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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (March 1, 1986)
Focus on Theatre Whither Sex? Two "AIDS plays", two separate views W. C. M cRae It’s no surprise that the health crisis involv ing AIDS is a political issue. It should come as no surprise that art portraying the health crisis has become an object and subject of politics as well. In 1985, two plays, As Is by W. F. Hoffman, and The N o rm a l Heart by Larry Kramer, opened in New York in response to the issue of AIDS in the gay community. These two plays are ostensibly about the same phenomena. However, each presents radically different analyses of the silent protagonist of both plays: sex, and more precisely, is there sex after AIDS? In these two off-shoots of the social issue play (what you might call ‘‘waiting room trage dies”), it is sex, and the politics of sex, which provides the focus. We know that AIDS is transmitted sexually. But to stigmatize sex or to blame sexuality and participants in it as being responsible for what is transmitted sexually is to misunder stand profoundly the nature of AIDS or of any sexually transmitted disease. The ironies of AIDS are familiar to anyone in contact with the condition: the hard-won right of gays and lesbians to express their sexuality and the continuing struggle to pursue sexual alterna tives in a society that disapproves of them has led to sex being the battleground upon which we measure our gains and losses. We have been identified by our sexuality. But now sex ual contact has become the avenue of ex change of an opportunistic retrovirus. Are we now to change the focus of what we most easily found defined us as a group, and thereby stage gayness as an experience and identity in a new and embattled area? Or does one credit participation in a sexual identity as the reason for AIDS, assigning the condition a punitive function? Or does one attempt to affirm sexuality and the gay experience of the past 15 years even in the face of the perhaps fatal consequences of a part of that lifestyle? These questions provide the intellectual backdrop to both The N o rm a l Heart and As Is. The plays come up with radically different answers to the questions, and have been the focus of much debate in the straight and gay press, often enough, compared, contrasted and reviled to make it seem as if only these two responses are possible to the issue of sex and the AIDS crisis. As Is by William F. Hoffman is the story of two men, once lovers, who decide to move in together again when one of them is diag nosed with AIDS. Much of As Is is familiar domestic comedy/drama, which has as a backdrop a traditional enough (considering the circumstances) love story. Interspersed and often simultaneous with the comic bickering and making up, are reflections of a hospice worker about her experiences with PWA’s; scenes from an AIDS support group; bar scenes; and reflections on when people first heard of AIDS. The action of the play fragments and rejoins across the stage, one word or dialogue used in several interchanges at once. As Is owes its occasional sentimentality to its determination to be positive. This leads to rueful reminiscences about the good old days of pre-AIDS sexuality. “God. I used to love promiscuous sex.” “Not promiscuous,’ Saul, ......................................... » « » t t i i ■ » > a t i l . Just Out. March. 1986 Center Stcl^6 nondirective, noncommitted, nonauthori tarian — ” “— Free, wild, rampant — ” “— Hot, sweaty, steamy, smelly— ” “— Juicy, funky, hunky— ’’ ‘ Sex.’’ “Sex. God, I miss it” As Is is unabashedly a gay play, frank about the sexual nature of its characters, and argu ably might be an uncomfortably strong state ment for a straight audience. It is perhaps all the more provoking because the characters don’t display guilt. Rather than retreat from the sensibiilty that predisposed its adherents to AIDS, As Is defends the flamboyance and excess of much of gay life and sex. For the main characters, the play ends with a romantic hospital bed interlude, and a monologue from the hospice worker. She tells of a plucky — and dying — drag queen whose nails the worker had painted the night before. As Is seeks to be an affirmation of gayness in the age of AIDS. The N o rm a l H eart by Larry Kramer (who wrote the novel Faggots) is about an AIDS crusader in New York. In his attempt to or ganize within the gay community against un responsive and irresponsible officialdom, Ned, the activist, runs up against antagonism and apathy in the gay community itself. Mov ing laterally to the story of the activist, who, like some Old Testament prophet, spouts in vective and statistics, is the story of Ned's lover, Felix, who succumbs to AIDS during the course of the play. There’s much in The N o rm a l H eart to make you angry: primarily the dilatory responses of journalism and politicians in New York to the gravity of the AIDS crisis. But Kramer is not content merely excoriating The New York Times or Mayor Koch. The gay community must do penance as well. For Kramer, the enemy is Promiscuity. Setting his standards higher than health officials and doctors who work with AIDS, Kramer encour ages not monogamy, not safe sex, but pre ventative celibacy. Says one character, “I don’t consider going to the baths and pro miscuous sex making love. I consider it the equivalent of junk food, and you can lay off it for a while.” And says another: “. . . Gay lead ers who created this sexual liberation philo sophy in the first place have been the death of u s ... why didn’t you guys fight for the right to get married instead of the right to legitimatize promiscuity?' We have seen the specter of the Right Wing using the health crisis to deny gay rights. We now see a gay writer using the same health crisis to promote revisionist morality. A n d himself. The N o rm a l H eart is not a play about AIDS. It is a play about Larry Kramer’s ego. “I’m rig h t this time, dammit,” and he's written a play to prove it The N or m a l H eart centers around Ned, a thinly veiled ~ representation of Kramer himself, an irrasci- ble writer who alienates everyone he comes in contact with, except the beatific Felix, who — surprise — falls both in love with Ned and ill with AIDS. The inevitable decline and death of Ned's lover proceeds in reverse ratio to the ascendence of general acknowledgement of Ned’s correct analysis of events: as Felix gets sick, Ned gets right. As everyone aspires to Ned's level of enlightenment Felix succumbs gradually to AIDS. Kramer giveth, Kramer taketh away. The play ends, Felix is dead, Ned’s own AIDS organization disenfranchises him, but all that he has foreseen has come to pass. He was right, goddam m it The N o rm a l H eart is a useful and anger-inducing exem plar about inaction whose moral might read: "Trouble will not go away if you try to ignore it Especially if the trouble is Larry Kramer." Kramer also gives little acknowledgement to the many men and women who have, like him, worked very hard for very little money in order to provide services during the current health crisis. He also neglects to credit the male gay community with, by and large, adopting safer forms of sex. The motivation for safe sex is self-respect; Kramer’s motiva tion for advocating celibacy is guilt. For all its anger, The N o rm a l H eart digresses into being a loud mawkish diatribe on what it’s like being Larry Kramer.