Interview with Kramer (1986)

SOURCE: "Drama of Rage and Despair," by Sheridan Morley, in The Times, London, 25 March 1986, p. 8.

[In the following conversation between Kramer and the Times critic Sheridan Morley, the playwright discusses the genesis and development of The Normal Heart.]

Early last year two very different AIDS memoirs opened in New York, both dealing with what had already become the plague-panic of homosexual communities there and elsewhere. The one that opened on Broadway to generally more respectable and respectful reviews was William Hoffman's As Is, a 90-minute closet drama of extreme good taste which managed to pussy-foot around its awful subject so successfully that even the uptown Manhattan matrons remained unappalled.

Downtown at Joe Papp's Public Theatre, and in stark contrast, was Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, a great cry of dramatic and journalistic rage at the way the AIDS catastrophe has been handled by and in New York City. Where As Is names no names, The Normal Heart indicts Mayor Koch, President Reagan, the New York Times and sundry other public monuments for coming too little and too late to the rescue of a gay community that had already been decimated.

And intriguingly, it is The Normal Heart that seems to have captured audiences outside New York: it has already had 10 regional productions in America, another half-dozen are planned abroad, Barbra Streisand has bought the movie rights (and intends not only to produce and direct but also play the doctor with hopes of Dustin Hoffman in the central role) while tonight Larry Kramer's drama opens at the Royal Court with the American film star Martin Sheen making his London stage début.

Taking its title from a poem by W. H. Auden which also includes the line "all I have is a voice to undo the folded lie", The Normal Heart is at least in part autobiographical: Kramer himself is a fiftyish screenwriter and novelist who co-founded an organization called Gay Men's Health Crisis and, like his hero, was eventually forced out of it for shouting too loudly in its political and social rage against what he still sees as a deeply anti-gay establishment in the United States. Talking to him in his book-stacked apartment high above Washington Square, I wondered how the play had started, and when?

"In July 1981 I suddenly became aware of friends getting mysteriously ill on Fire Island, a gay beach community which seems now, like Fitzgerald's French Riviera, to belong to an altogether lost world. People I knew were suddenly dying and nobody knew how or why; what's more, nobody seemed to want to find out. They were almost literally burying their heads in the sand. I guess that was when gay politics began taking up more of my time than writing."

Born in Connecticut and educated in Washington, Kramer got his first job as a story editor with Columbia Pictures and came over to London with them for the whole of the 1960s:

"My father and brother were lawyers, but from the time I went to Yale I knew I wanted to write, so I went as a messenger boy to the William Morris agency at 20 dollars a week and from there Mike Frankovich took me over to London with Columbia. I spent most of my time setting up the film of Women in Love, and when eventually the Columbia deal on that fell apart I left them and spent all my own money buying back the option and commissioning David Mercer to do the screenplay.

"What he delivered was altogether more Marxist than anything D. H. Lawrence ever considered, so at this point I had no screenplay, no director and all of my own money locked up in the option. I couldn't afford to get another writer so I then wrote the script myself, and after it had been turned down by Peter Brook and Jack Clayton and Stanley Kramer I took it to Ken Russell and the rest I guess you know."

Determined now to become a writer rather than a producer, Larry Kramer returned to New York in the early 1970s and wrote six or seven other screenplays that somehow never got in front of the cameras, as well as a best-selling gay novel called Faggots. It was at this point that he first became conscious of the deaths on Fire Island:

"And here we are, almost five years on, with everything still getting worse. When my play first opened in New York the Times there ran a disclaimer under the review, denying that they had ever tried to ignore the AIDS issue, and certainly they are now doing some major reporting of it. But there is still a feeling here in America that senior politicians want the whole issue played as far down as possible. President Reagan has still not uttered the word AIDS in any public statement, and work on the vaccine is still desperately under-funded. There's a conspiracy of silence, and when we were in rehearsal they had lawyers from the New York Times and the Mayor's office checking us out for libel. They say that Koch goes green whenever my play is mentioned, and in retaliation, when it first opened and he was asked about what he thought of it, he would simply tell everyone to go see As Is instead."

