Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  The following month, playwright Robert Chesley responded with a letter in the Native. Chesley was the thirty-seven-year-old author of Stray Dog Story, a play about a dog magically turned into a gay man who is then used and abused by other gay men. Chesley, too, was critical of gay life. He had been friends with Kramer and had even been to bed with him. He began his letter by saying he would contribute money to Kramer’s fund. But he went on to warn, “I think the concealed meaning in Kramer’s emotionalism is the triumph of guilt: that gay men deserve to die for their promiscuity…. Read anything by Larry Kramer closely, I think you’ll find the subtext is always: the wages of gay sin are death…. I am not downplaying the seriousness of Kaposi’s sarcoma. But something else is happening here, which is serious: gay homophobia and anti-eroticism.”

  There is nothing in Kramer’s original statement to justify this attack. Chesley was reacting to things left unsaid in the article, or to things said by Kramer only in conversation. Yet Chesley’s words must have hit a nerve or Kramer would’ve ignored them.

  Kramer responded two months later (after speaking to his psychiatrist), in a long, bitter, rambling letter in the Native. He gave his history with the “gay cancer,” describing the sickness of friends and his initial efforts at fund-raising. He went on at great length defending Faggots, as if that were his real injury, quoting from six different good reviews in the British and French press. Then he let loose at every target imaginable: the National Cancer Institute, the inept organizers of the annual gay march, the silence of the New York Times, the impurity of poppers, the awfulness of Mayor Ed Koch (he seemed to hate Koch even before Koch did anything wrong), and “the ‘eroticism’ that has made gay health such a concern in New York that every gay doctor in this city is, as Dr. Mass puts it, ‘exhausted.’ ” Kramer had found the manic, high-octane, punching-in-all-directions voice he would use for all his polemical prose.

  Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts. We cannot pretend that Kramer (or Chesley) was an objective observer here. In terms of what was known about the illness at the time, Kramer was overreacting. Yet he turned out to be right. His sexual anxiety enabled him to see things that others were not yet ready to recognize, just as a color-blind person can see patterns not immediately visible to the color sighted. And his injured pride and loose-cannon temper enabled him to say what others were slow to express. His anger was partly a rhetorical device, but one that put him in touch with real anger; his real anger did not always select its targets well.

  Robert Chesley went on to write the first major play produced about AIDS, Night Sweat, in 1984. He followed it with an even more powerful AIDS play, Jerker, in 1986. He died of AIDS in 1990.

  Shortly after Kramer’s counterattack in the Native, he held another meeting in his living room off Washington Square, on January 4, 1982. Joining him were Dr. Mass, writer/editor Nathan Fain, publisher Paul Popham, investor Paul Rappaport, and novelist Edmund White. Kramer wanted to form an organization to fight the amorphous illness. When Rappaport said, “Gay men certainly have a health crisis,” Kramer cried out, “That’s our name!” The group was called Gay Men’s Health Crisis, soon known as GMHC. The six founders immediately set about fund-raising, recruiting members, and arguing with each other.

  The name of the disease was changing as its identity changed. The Centers for Disease Control first called it GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). Then, in the summer of 1982, it became known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, soon shortened to AIDS. It was the failure of immunity that made bodies vulnerable to strange diseases like Kaposi’s sarcoma, which produced purplish lesions on the skin, and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, which did not respond to the usual antibiotics. These were the chief markers and killers at the time; other opportunistic diseases followed. The cause was identified as a virus in 1984, but not until the French and American discoveries were reconciled in 1986 did it become known as HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). The first AIDS antibody test was not available until 1985. Complicating matters further, the virus could have an incubation period of three years or more. Nobody could be sure when they had been infected or if they would become sick.

  Early in 1983, it was learned AIDS could be transmitted by blood transfusion. Only when doctors found the disease could affect heterosexuals did mainstream media begin to cover the story.

