish. [Rev.] Jerry Falwall mails out millions of pictures of two men kissing as if it was the most awful sight you could see. (Kramer 97-98).
Mickey’s passionate words allude to their lives before the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the contemporary times in the 1980s wherein the gay men are being blamed for being responsible for getting AIDS in the first place.
Hoffman’s play As Is remains shy in its critique of the administration. However, it does comment on the pain of being gay within the dominantly heterosexual society. Rich comments on the isolation he felt as a child. He used to spend “all his time in libraries” (46). He was scared all the time as a child and he was “so desperate to find people like (him) that (he) looked for them in the indexes of books – under H” (46, italic by the author).
As Is, as an early work of AIDS literature, attempts to look at the manner in which the media had circulated information about the condition to the people. The TV Announcer in the play states:
Scientists tell us that millions of people worldwide are infected. So far, a vast majority of the cases in this country have been homosexual or bisexual men or intravenous drug users of both sexes, but the disease is beginning to make inroads into the general population. When will science conquer this dreaded plague? We don’t know. (20).
The announcement of the ‘disease’ and the ‘dreaded plague’ making ‘inroads into the general population’ does reveal that up to the time AIDS was within its risk groups (the gay men, IV-drug users, and others), it was not much of a concern for the media. Shilts comments on this inaction of the media in the following words
died and nobody paid attention because the mass media did not like covering stories about homosexuals and was especially skittish about stories that involved gay sexuality. Newspapers and television largely avoided discussion of the disease until the death toll was too high to ignore and the causalities were no longer just outcasts... news media regarded (AIDS) as a homosexual problem that wouldn’t interest anybody else. (xxii-xxiii).
The Normal Heart and by extension Kramer are much more critical of the news media, especially The New York Times. The article “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” was published on “page twenty” as stated by Emma in the opening of the play (23). Referring to the above words by Shilts, it is easily understood that the media did not want to publish something that was ‘a homosexual problem’. This sentiment has already been echoed when Hiram conveys the mayor’s message with the words “your own responsibility”. Ned Weeks adds to Emma’s observation, “They (The New York Times) won’t even use the word ‘gay’ unless it’s a direct quote. To them we’re still homosexuals.” (23). Using Ned as his spokesperson and soapbox, Kramer comments on the homophobia of the this news agency’s activities up to October 1982,
Have you been following this Tylenol scare? In three months there have been seven deaths, and the Times has written fifty-four articles. The month of October alone they ran one article every single day. Four of them were on the front page. For us – in seventeen months they’ve written seven puny inside articles. And we have a thousand cases! (75).
Kramer is equally critical of the medical organizations and hospitals. When Emma confirms that the lesion on Felix’s foot is “it”, he asks if he could get a second opinion (85). It is her reply that shows Kramer’s critique of the medical institutions and the conditions that were then,
Feel free. But I’ll say this about my fellow hospitals... you won’t get particularly good care anywhere, maybe not even here. At....I’ll call it Hospital A, you’ll come under a group of mad scientists, research fanatics, who will try almost anything and if you die you die. You’ll rarely see the same doctor twice; you’ll just be a statistic for their computer – which they won’t share with anyone else...you’ll be a true guinea pig. At Hospital B, they decided they really don’t want to get involved with this, it’s too messy... so you’ll be overlooked by the least informed doctors. C is like the New York Times... square, superior, and embarrassed by this disease and this entire epidemic. (86).
Furthermore, Kramer through his play critiques the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and the major American medical organizations. This is evident when Emma angrily states,
“A promising virus has already been discovered – in France. Why are we being told not to cooperate with the French? Why are you refusing to cooperate with the French? Just so you can steal a Nobel Prize?” (104).
In 1983 a very bitter and irate Kramer, published the article “1,112 and Counting” in the March issue of the New York Native, wherein he writes about the attitude that considered the AIDS to be the disease of the outcasts and social pariahs. He states that there was no doubt that “if this epidemic was happening to straight, white, non-intravenous-drug-using middle class”, and then lack of research funds would not have been a problem at all (39). However, AIDS first happened to gay men and other minorities back in the 1980s, so the mainstream media and medical organizations maintained their indifferent status quo.
Kramer’s anger is reflected in Hoffman’s play As Is as well. Here Rich refuses to “participate in the documentation” of his own demise and he complains that the hospital worker “won’t go near (his) bed, but he’s not afraid to touch my money” (44). His frustration and fear is revealed when his brothers comes to see him “wearing a surgical mask, gown, and gloves” so that he would not get infected (48). The brother, who had previously abandoned Rich, makes attempts to apologize and educate himself about AIDS. He brings a “newspaper clipping” that states that “they’re going to have a vaccine soon” (49). Rich resentfully states that the vaccine is to “prevent AIDS,” not to cure it (49). Hoffman thus vaguely implies that medical organizations are trying to prevent the ‘disease’ from entering the ‘general population’ while the already infected gay men, IV-drug users, haemophiliacs and non-white individuals are left without a cure. Rich contemplates suicide as an option, while Ned reports that one of the persons with AIDS being counselled by his organization had killed himself. Both the plays show that a number of gay men preferred suicide instead of dying such a humiliating, painful, lonely and disfiguring death.
Shilts had made an interesting observation in his work wherein he states “before” was to be the word “that would define the permanent demarcation in lives of millions of Americans, particularly those... who were gay” (12). There was “life after the epidemic. And there were fond recollections of the times before” (12). This demarcation is visible in both the selected plays. Hoffman presents a rather explicit nostalgic banter between his protagonists, Saul and Rich, of the time before AIDS.
Saul: God, I used to love promiscuous sex,
Rich: Not “promiscuous,” Saul, nondirective, noncommitted, nonauthoritarian...
Saul: Free, wild, rampant –
Rich: Hot, sweaty, steamy, smelly –
Saul: Juicy, funky, hunky –
Rich: Sex.
Saul: Sex. God, I miss it. (28).
But after Rich’s diagnosis, words and phrases like ‘test’ and ‘safe sex’ have become a part of their daily lexicon. Similarly, Kramer too presents a short dialogue by Felix wherein he reminds Ned that they had already made love, twice, at the baths a few years before their first date in November, 1981 (42). Hence there is a cohabitant element of nostalgia in these two plays, and also in the other plays mentioned earlier, wherein gay men fondly recollect their free sexual lives before the advent of AIDS.
The AIDS plays, the two discussed in this paper and the ones mentioned, are significant in that “they assert the theatre’s ancient function as a public forum on which a community gathers to talk about itself” (Shewey 2). These plays become a “mere pretext for an assembly of individuals collectively seeking information, seeking an outlet for anger, anxiety and grief” (2). These plays have an “immediate social value in dealing with an issue so close to home” (2). As Is and The Normal Heart serve as platforms for informing the audience and the readers about the AIDS crisis, educating them about it and also to show the manner in which the gay men had dealt with it so far. These plays do have an axe to grind, especially the latter with its playwright focusing on activism and critiquing public figures and institutions.
This paper has thus made an attempt to reveal the homophobia of the administration, the media and the medical organizations during the early years of the AIDS crisis through a brief study of the selected plays As Is and The Normal Heart. The collective silence and inaction of these institutions also showed that they would rather not get involved with anything that had to deal with social minorities and gay men in particular. The paper also made an attempt to illustrate the impact of AIDS on the lives of gay men.
Works Cited