What makes Kramer's play so much more dangerous than As Is is the fact that he sees AIDS as a political rather than a medical or social issue: where Arthur Miller, when he wished to attack McCarthyism in The Crucible, went back three hundred years to find an historical parallel in the witch-hunts of Salem, Kramer stays firmly in the present and indeed paints across the back walls of his set the names and numbers of those who have died. He also draws uneasy and debatable comparisons between the treatment of gays in 1980s America and that of Jews in 1930s Europe:

"I want to make people cry. It's as simple as that. AIDS is the saddest thing I shall ever have to know in my life-time, and this is a play about the need for us to stand up and be counted. It's a play about a whole community threatened by prejudice, by fear, by intolerance and by an increasing conservatism."

But, although it is in that sense a very American play, Kramer could not in fact have written it had he not found himself three summers ago at the National Theatre in London:

"I went one night to see David Hare's A Map of the World and it was only then that I realized how to write The Normal Heart. You have to remember that we have no tradition in America of contemporary political plays. Nobody ever mentions Reagan on Broadway, or the state of the nation; but here in David Hare's work I found actors on a stage actually talking about Mrs Thatcher, about the current state of government in England, and I realized how to do it.

"That doesn't mean Normal Heart has made things any better: the gay community in New York is still hopelessly divided politically, and they still can't get themselves towards any kind of coherent attitude to the outside and still hostile world. Mayor Koch meanwhile goes on as if the problem doesn't exist, and money for research is still far too slow and limited. Not that things seem any better in England: I once marched in a Gay Pride rally there and it was pathetic. About three thousand people at most, and in the rain at that. Every summer here in New York we at least manage to get a hundred and fifty thousand people on the march for gay rights.

"The Normal Heart was written out of rage and resentment and despair, both at the way the non-gay world was treating AIDS as if it didn't really affect it, and at the way gays were refusing all the militant options. And the rage and resentment and despair are still there, if anything more deeply felt now than ever."

The Farce in Just Saying No (1989)

SOURCE: "The Farce in Just Saying No," in Just Say No: A Play About a Farce, by Larry Kramer, St. Martin's Press, 1989, pp. ix-xxiv.

[In the following introduction to the published script of Just Say No, Kramer discusses the difficulty gay writers face in getting their work published or performed, the indifference or hostility of the media toward gay issues, and the current state of American theater. "The theater now is the most boring place in the world," Kramer insists.]

You've got to have rocks in your head to write a play.

You must be a masochist to work in the theater and a sadist to succeed on its stages.

And you must be retarded to believe you can support yourself.

These tenets apply to any and all playwrights. But particularly to those who have anything important to say.

Playwrights, of course, are nuts anyway. I think it's ten times harder to write a play that works than a novel, and a hundred times harder to write a play than a screenplay. Screenwriting is craft, not art (and group craft at that), and novelists have all the time and pages in the world through which to leisurely maneuver their investigations.

Playwrights have two or three acts, two and a little more hours, and about a hundred pages, to create an entire world containing a certain kind of truth, to peel away the pain within the pain within the pain and hit the jugular.

What makes a good play? Oh, there are lots of theories. A strong clothesline that keeps pulling an audience along while it unconsciously asks, and the writer quite consciously answers: "What next?" "Now what?" Tension. What goes on between the lines. The tension in relationships between characters. The tension between characters and events. The tension between the characters and their actions, and the audience. The tension between what the playwright tells you and what s/he doesn't tell you. The tension between what you are told and what you are thinking. The tension between ideas and actuality. The tension between right and wrong.

Conflict. All of drama is fights. Fights between conflicting needs, desires, ideas.

I don't think there's any playwright who sits down and consciously applies all these pretentious formulas I've just listed. Though that's what possibly comes out, we sit down and write because we simply want to say something.

That's much easier to deal with, isn't it? I want to say something. I want to tell you about my mother and father. I want to tell you about my childhood. I want to tell you this story I heard. I want to tell you about this unusual character. I want to tell you the world is awful—or wonderful—or funny—or sad. I want to tell you what I think about something. I want to tell you what it's like to be gay. (Did you want to hear that one?)

