The sticky change is smaller yet connects to bigger issues. In Ned’s ouster from the board, he doesn’t quit as Kramer did, but is abruptly voted out for being antisex. It simplifies a very tangled story, but it’s not only untrue, it also reduces Ned to a righteous victim. Ned responds with Kramer’s own preachy words: “The only way we’ll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn’t just sexual…. Being defined by our cocks is literally killing us. Must we all be reduced to becoming our own murderers?” Then he abruptly backtracks and pleads, “Bruce, I know I’m an asshole. But please, I beg you, don’t shut me out.”
People often talk about The Normal Heart as if it weren’t art but raw news. Yet by using himself as the central character, Kramer created a tragic hero of sorts, one whose tragic flaw is that he is an asshole. The man who is tough and difficult and crazy enough to bring the world a terrible truth is too tough and difficult and crazy to organize the proper response to it. The Normal Heart is frequently compared to Henrik Ibsen’s The Enemy of the People, and for good reason. Not only is there much talk about the baths in the two plays (in Ibsen the waters of a spa are infected), but both offer challenging portraits of the asshole as hero. We’re happier when the assholes are villains. But Ibsen’s Dr. Stockman is an arrogant, unlikable, unpopular man who happens to be right. Ned Weeks is a righteous, irritable, short-tempered man who also happens to be right. Yet the real Kramer was more of an asshole, and more interesting, than Ned. He was a highly emotional man with a gift for shooting himself in the foot. Those exasperating, human qualities are present in the play if you look, but they’re softened by rewriting his break with GMHC. Kramer would fix that when he adapted the play for film, making his fictional self more difficult and more interesting when he produced multiple drafts of a screenplay for a movie that Barbra Streisand promised to make.
The play opened at the Public Theater on April 21, 1985, to reviews that weren’t just mixed but complicated. Critics were reviewing not only a play but a minority group in an epidemic. Respect and unease were mixed with literary judgments. Frank Rich in the New York Times began with praise: “The blood that’s coursing through The Normal Heart, the new play by Larry Kramer at the Public Theater, is boiling hot.” Then the criticisms started—“Although Mr. Kramer’s theatrical talents are not always as highly developed as his conscience”—and increased, with complaints about petty politics, a shrill protagonist, and “galloping egocentricity,” until Rich concluded, “One wishes the play’s outrage had been channeled into drama as fully compelling as its cause.” Michael Feingold, who was gay himself, began with criticism in his review in the Village Voice, but closed with praise: “The aesthetic failings of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart—as plentiful as bacteria in a human mouth—are balanced by the truth of what Kramer has to say: historically, politically, epidemiologically.”
One of the better reviews came from, of all people, John Simon in New York magazine. The tall, haughty, womanizing Simon was notorious that spring for hating homosexuals. He had been overheard loudly declaring in a lobby after a bad production of Anatol by Arthur Schnitzler, “Don’t you sometimes wish that all the faggots in the theater… would get AIDS and die and we’d be rid of them, and we could go on from there.” The following week he wrote in a review that a show about middle-aged women was “faggot nonsense.” His gay friend, composer Ned Rorem, took him to see The Normal Heart as preparation for an interview in the New York Native. Simon cried at the end of the Kramer play, but in the interview he was unapologetic about his earlier remarks. His good review of Kramer may have been an act of penance, but he was not a penitent man. He wrote, “What could have been a mere staged tract—and, in its lesser moments, is just that—transcends often enough into a fleshed-out, generously dramatized struggle, in which warring ideologies do not fail to breathe, sweat, weep, bleed—be human.”
Reviewers and audiences were more comfortable with another AIDS play which opened only a week before Kramer’s, As Is by William Hoffman. The Times review of Normal Heart ran with a note from the editor defending the newspaper against Kramer’s charges, and a sly quote from a spokesman for Mayor Koch saying the mayor hadn’t seen the play and he couldn’t comment on its attacks on him, but he hoped it was as good as As Is. The Hoffman play is better written and better crafted, telling the simpler story of a gay man looking after an ex-lover who becomes sick and dies. It offers snapshots of life in the epidemic: gentle, human glimpses. Nevertheless, it is the play that has become dated, that now looks like old news. The Normal Heart, with its bureaucratic quarrels and impossible hero, has a story that stays relevant and involving.
It ran for over a year at the Public, longer than any other production there, with Papp’s strong support. It would be performed all over the country during the next years, a message show like a new incarnation of the Living Newspaper, but a powerful drama in its own right.
GMHC continued to grow, becoming an important and necessary service organization. As the numbers of sick increased, it provided help and care that federal and local governments didn’t. Kramer remained barred from the board, but he became the lover of the next executive director, Rodger McFarlane. This might explain his praise of GMHC at the time for its counseling and home support services. Then he broke up with McFarlane and the attacks resumed. He criticized GMHC for being nothing but caregivers, for not being political, for not providing experimental drugs, for not condemning sex, then for promoting safe sex, then for not knowing how to promote itself. He is often compared to a Jewish mother, always complaining, never satisfied, but Catholic and Protestant mothers (and fathers) can be just as bad. “You and your huge assortment of caretakers perform miraculous feats helping the dying to die,” Kramer jeered. Yet there are times when the world sorely needs caretakers. GMHC accomplished much that needed to be done.