  The number of cases was still remarkably low, especially when one considers how high they would rise in the years to come. The first volunteers at GMHC worked mostly out of imagination and fear. Feared possibility can be more slippery and exhausting than factual reality. Individuals often burned out. Mass left first, worn down by trying to mix activism with his journalism and medical practice. He continued to go to the baths, however, where he met his life partner, Arnie Kantrowitz (one of the zappers at Harper’s in 1970). Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983 after he won a Guggenheim Fellowship. “I wanted to go on having industrial quantities of sex,” he later claimed, “and I thought I could go on in Paris. New York was turning into a morgue.” We shouldn’t take him entirely at his word. White often attacked himself before other people could, making his own preemptive self-condemnations. Yet in France, philosopher Michel Foucault dismissed the disease as a puritanical illness imagined by antisex Christians; it couldn’t possibly be real. Foucault would die of AIDS in 1984.

  Kramer’s next article in the Native, “1,112 and Counting,” appeared on March 14, 1983, on the front page. It’s probably his most famous single piece of journalism.

  He begins with cold facts. There were now over a thousand reported cases of AIDS and 418 deaths. He talks about the kinds of gay men who get AIDS: “There are drug users and non-drug users. There are the truly promiscuous and the almost monogamous. There are reported cases of single-contact infection. All it seems to take is one wrong fuck. That’s not promiscuity—that’s bad luck.” He talks about the hospitals, the forms of treatment, and the poor response by the federal government’s National Institutes of Health. All very strong and clear. He then lurches into two pages attacking Mayor Koch for his silence, not only in the city but for failing to confront President Reagan and demanding a stronger response from the federal government. He did not call the baldheaded, nasal-voiced, three-term bachelor mayor a closeted homosexual—not yet, anyway. But Kramer believed that was the real reason for Koch’s silence: he was a closet case who didn’t want to be identified with homosexuals. (The closet for Kramer was the sin of sins. But as others pointed out, many undeniably straight public figures were as aloof and silent about AIDS as Koch.) Kramer then lambastes a long list of enemies, ranging from closeted gay doctors, to the New York Times, to the gay press that (with the exception of the Native) said little about the epidemic, to gay men who can’t bear the idea of giving up sex until it’s learned what spreads the illness. He concludes with a call for protests and asks for volunteers for future civil disobedience.

  GMHC had insisted Kramer include a disclaimer that he was speaking only for himself and not for GMHC. He did. Yet his attack on Koch would be the catalyst for his break with the organization.

  Two weeks later, on Sunday, April 10, Kramer and twenty protesters with placards stood outside Lenox Hill Hospital in the rain during an AIDS conference attended by Koch. The protest made the evening news. The next day Koch agreed to meet with representatives from the gay community, including two from GMHC. Kramer assumed he’d be one, especially since his protest had helped bring about the meeting. The board said no. They knew how much he despised Koch and feared he’d lose his temper. Director Paul Popham would attend with the young executive director. Another AIDS group, the AIDS Network, said Kramer could go as their representative, but Kramer said no. He must go as part of GMHC or he would quit the organization he had founded. Popham refused to back down. So Kramer quit. He was like a jilted lover who feels he can best prove his love by shooting himself in the foot.

  The gay groups had their meeting with Koch, nobody lost his o
r her temper, and GMHC made connections that helped them to become the most important AIDS organization in the country.

  Feeling betrayed and angry, Kramer kept away from the group and resumed work on his novel. But it was no good. He couldn’t write. He realized he’d lost his platform by quitting GMHC, and he asked to be reinstated on the board. They refused to take him back. They had found that work was easier and less stressful without him. At a GMHC dance, Kramer entered the DJ booth, took over a microphone and pleaded with the volunteers to make the board let him back in. Again, nothing. That June he spoke at the gay pride rally in Central Park. He denounced the Times, President Reagan, and Mayor Koch, but he also tried to make peace with GMHC.