And I believe the resolution of all this must be moral. Very unfashionable, morals. Very out of season, morality.

Most of what today's critics acclaim as good plays bores me greatly. These plays are thin, trendy, banal, plain, pointless. They bear little relevance to the life I am living or have lived. I don't respond to the tensions and the conflicts and the "what next"s. I find few characters challenged—at least in the way I understand challenge. I don't leave the theater enlightened. Or angry because I've been forced to confront something I don't want to think about but should. These plays are about people I don't want to know. These characters and the world they inhabit not only bear little relation to my life or my dreams, they don't even arouse my curiosity. And I am a pretty curious guy.

And the writers of these plays rarely present a point of view or a resolution—or a moral—that isn't banal. These plays add nothing important to life and to the world. Why should I waste my time attending them?

Until recently, good plays were also about language. They weren't composed in words of one syllable. Or in dialogue so aching to be street-smart accurate (or Jewish suburban or minority ghetto—though black play writing of late often has been more interesting than white playwriting) that a heritage that includes Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Shaw, and Williams might never have existed. Once upon a time, heightened language reached for the same stars as big themes and noble conflicts. Until Beckett and Pinter and their bastard offspring came along and diminished what was said. Why do we now settle for so little? Beckett didn't destroy the theater of language; that was done by the critics who so slavered over his work that it became unfashionable to pursue other possibilities. That is, if you wanted a good review and desired to be included in college curricula. Critics like to be trendy, like everyone else. And God knows Americans—and particularly New Yorkers—like to be trendies.

It seems to me that the more a play is about something—an opinion, a philosophy, a specific point of view—the more the critic feels bound to attack it. The modern play, to be "artistically correct," must not take sides, ruffle feathers, churn up waters, make you think. It must also not be about "others," because that makes the trendies uncomfortable, unless it is about the poor or downtrodden, which allows trendies to condescend. It definitely must not be critical of the status quo—i.e., the trendies themselves; we are not a nation good at either criticizing or laughing at ourselves. Once upon a time, Gustave Flaubert (with Joyce, the altar trendy critics worship at in the world of Novelty, as they kiss poor Beckett's ass in the world of Play) maintained that a writer must be careful not to intrude too personally into his characters' lives, action, and thoughts. "Ne pas conclure" ("Draw no conclusions") was his motto and "You should write more coldly" was his advice. These somehow became the definitions, the highest goals, the boundaries of modern writing. Distance. Objectivity. Observation without authorial intrusion. Well, if you read Flaubert, you will find that he is just as intrusive and opinionated and selective and manipulative and emotional an author as the many great ones who preceded him. But because critics have said "Ne pas conclure" and "You should write more coldly," It Must Be So, and writers have been pulverizing their brains and their talent ever since, as, with determination, they actually extract their juices from their work. Imagine writers trying to make their writing less interesting! But that is exactly what is considered good writing today. The word and deed flattened, lest they be too orotund.

It is no different in the theater. Thirty-five years ago, Walter Kerr wrote a book, How Not to Write a Play, which pleaded (obviously to no avail) for a return to heightened and poetic theater—language and ideas and challenge. Shaw, Ibsen, Chekov, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare: remember them? They would probably be out of work if writing today. TV and tabloid critics would bemoan "wordiness" and "length" and "author's message" and "too complicated plot" or "lack of action." Meanwhile raving about plays where characters have no opinions, take no sides, give and/or lose nothing of import. Where there is no conflict, only petty obstructions. Where nothing of life and death is at stake. Where there is no drama.

Might as well stay home, thee and me. Which most audiences now do. And watch TV.

Theater should astonish, amaze, frighten, shock, purge, touch, and move. (Here I go again.) Make you angry. Make you cry. Make you laugh. Help you learn. Inspire. All of the above. That's what it used to do. That's what it started out to do. Intentionally.

