The Normal Heart

The Normal Heart

Sunday, May 25, 2014. The day I’d been anticipating for what seemed like decades.  Finally, HBO would premier its production of Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart.  You can read more about the story here but let me summarize by saying it’s a memoir of the onset of the AIDS crisis in America.  Don’t panic. This is not a movie review, although I will include some comments on the film. Mostly this is just some thoughts that came to me while watching.

I first saw this play in 1986/87 when it was done by the Way Off Broadway theater in Indianapolis. I’d known one of the actors for many years and was there mainly to support him.  I certainly wasn’t prepared for the emotional roller-coaster that I’d be riding that night.  At that point in time, there was so much we didn’t know about HIV/AIDS. President Reagan had barely even mentioned it in public. Ryan White and his family were receiving death threats.  The medical establishment seemed to be focused more on controlling the illnesses associated with a compromised immune system than they were actually controlling the virus.  And there were a lot of people in the health care industry who wouldn’t treat or even touch anyone with AIDS.

At that point in my life, I only knew a very small handful of gay men and none of them were HIV positive. But I remember the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Some younger readers may find this odd, but at the time they were the only group distributing information on condom use.  Even Planned Parenthood used the GMHC brochure because they didn’t have one of their own.

Looking back almost thirty years later so many things have changed both for me personally and for the world at large.  I am saddened to have lost friends to this terrible disease. But on the plus side (no pun intended) I now know a lot more gay guys. I’m pleased and honored to call some of them my friend.  

Over the years, I’ve learned that a few of those friends HIV positive.  But their viral load is so small as to be nearly undetectable which is something we couldn’t even have imagined in 1987.  The world at large has come to accept that this is not a plague limited to a certain small percentage of the population.  We accept that this is an illness that doesn’t discriminate based on race, gender, identity or even social status, thanks to people like Ryan White and Arthur Ashe.  Sadly there are still places where ignorance rules but even those seem to be shrinking.

To paraphrase Dan Savage... it has gotten better.

As for the movie itself, it was great! Larry Kramer’s words are as powerful now as they were thirty years ago.  The visuals reflect the in-your-face attitude of the protagonist, Ned Weeks. This movie deserves its TV-MA rating, as any frank depiction of the subject would.  If you think you’ll be squicked by the sex, just avert your eyes for a few seconds.  The scenes are, for the most part, brief.

The acting here is magnificent! I’ve been watching Mark Ruffalo for nearly twenty years and it seems like he just gets better and better in each new role.  If you’ve only seen Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory you really need to see him here as Tommy Boatright. His soliloquy about rolodex cards (no spoilers here) grabbed me by the heart and squeezed with a grip I didn’t think possible.  Mark Ruffalo and Matt Bomer have a chemistry that nearly jumps off the screen. I’m a fan of Bomer’s but I’m so used to seeing him as the glib con man, Neil Caffrey, on White Collar that I’d forgotten just how much depth he can bring to a part. And I’d like to nominate Alfred Molina as my generation’s ‘man of a thousand faces’. I almost didn’t recognize him in the role of Ned’s homophobic brother. You’d never believe this is the same man who played Doc Ock in Spiderman II or Angel, the hired killer in Maverick. 

When HBO announced that they were going to be making this into a film, I was elated. And then I waited anxiously to see what they’d do with the material. I’ll admit that I was a little scared, even with the top-notch cast and Ryan Murphy as director, that it wouldn’t live up to my memories and my expectations.  I needn’t have worried. It’s amazing!  If you have the opportunity to watch this film, please do so.  It’s a wonderful reminder of how far society has come, while also reminding us that there is still more to be done.

In loving memory of Robbie McKinnon and Dale Jordan.