  I want to apologize to any of the people dear to me whose feelings I may have bruised these past two years. I have been very much an angry man. It seems that in my frustration at seeing AIDS ignored so long I just couldn’t shut up…. I am by nature an impatient man.

  He left for England that very night, determined to put it all behind him.

  He hoped to visit old friends in London and have a good time. He went to the theater and saw several plays, including Map of the World by David Hare. Hare’s drama about infighting among U.N. bureaucrats battling poverty could not help but make Kramer think of his own experience. He decided to write a play himself in an attempt to understand what he’d been through. Before he returned to the U.S., he went to Germany and visited Dachau outside Munich. He was struck by parallels between the Holocaust and the AIDS epidemic, two huge crimes that were initially ignored by the world. The echoes gave his new project a larger purpose.

  He rented a place on Cape Cod and wrote the first draft of a long, autobiographical play that was not just about GMHC but about his entire life, with flashbacks to his parents and his brother. He finished the first draft at the end of August and began a second draft. He found his title in W. H. Auden’s poem, “September 1, 1939,” from a different stanza than the stanza that includes the famous line, “We must love one another or die,” one where Auden declares that “the normal heart” wants what it cannot have, “to be loved alone.”

  Kramer began to send the play around. People were respectful but not interested. Some confessed they were afraid of the subject. Also, the play was incredibly long at this point, over seven hours. He wanted it read by Joe Papp at the Public Theater, the downtown arts theater housed in the old Astor Library off Cooper Square; he sent it to Papp through a GMHC volunteer, Emmett Foster, who was Papp’s administrative assistant. When Kramer didn’t hear back, he wrote a furious letter for Foster to give to Papp. Foster remembered it saying in effect, “Your own son is gay and you don’t want to do this play because you’re homophobic.” Foster told Kramer that if Papp saw the letter he would never touch his play. Kramer backed off.

  The play was eventually read by Papp’s wife, Gail Merrifield, head of the Public’s development office. She received a seven-pound manuscript, more like a novel than a play. She later described reading it as “tough sledding.” It felt like two different plays, one a family drama about two brothers, the other a political play about AIDS. “Characters spouted pages of medical facts that were unactable. It had no shape. When I finished it, however, I was moved.” She met with Kramer and told him what she thought. To her surprise, he immediately began to take notes; he was willing to rewrite the play.

  He visited Merrifield’s office repeatedly over the next eight months, discussing the story and using her questions to find its heart. He cut back heavily on the family; he reduced the medical details. When Merrifield decided the script was good enough to show her husband, she still had to force him to read it. Papp didn’t like plays about any kind of illness. He put it down after twenty pages, saying it was much too overblown. But he resumed reading. “Finally I get through the whole thing and say, ‘This is one of the worst things I’ve ever read’—and I’m crying. I was crying!” He agreed to produce the play but said it needed more work. He teamed Kramer with the Public’s literary manager, Bill Hart, and rewriting continued. The play went through another ten drafts. Kramer ignored most of Hart’s suggestions, but pushing and prodding from Hart got him to produce the most memorable scene in the play, when the protagonist, Ned Weeks, loses his temper with his sick lover and hurls groceries and milk against the floor.

  Michael Lindsey-Hogg was brought in to direct, and he worked with Kramer on further cutting and sharpening. This is one of those cases where many cooks actually improved the broth. Theater is always collaborative, but input from other minds helped Kramer strip away the fat and find the bones of his story—the bones are always his real strength. The Normal Heart is infinitely superior as a play to what Faggots was as a novel.

  Throughout the process Kramer remained unpredictable. Often warm and generous, he could also be mean and childish. The casting director found him condescending and distrustful. The production designer barred him from his office after Kramer called a pair of costume shoes ugly and threw them out a third-story window. But his only serious quarrel with Papp was over the attacks in the play on Mayor Koch. The city was the Public Theater’s landlord, and Papp did not want to alienate the mayor. Nevertheless, he gave in to Kramer and let his protagonist repeatedly badmouth Koch.