Once upon a time the theater was the home of opinion and anger. (Not only drama, but tragedy, farce, and comedy can be very angry.) It was actually meant—can you believe it?—to rouse the public and create discussion and change the world. Sophocles and Shakespeare and Marlowe and Pirandello and Racine even dared to criticize rulers and kings. Aeschylus actually dared to question the gods. What's the last American play where our "rulers" were taken to task? Or a religion challenged? Congreve and Wycherly and Goldsmith and Sheridan and Marivaux and Wilde dared to satirize the ruling classes. What's the last American play you saw that dared to do that?

American theater reflects an inordinate inability to laugh at ourselves, to criticize any powers-that-be. How exceptionally boring. And polite.

Theater today is polite and boring. Compared with what's available everywhere else—movies, television, fiction, non-fiction, rock videos, magazines, street corners, Central Park, even journalism and daily newspapers—theater is terribly polite and boring. No wonder audiences stay away in droves.

When something comes along that is offensive, and is meant to be offensive—actually aggressively affronting current thinking; actually struggling with determination to crash through a brick wall of apathy or denial or ignorance—today's theater of boring politesse is now so entrenched, and the critics now say "You must write more coldly" so automatically, that what should be the true nature of the playwright's calling is not only overlooked, it is found to be offensive. The playwright's true task is now viewed, by critics and their desperate-to-be-led-into-trendiness audiences alike, as a different kind of breech: a breech of taste, of the status quo, of politesse—the very tepid qualities the playwright, if he or she is any good, should be trying to blast off an audience's shoulders like the leaden, scurvy dandruff it is.

The last time the American theater was healthy—through the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s (and don't give me that hoary argument that now there's TV and all sorts of other distractions for our leisure time: people inherently love to go out)—plays were about issues and ideas and interesting people and danger and conflict and the world (as against the contemplation of the playwright's navel). These are some of the people who wrote plays then: Lillian Hellman, Robert E. Sherwood, Clifford Odets, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, Edna Ferber, Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Philip Barry, Sidney Howard, Sidney Kingsley, William Saroyan, Paul Osborne, S. N. Behrman, George Abbott, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, the Marx Brothers, John Steinbeck, P. G. Wodehouse, Thornton Wilder. And I'm not even touching the musical, or foreign writers whose work was produced here, such as Sartre, Anouilh, Coward, Maugham, Shaw, Pinero, Priestly, O'Casey. Sort of makes you realize how stinking the paucity is now, doesn't it?

The opinionated play published herein is about something. About something that may murder millions of people, that is murdering tens of thousands of my fellow gay men, and is possibly set to murder me. I was not surprised when a number of New York critics slaughtered me. I'm accustomed to that by now. By now I have learned that I rarely get good reviews, and that critics don't review what Larry Kramer writes or says, they review what Larry Kramer is, which is a homosexual. And they review what they think of homosexuality—they don't like it—or what they think homosexuality should be—they don't like it the way it is—and they aren't very interested in hearing what I, or any other gay writer, has to say about it. When Neil Simon writes an autobiographical play, they don't review his life, or his heterosexuality; they review his play; but that's because critics are heterosexual, too, or maintain they are. So they don't have to confront anything. Or be challenged. Or lead the way. They can just sit back on their politesse.

Wouldn't it be the most boring world if everything and everyone were alike? And if everyone wrote the same play?

The theater now is the most boring place in the world. And everybody is writing the same play.

What I was most surprised by in the reviews for Just Say No was the amazement a number of critics registered that I really thought plays could change people's minds, accomplish something. Help change the world for the better. How dare I have harbored such a thought! And written such a play!

But I do believe this. Oh, I do believe it so.

And so should the critics.

That's what art started out to do. Once upon a time. Back in those once upon a times when criticism, too, was considered an art, and to serve art.

I am certainly not the first nor will I be the last writer to complain bitterly that bad critics destroy creativity and understand little about it. I get angry that reputedly comprehensive heterosexual publications have yet to give me—or most other gay writers—really good reviews. By "good" I mean thoughtful. Considered and considerate of what we are trying to say. We don't mind being criticized; we do mind being blindly attacked by bigots, or relegated to thumbnail assessments in the back pages, or—most likely—totally ignored and unreviewed at all.

