The Normal Heart

We watched the HBO production of Larry Kramer's autobiographical story of mostly gay males suffering at the onset of the AIDS crisis, when almost nothing was known, and continuing to face a bewildered future as the Federal Government (under President Reagan who ever so cynically and maliciously avoided the topic even though one of his closest personal friends Rock Hudson was to die of the disease) did nothing to encourage research to halt the virus as it had done under the earlier threat of polio, also a virus.  It brought back tearful memories of so many friends and students who died young, full of promise, full of life, even a few casual lovers, whose example in one particular instance of courage in dying has remained with me as an inspiration.  I went to see him in his last days, setting aside an evening when I would be in San Francisco for a son's wedding, and he had dressed himself up in a suit, feeble though he was, and we sat on the floor, he cradled in my arms leaning on my chest, and talked for hours, about death and dying, he so young, and I only middle aged at the time.  Another former student, also an occasional lover, was marvelously in control of his humor, while out of control otherwise, who raced up the stairs of the house he had designed from the dining room, as his diapers began to fill up, hilariously exclaiming against his failure of prescience for not having a bathroom on the same floor as the dining room.  And yet another--I can't seem to stop--who ended up across the street from me in Manhattan, telephoned a mutual friend in California to say that he "was sick," and she urged me to investigate.  I found him covered with the tell tale Karposi spots, half paralyzed from a stroke, but insisting to me and his helper that he was planning to return to work the following day.  Two weeks later I sat at his funeral service among the large crowd of his friends from weekends in Fire Island, all of them  young, beautiful, so gay, so elegant, and so many of them so doomed.  The film portrays the politics of gay promiscuity of that era which, of course, was very much a cause of the rapid spread of the disease.  I never was part of the gay scene, back in Boston, a married man, or a recently divorced man, who, when I was young and handsome, had furtive homosexual encounters but later on much too old, too creaky, and too buttoned up to imagine even appearing on the beach at a place like Fire Island.  I once tried group sex in a gay bath but it was like going to my first high school dance, me completely shy and withdrawn watching the noisy clamor and action across the room.  Those who disapprove of the aggressive gay promiscuity of that era need to see this film and understand that these activists had to insist that their sexual inclinations for which they had suffered paralyzing retribution from family and society since they became pubescent had to be acted out; crude as it may seem, fucking with ten different guys a night is equivalent of Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus.  That  so many of them died for it, was a supremely cruel cruel turn of fate, that a Judaeo-Christian culture can all too facilely call punishment.  I remember at a dinner party of mostly New York performers in the various arts listening to a well known opera singer catching up with an old friend across the table whom she had not seen for some time, and soon silence fell over the table as first one then the other inquired about mutual friends was told of their death, one after another, all the bright young things of the creative life of New York City.  And you had to think back now and realize that just as Germany culturally died in its tracks and has never recovered from the death of all its Jews, so New York and the United States in general has suffered a tragic loss of refinement and creativity in the death of their gays.