  The part of Ned Weeks was cast with Brad Davis, an intense, handsome actor who had starred in the movie Midnight Express. He was Lindsey-Hogg’s idea, not Kramer’s. Kramer thought he was too young. But Kramer knew it wouldn’t hurt to have himself played by a movie star.

  It’s fascinating to reread the play now knowing the actual history it covers. Kramer drew a clear, coherent, fictional story out of a mess of facts, but remained true to the spirit of the facts. A handful of doctors, mostly male, are combined into one female doctor, Emma Brookner, the only woman in the cast. But Ned Weeks isn’t just based on Kramer—he is Kramer, without being overly idealized. All criticisms one could make about the author are made in the play about Ned, from being a megalomaniac to hating sex to the idea that he became political only because he found writing too hard.

  The dialogue is sharp and quick; scenes are well-chosen and well-paced. Ned is present in Dr. Brookner’s office when cases of the mysterious illness first appear. He and his friends quickly organize to get the word out. When Ned visits the Times to get them to cover the story, he meets Felix, a fashion writer who will become his lover. Everything moves rapidly. There is no waste. Dr. Brookner is given most of the balder, clunkier lines, but they hurry the story along.

  A major achievement in the play is its full-scale portrait of life at the unnamed, GMHC-like organization. Office politics is difficult to dramatize without becoming boring, but the battles here are involving and revealing. At one time or another Kramer shows sympathy for all the participants. These men are overworked and exhausted, worn out by their campaigning and organizing and by looking after sick friends and lovers. Accusations from Kramer’s articles appear almost verbatim in the play, but he lets the other side answer. One of the most powerful scenes is when Mickey Marcus, a health officer loosely based on Lawrence Mass, returns exhausted from a truncated trip to Rio and flips out when Ned blames the epidemic on sex yet again.

  Mickey: (to Ned) And you think I’m killing people?

  Ned: Mickey, that’s not what I—

  Mickey: Yes, you do! You know you do! I’ve spent fifteen years of my life fighting for our right to be free and make love whenever, wherever… And you’re telling me that all those years of what being gay stood for is wrong… and I’m a murderer. We have been so oppressed! Don’t you remember how it was? Can’t you see how important it is for us to love openly, without hiding and without guilt? We were a bunch of funny-looking fellows who grew up in sheer misery and one day we fell into the orgy rooms and we thought we’d found heaven. And we would teach the world how wonderful heaven can be. We would lead the way. We would be good for something new. Can’t you see that?

  The Normal Heart is, in part, a documentary play, akin to 1930s social
dramas like Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets or the Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers. The latter was actually evoked at the Public Theater by covering the whitewashed walls with facts and figures from the epidemic—the theater itself became a scrambled newspaper. Despite the documentary foundation, however, there were two major fictional changes, one large but justified, the other a bit stickier.

  The justified change was giving Ned a lover, Felix. The two men’s relationship is a major engine of the play, a sweet subplot in Act One that builds to the powerful moment when Felix shows Ned the purple lesion on his foot. Felix’s illness and death are the heart of Act Two. Not even such awkward touches as a deathbed wedding or the dying Felix telling Ned, “Don’t lose that anger,” can spoil the emotional power of this love story. With so much of the play based on reality, many people needed to believe Felix was real, too. Kramer became prickly when asked about Felix’s identity. He insisted Felix had existed but that he didn’t want to talk about him. Maybe there was a Felix, but, as one friend observes, it’s out of character for Kramer not to talk about something. More striking, the play isn’t dedicated to the memory of a lost love, but to Norman J. Levy, Kramer’s psychiatrist. This does not take anything away from the play. Felix is an inspired invention. He humanizes Ned and makes the play more accessible and involving. And why shouldn’t a writer imagine for himself the boyfriend he has not yet found?