There are many fine openly gay writers writing about gay subjects now. Our novelists include Andrew Holleran, David Leavitt, Christopher Bram, Paul Monette, Gary Indiana, Rita Mae Brown, Sarah Schulman, Gary Glickman, Edmund White, John Rechy, Dorothy Allison, Brad Gooch, Dennis Cooper, Michael Nava, May Sarton, James Purdy, Gene Horowitz, Krandall Kraus, James McCourt, Armistead Maupin, George Baxt, Allan Garganus, Paul Bowles. Our playwrights writing about gay subjects include Victor Bumbalo, William Hoffman, Terrence McNally, Harvey Fierstein, Doric Wilson, Robert Patrick, Charles Busch, Martin Sherman, Albert Innaurato, Robert Chesley, Joseph Pintauro, Lanford Wilson, Arthur Lau-rents. How many of them have you read or seen? How many of them have you tried to understand? If you find depiction of gay life, particularly gay sex, foreign, does it ever occur to you that we often find depictions of straight sex and heterosexuality foreign?

It is exceedingly painful to face the fact that, over the years, I know that such treatment has taken its toll on me, and on every other gay writer. (And, for that matter, on every "minority" writer.) And that I would have been a more productive artist if I didn't have to withstand all the diatribes hurled at me because few critics, and the publications they write for, have empathy or interest in homosexuality and what it's like to be gay in this world. It rankles to see all the second-rate straight white males who churn out dreck year after year get all the recognition, the best-seller lists, the Broadway hits, the Tonys and Pulitzers and National Book Awards, the movie sales, when I know I and other gay writers are better writers and thinkers than a lot of them and we are treated so dismissively, if we are noted at all. Such positioning also turns many of us to other endeavors completely, or into bitter men and women, from either fighting a fight that seems never to be over, or—even more debilitating—ceasing the struggle altogether.

Sour grapes, you say? Well, as my best friend fielded my fear that this entire essay might be construed as filled with nothing but: "Those folks tried to kill you, honey; you're due a few sour grapes."

The New Yorker does not consider gay literature a category worthy of discussion. Nor does Esquire. Or any of the literary quarterlies—the Paris Review, Antaeus, Grand Street, and their like. The New York Review of Books does not appear to believe that such a thing as homosexuality even exists. Vanity Fair, despite the existence on its staff of many gays, seems to me to be so homophobic as to often come close to actually breaking laws against slander. The same can be said of The Nation. The Village Voice rarely reviews gay books and plays. Time never and Newsweek infrequently. And, for publications located outside of New York, gay writing simply does not exist.

The New York Times does occasionally nod our way. But it is a condescending nod: reviewers are rarely equipped for the task. Would you give a book on electrical engineering to a florist to review? Would a feminist manifesto be fairly treated at the hands of a misogynist? The Times often appears to go out of its way to locate a reviewer ludicrously removed from a sensitivity toward gay subjects. My recent non-fiction book on AIDS was reviewed by someone completely unfamiliar with this epidemic and its effects on my community. But then I have never had a considered review in The New York Times. Yes, I am still sucking on a few sour grapes.

But gay artists try not to. We try to reason with ourselves that it is the creation first and foremost that is most important—not its reception by a world. Perhaps there will be acceptance after death—now much closer for too many of us. Because of a growing network of gay bookstores and an increase in the number of gay community theaters, our work does reach an audience that supports us, financially and emotionally, little by little and more and more. My family may think, from reading and viewing what they read and view, that everything I've written is a flop; but in the gay world I have made a certain higher mark.

But there is no writer who can accept relegation to a ghetto happily. Like any other writer, we want to be universally heard. We want you to try to understand what we are trying to say to you. If we are widely panned and even more widely ignored, how are we to get our message out? We want gay playwrights chronicling our history to reach the acceptance of, say, August Wilson.