Kramer believed in the politics of anger. And he was good at anger, both real anger and playacted anger. However, anger can get you started, but it can accomplish only so much by itself before entropy sets in and you run out of gas or, worse, you self-destruct. Which can be a private disaster for an artist, but would be a public catastrophe in a political leader. Luckily Kramer wasn’t a leader with obligations but an artist, a free agent. He could drop out whenever he wanted, and he did.
16. Dead Poets Society
Death is almost never timely, even for the old.
On February 24, 1983, alone in his room in the Hotel Elysée in New York, seventy-one-year-old Tennessee Williams died after choking on the cap of his eyedrop bottle. He often held the cap in his teeth while applying his eyedrops; he must have inhaled the cap with his head tilted back. Williams would have laughed in delight over such an absurd death—if it had happened to someone else. More than one obituary quoted Blanche’s line from Streetcar: “You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape one day out on the ocean.”
A year and a half later, in August 1984, while visiting his friend Joanne Carson in Palm Springs, Truman Capote died in his sleep from “a multiple drug intoxication” complicated by liver disease. He was fifty-nine. A year earlier Gore Vidal had dropped his libel suit after Capote wrote a public letter of apology. Asked to comment on his death, Vidal shrugged and cited what had been said about the death of Elvis Presley: it was “a good career move.”
The deaths of Williams and Capote were oddly anticlimactic. They had both died as writers years ago and, in this sense, their deaths were almost posthumous. Williams had continued to write, yet his later plays are more manner than matter and never emotionally engaged. Capote had stopped writing altogether, but nobody knew that until his executors went through the desks and closets of his different homes, hunting for the rest of Answered Prayers. Nothing existed except the chapters published in Esquire.
The two men died just as the plague years began. The deaths of gay artists had not yet become commonplace.
“2,339 and Counting” was the title of Kramer’s October 1983 artic
le, published as an ad in the Village Voice when the Voice refused to run it as an article. (Kramer wanted to reach a larger audience than he was reaching with the Native.) The numbers had doubled since the last article six months earlier. Of the sick, 945 were dead. In addition to the gay men, there were IV drug users, hemophiliacs, and a few Haitians. A nasty joke of the time went: What’s the hardest thing about being diagnosed with AIDS? Convincing your parents that you’re Haitian.
Famous people began to die of AIDS, yet they didn’t want the world to know what killed them. AIDS was like the dye on a biologist’s tissue sample identifying who was homosexual. The obituaries in the New York Times were routinely vague or said simply “heart failure”—but the heart always stops when a person expires. When Roy Cohn, the fiercely anti-Communist, fiercely closeted lawyer became sick in 1986, he did everything he could to keep his diagnosis a secret. Liberace died of AIDS in 1987 after claiming he was wasting away because of a watermelon diet. But one famous figure chose to be honest. Movie star Rock Hudson was visibly ill when he appeared with his former costar Doris Day on a television talk show in July 1985. He said he had the flu. But after ten days of attention and speculation by the press (and a quote from Armistead Maupin in the San Francisco Chronicle saying, yes, Hudson was gay), the actor told his spokesperson to tell the public what he had and who he was. For most of straight America, Rock Hudson was the first actual person they knew with AIDS. He died that October.
How does one write about an epidemic that is so public yet experienced so privately, almost secretly? The first major work appeared in the most public literary art, the theater. There were timely plays by Robert Chesley, Victor Bumbalo (Adam and the Experts) and others as well as those by Kramer and William Hoffman. But this highly public art was soon joined by the most private art, poetry.
Poetry offers a more personal and immediate response to experience than any other literary form. It does not require the machinery of plot and character, but can directly address intensely felt moments. The great poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon, responded directly to the slaughterhouse of the trenches, writing about the war in the middle of the war, sometimes composing passages in the front lines. The cool, dry, bitter, matter-of-factness of “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Owen would find its counterpart in poems written by young Americans seventy years later. Take, for example, this passage:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on bitter tongues…
Only the old-fashioned cadence indicates to most readers that this man is dying from poison gas and not from Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia.
Men and women immediately began to write poems about their friends, their lovers, and themselves, what they saw, what they feared, what they lost. Some of the writers were already famous, others on their way to fame, others barely outlived their first books. The work was published in little magazines, chapbooks, handmade brochures, and hardcover anthologies. Some poems make one think of Randall Jarrell’s description of bad poetry: “It is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with ‘This is a poem’ scrawled on them in lipstick.” Yet the best work describes these raw experiences so precisely and clearly that any reader can come away with a better understanding of the world.
Some of the strongest poems were little more than sharply observed snapshots of feeling. They did what journalism is supposed to do but rarely does, making alien experiences accessible. Has anyone ever written a better description of what it’s like to be sick with AIDS-related pneumonia than Melvin Dixon’s poem, “Heartbeats”? It’s a brutally simple poem, composed in double beats like a fist knocking at a door.