Gay writers try hard to avoid the paranoid scenario: the straight world does not want us to get our message out. Stomp us into oblivion and there will be no gay literature to attend to. At its worst, we have come to see this attitude exemplified in our government's inattention to AIDS. Perhaps it will go away, or perhaps they will go away, we now know to be the subtext of what's going on. Harvey Fierstein spends twelve years trying to get Torch Song Trilogy produced, before finally putting it on himself. David Leavitt gets clobbered, in Vanity Fair, not for what he's written but for what he hasn't written, because the homosexuality he's writing about differs from the homo-sexuality the critic, James Wolcott, wants to read about. Every second-rate heterosexual playwright and filmmaker gets invited to the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center or Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, but not openly gay ones dealing with openly gay subject matter. Every major New York play agent—fourteen of them—turned down my play about AIDS, The Normal Heart.

By the time the AIDS epidemic came along and I knew I had to write about it, I'd learned many of the above lessons. AIDS was not being, and has not been, attended to because it occurs in populations the majority isn't interested in and find expendable. Just as the media had, traditionally, brutally treated gay artists and their work, so had the media shown a remarkable lack of interest in covering this devouring epidemic.

I've come to realize that most critics, reporters, and journalists (there is often very little difference among the three) are, along with what they write, and whom they write it for, painfully conservative in bias. So here comes AIDS—a medical mystery so complicated as to make it very difficult to make comprehensible in sound bites, in short paragraphs, and certainly not without first carrying out a great deal of digging, research, and homework. The press has been very reluctant to do this research and homework. Consequently, most of the many AIDS scandals just aren't written about.

And our ideas of what is truly scandalous unfortunately often involve the heterosexual majority. If some think AIDS was allowed to fester and grow unattended in New York because they believe its Mayor is a closeted homosexual terrified of being revealed as such if he be found too attentive to the demands of the city's gay population, how in the world do you get the straight press to report this suspicion? If some think AIDS was allowed to further fester and grow unattended on a national level because they believe our former President and his First Lady were fearful lest various sexual scandals and proclivities in their own pasts and their own family be revealed, how in the world do you get the straight press to report these suspicions? These are valid suspicions—that sexual hypocrisies have more to do with the conduct of the affairs of state than historians allow. But "straight" leaders "protect" themselves by erecting unwritten codes of decorum—if you will, politesse—that an increasing number of gays do not support. There is no actual law that prohibits naming a public official as homosexual, or that constrains a press from revealing a boisterous heterosexual life—no law, that is, except the unwritten ones: it is considered by heterosexuals as bad taste.

But gay people do not consider it bad taste to be identified as gay. In fact, huge numbers of us consider it exceedingly prideful. And exceedingly, tragically, unhealthy to conceal it. This has become brutally apparent as such hypocrisy allows so many of us to be so casually put to death.

Such, indeed, is the message, the moral, of Just Say No.

And such, indeed, is the continuing unwillingness of the heterosexual world to hear a message so unpleasant to them that they will do everything in their power—including their continuing ignoble attempts—at stifling our creative voices in any and every way they can.

In 1973, my first play, Sissies' Scrapbook, was produced. In those days, Playwrights Horizons was not so handsomely ensconced in its Forty-second Street home; rather, it shared space with a dance company at the old YWCA on Eighth Avenue and Fifty-third Street, and all its plays were put on in an old gym, with bleachers for seats. The entire budget for the five performances (extended to eight) allowed by Actors Equity (because no-body got paid anything) could not have been more than several hundred dollars. I had a wonderful cast, the audiences were exceptionally responsive, I felt my play was appreciated and my message understood. Critics did not review these "showcase" productions in those days; though I wrote to Clive Barnes, then a Times critic, he did not respond or come to see it. When the play closed, there seemed no hope for further productions. Since I then supported myself primarily as a screenwriter, I went back to the movies.

But I was hooked. I kept remembering: I had moved people. I'd made them cry. Something I had written had been able to touch the audience. After each performance, I could see them leave the theater crying. Some of them would seek me out, still in tears. I had made people feel what I had felt, for my characters, for their stories, for what had happened to them. Heady stuff. No movie I had ever written had provided me with that experience. (Anyway, movies don't work in the same way. Movie actors don't create their performances from interaction and tension with an audience. That doesn't lessen their effectiveness or usefulness—as entertainment. But it's a hard medium through which to convey ideas, and as I have said, I think good plays should contain a large dollop of good ideas. And it's ideas that change the world, not entertainment.)