No air. Breathe in.
Breathe in. No air.
Black out. White rooms.
Head hot. Feet cold.
No work. Eat right.
CAT scan. Chin up.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
No air. No air.
Thin blood. Sore lungs.
Mouth dry. Mind gone.
Six months? Three weeks?
Can’t eat. No air.
Today? Tonight?
It waits. For me.
Sweet heart. Don’t stop.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Dixon was a teacher, poet and novelist, author of Trouble the Water, a promising first novel about growing up gay and black. He died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of forty-two.
Other poets wrote poems about the fear of AIDS. There were also poems about sex in the shadow of death and poems about survivor’s guilt. And there were elegies, many elegies.
James Merrill had finished The Changing Light at Sandover, his ambitious epic about life after death, in 1982, before the epidemic made itself fully felt. Yet the mammoth poem now took on new meaning for readers. As Edmund White said of the fictionalized Merrill character in his 1997 novel, The Farewell Symphony, “Now I understand why [he] had invented his dress-up party version of the afterlife…. It was a normal way of keeping the dead alive.”
Merrill wrote a memorial tribute in prose for his scholarly friend, David Kalstone, who died in 1986, describing how he scattered his remains in Long Island Sound: “In the sunlit current the white gravel of our friend fanned out, revolving once as if part of a dance, and was gone.” He followed with two elegies for Kalstone, including one that elaborates on the scattering of the ashes.
You are gone. You caught like a cold their airy
lust for essence. Now, in the furnace parched to
ten or twelve light handfuls, a mortal gravel
sifted through fingers…
In his cool, calm, quietly tender poems, Merrill never indicated that he himself had tested positive for the virus in 1986. He had his reasons for keeping it secret, including the fact his mother was still alive. (She was not happy when he talked frankly about being gay in his 1993 memoir, A Different Person.) The closest he came to making it public is a strangely intense, hallucinogenic poem, “Vol. XLIV, No. 3” where details under the microscope become electric fantasies.
Chains of gold tinsel, baubles of green fire
For the arterial branches—
Here at Microcosmics Illustrated, why,
Christmas goes on all year!
The poem then turns more serious.
Defenseless, the patrician cells await
Invasion by barbaric viruses,
Another sack of Rome.
A new age. Everything we dread.
When it was published, Merrill seemed to be talking only about the vague, generalized fear all gay men were feeling at the time, no matter what their health was.
His life with David Jackson had changed. They no longer shared their nights at the Ouija board; they were both seeing other men. They remained in touch, yet they didn’t always live together in their different homes in Stonington, Key West, and Athens.
Some of the strongest poems about AIDS were written by Thom Gunn, the English poet who had met Christopher Isherwood back in 1954. Another Brit who decided he was happier living in America, he followed his American boyfriend, Mike Kitay, to San Francisco, settling first on Russian Hill, where he was neighbors with Armistead Maupin, then buying a house in the Haight-Ashbury, where he lived with Kitay and various mutual friends for the next thirty-three years.
Cambridge-educated like his peer Ted Hughes Gunn enjoyed being in the city of the Beat poets, but their poetics never rubbed off on him. His life could be as anarchic as theirs—he stopped teaching for a few years so he could experiment with LSD—yet he loved old-fashioned form and meter. “Later I realized what I was doing,” he told an interviewer. “I was filtering the experiences of the infinite through the grid of the finite.” A lean, handsome man who wore leather jackets like Marlon Brando in The Wild One and was photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, he also edited scholarly editions of Elizabetha
n verse. His own work grew more matter-of-factly gay, the Auden-like “you” of beloveds becoming actual male bedmates, the urban landscapes including an occasional gay bar or drag queen. He lost his fans, who feared he was writing too much “hippy silliness and self-regarding camp.” Then he wrote The Man with Night Sweats.
The book came out in 1992, but the poems were written between 1982 and 1988. The volume includes work that has nothing to do with AIDS, evocations of adolescence, flowers, and neighbors, but it was the AIDS poems, all in Part 4, that seized the attention of readers, gay and straight. They cover the whole gamut of the epidemic, addressing dying friends, personal fear, tainted desire, and grief. The title poem is about a man waking up from a fever dream covered in sweat, the night sweat that’s a symptom of either AIDS or fear—or both. (Gunn himself was HIV negative.) Just the titles of other poems speak volumes: “In Time of Plague,” “To a Dead Gym Owner,” “To a Dead Graduate Student,” “Terminal,” “Death’s Door.” Yet it is not a depressing book. Gunn remains calm and clear-eyed throughout, and his people remain complex and human even in the midst of illness.
Look, for example, at “Lament,” written about Gunn’s friend Allan Noseworthy. In four pages of rhyming or half-rhyming couplets, we follow a man into a hospital and stay with him until he dies. The Auden-like “you” is no longer coy.
A gust of morphine hid you. Back in sight
You breathed through a segmented tube, fat, white,
Jammed down your throat so that you could not speak…
A man struggles to keep his identity, his wit and curiosity, even with a breathing tube filling his mouth.
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 27