A year later a producer appeared who offered to produce Sissies' Scrapbook commercially Off-Broadway. During two weeks of previews, again people were moved: I saw them crying. Despite a production inferior to the first one, and despite my inability to solve to my satisfaction a structural defect, something was still working. The play was about four men who had been best friends since their days together at Yale. The producer objected to the original title and Four Friends, an inadequate substitute, was used. But the play was still about cowardice and the inability of some men to grow up, leave the emotional bondage of male collegiate camaraderie, and assume adult responsibilities. Three of the men were straight and one of them was gay. They all were cripples in one way or another and one of the straight ones did indeed become actually crippled in Act Two.

This was to be my first experience of extending to the straight world—and straight men—messages they did not wish to hear. I received a brutal clobbering from the Times. Clive Barnes, who arrived half an hour late, began his review with: "With friends like these you don't need enemies." Despite other and more encouraging reviews, the producer closed the play on opening night. "The Times closed it," the producer said to me. "You can't beat the Times."

We now come to an unfortunate fact of life with which I've been told even the Times itself is uncomfortable—the disproportionate influence of a Times review on the run of a play. Although they had also disliked the film of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love which I'd scripted and produced, and they were to be vitriolic toward my novel, Faggots, which came out in 1978, a movie and a novel can eventually outrace bad reviews: the former because film companies spend fortunes in advertising to dispel all bad words, and the latter by the very fact that a small volume of printed pages can somehow stay around for a long time and find its own audience. But a play rarely survives a bad Times review, particularly without an enterprising and/or rich producer. This kind of producer is now exceptionally rare. And foolish, because by now the public, those trendies, has handed over responsibility to the Times for making theatrical judgments for them. A bad review more than not elicits the reaction: thank goodness—another play I don't have to see.

I did not suffer my failure well. I had witnessed the slaughter of my child and it hurt too much. And back in the movie business, I was confronted once again by another painful obstacle: movies are not interested in what I am interested in. Increasingly aware of my gay identity, I wanted to write about that. Film companies are even more homophobic than theater critics. To this day, there has never been a good American film financed by a major studio about homosexuality, despite the fact that every studio has more than its share of gay executives, producers, stars, and writers—even, in some cases, the very studio heads themselves.

When I knew I had to write about AIDS, I found I had no choice but to return to the play form, for several reasons. I knew no film company would finance such a movie. It had taken me three years to write my novel and I was obsessed with the notion that my AIDS message had to get into the world quickly. It also seemed to me that only the play form could provide the sense of immediacy I felt essential.

I also thought the play form was the best way to get matters attended to. Ed Koch and Ronald Reagan would have no choice but to pay attention to AIDS after opening night of The Normal Heart. Yes, I conceived of the theater as a means of achieving something politically. I was going after Koch, and Reagan, and—courageous me—The New York Times. My soap box was planted firmly on the ground of Joe Papp's Public Theater and Joe Papp is as good a producer and attention-getter as there is. And although I might suffer critical clobberings again, I knew Joe guaranteed us an eight-week run.

Why was I going after The New York Times? Because, along with Koch and Reagan, they shared an ignoble disdain for AIDS. Their early reporting was rare and grudging. In the first nineteen months of the epidemic, as the number of cases rose from 41 to 958, they allowed only seven articles into its pages, and never on Page One. During the three months of the Tylenol scare, in 1982, the Times wrote about it a total of fifty-four times. Four of these articles appeared on the front page. The total number of Tylenol deaths: seven.

I cannot tell you if the Times critic Frank Rich liked The Normal Heart. I think he was conflicted. On the one hand, my play criticized the hell out of his employer. On the other hand, my play was about dying young men. Even he wasn't that cruel as to totally crucify a play about dying young men. The day after he came to see it, the Times called for two tickets for that evening's preview. In those seats sat William Honan, their cultural affairs editor, and a lawyer with a flashlight. Every time the Times was mentioned in the play, the flashlight would go on and the lawyer would write down the line. When Rich's review appeared, appended to it was a short announcement from the editors denying the charges I'd made. To my knowledge, such an editorial appendage to a critic's review was an historic first.

Rich took it upon himself to make a statement exceedingly painful to me. He claimed that the role of Felix Turner, the lover who dies from AIDS in my play, and who worked as a reporter for the Times, was a fictional creation. No one bothered to check with me or with the Public Theater. Felix Turner had been my lover. When I immediately asked for space to rebut Rich's misinformation, it was refused me.

Rich threw a couple of great quotes into his review, I guess to hedge his bets. And Joseph Papp is that rare producer who is also a courageous promoter. He read us Rich's review immediately after the opening night's performance. And he vowed that he would keep the play running. And he kept his promise. To this day, The Normal Heart holds the record of being the longest-running play at his Public Theater.

Did The Normal Heart change the world? Of course not. But it did accomplish more than a little something here and there. It has been produced all over America and all over the world, including such unlikely places as South Africa, Russia, and Poland (and Poland is a land where there is such homophobia that gay people often commit suicide). In Lafayette, Louisiana, a town where they beat up gay people in the streets, the play was done by an amateur group, in a run that was extended twice and then repeated a year later; local straights joined the few local gays who were out of the closet to form an AIDS service organization. And, in Baton Rouge, the local drama critic came out of the closet in his review.

And I'd estimate a few hundred thousand people have seen what I wanted them to see—including two men actually kissing each other and in love and caring for each other and one of them dying in the other's arms. Human beings, just like those watching them.

And I did shame The New York Times. Though I still bitch at them continuously, their AIDS coverage is now better than it was.

And Joe Papp and Joe Papp's lawyers joined with me in offering on a stage the dramatic argument: AIDS was originally allowed to grow and grow and grow because the Mayor of New York is a closeted homosexual so terrified of being uncovered that he would rather allow an epidemic. This argument has now entered the general discourse on the history of AIDS. And all future historians will have no choice but to take note. I'm proud of that. I'm proud that I've been able to help gays realize that we who are proud do not have to be victimized by one of our own who is ashamed. Yes, plays can help change history. If you can keep the damn things running.

Going after a Mayor is one thing. Going after a First Family is evidently quite another. It looks like the world will not see Just Say No as it has seen The Normal Heart. Even my mother thinks Just Say No was a flop because the Times review was so hateful. It doesn't occur to her to ask: why did Mel Gussow scream at me so much? As with Four Friends, the producer did not have the resources to surmount a wretched Times review and he closed the show.

Gussow accused Just Say No of being in the worst possible taste. Is it bad taste to let a country be destroyed by a plague? Is it bad taste for a Mayor to sell out his city? Is it bad taste for a mother and father to hypocritically sell their son and their gay friends down the river? Gussow, and others, didn't like it that my characters lampooned real people. I don't like it that those real people—and their actions and their attitudes and their secrets, their politesse—are killing me and mine. And I have a moral right to present my case. It's bad taste that the critic for New York's most important newspaper doesn't even try to understand my message, or convey it to his readers. Just because my truth is light-years away from Mel Gussow's truth, that doesn't make my truth in bad taste.

I have seen nothing but bad taste in the last nine years since AIDS came into my life. On the part of this city, on the part of this state, on the part of the federal government, on the part of not just the Times but every major publication and network. Why is it bad taste for me to point it out? To point out the venal and crass hypocrisy that became the hallmark of the Reagan years—and looks to be continuing during these years in the Bush—seems to me not to be bad taste at all, but a way of maintaining some sort of spiritual health. And the gay audiences who saw Just Say No know exactly what I meant and mean. And, God bless them, they were able to laugh. Perhaps it takes being pushed almost over the edge day after day for nine years to make you see a certain kind of truth.

But gay truths are different from straight truths. And most of the straight world does not wish to hear gay truths. Because, as all truth should, it often contains hurts enough for everyone.

But the trendy heterosexual world of politesse is stronger than we are.

And we are all dying for it.