[In the essay below, Gross compares The Normal Heart to two other AIDS plays: William Hoffman's As Is and Harvey Fierstein's Safe Sex. All three works are "history plays, " Gross asserts, that "remind audiences that history is political, art is political and even sex is political. "]

Jews, homosexuals, infidels and other devils took more than their fair share of the blame for the Black Death which plagued medieval Europe. No historical drama exists to depict that piece of the gay collective past. Until recently, writers of gay historical drama chose a plague of a different color—the non-biological warfare of persecution, oppression and brutality which crouches at the center of the "three key symbolic events in … gay history: Oscar Wilde's trial, the Nazi purge, and Stonewall" [J. M. Clum, "'A Culture That Just Isn't Sexual': Dramatizing Gay Male History," Theatre Journal 41, 1989]. As Is, The Normal Heart, and Safe Sex each allude to the latter two events (indeed, the Holocaust acts as a major symbol in two of the plays); nevertheless, the main point of each of these plays is to sound the alarm over a contemporary event, both real and symbolic, that mirrors the past and also threatens to redefine or undo liberation across the board. These plays, by William Hoffman, Larry Kramer and Harvey Fierstein, respectively, remind audiences that history is political, art is political and even sex is political. These are history plays that are performed in the midst of their own history. The players, the spectators and those walking around outside the theater stand engaged in the same situation. Playwrights have sensed this. Gay writers know that both drama-time and real-time break down into pre-AIDS and post-AIDS. Martin Sherman cancelled the 1983 full-scale production of his Passing By, a play about two gay men quarantined with hepatitis, for fear that "the tragic AIDS epidemic … would throw the story … into a completely misleading light and fan some of the misconceived and prejudicial linkage of homosexuality and physical illness that was then popular in the American press" [introduction to Gay Plays, ed. Michael Wilcox, 1984].

Hoffman, Kramer and Fierstein also felt this pressure. The introductions to each of their plays speak to the squeeze of AIDS. Each author wrote under a great sense of urgency. Each felt the press of time. Each had a deadline, not imposed by some editor or producer but, it seems, by civilization itself. These were hurried playwrights: Hoffman—"but one day I realized the depth of my fear and asked God to protect me as I wrote the play" [introduction to As Is, 1985]; Kramer—"'This is not a play about measles.' It is about something the Africans call the Horror" [The Normal Heart]; Fierstein—"Never have I felt so of the moment, so 'time-capsulized'" ["Author's Note" to Safe Sex, 1987]. Each wrote his own kind of play about gay men confronting AIDS and each draped his play with an overlay of urgency. None of the major characters dies; yet they all come to feel closed in, trapped, out of time. For these characters, AIDS holds the slow horror of suffocation.

Each of the plays gives us characters who struggle with the suffocation of alienation and loneliness. As Is tells the story of Rich and Saul who meet to split-up the community property left over from their divorce, a divorce Saul had never wanted. By play's end, Rich and Saul are reunited as a couple facing Rich's rapid AIDS-related physical deterioration. Saul plays the caretaker and serves throughout as a font of love. That scares Rich. During one of the several scenes of Chekhovian overlapping dialogue, Rich flirts with two lines from one of his poems—"The final waning moon / And the coming of the light," while another character describes the play for which she has just auditioned wherein "Everybody in the play is dead [and] The main characters are ghosts." Rich, afraid to truly love or to give, acts as something of a ghost.

Ned, in The Normal Heart, is no ghost. He yells and screams too much to be ghostly. Ned, too, is a writer; he, too, closes the play in an AIDS ward; he, too, defends against closeness at every turn. He forms a political action group to fight the disease on the medical/political front. Uncomfortable with his own sexuality, Ned wants to wage war on the sexual front, as well. His political flyer that reads "I am sick of guys moaning that giving up careless sex until this blows over is worse than death" represents just one of the many understandable outbursts that came to be known as the "Ned Weeks School of Outrage." Before working with a string of therapists, Ned approached relationships as a runner; now he approaches them as a fighter. Like Rich in As Is, Ned offers a glimpse of alienation in his writing: "[His] novel was all about a man desperate for love and a relationship, in a world filled with nothing but casual sex," and "it sounds to me like [this AIDS crusade is] another excuse to keep from writing." Both of these accusations speak to Ned's need to keep distance from self and other. Ned's harsh activism contains a great deal of heart-felt passion that wins the audience's respect with its tightness. Ultimately, however, the style of Ned's activism eventually alienates the group and they expel him. Like other gay domestic dramas, these two plays end with closeness pressed upon men in desperation, whose time for love and life is rapidly ending.

Fierstein's Safe Sex, produced in 1987, two years after As Is and The Normal Heart, offers a trilogy of plays, each with two major characters. In two of the pieces the author presents a view of the feared AIDS aftermath. "Manny and Jake" open the trilogy with a world in which sex has been banished—at least by Manny. "But I can't kiss," he tells Jake, a would-be seducer. Manny openly mourns the loss of his own humanity and of his relationships with other people. "Another body in a hospital waiting room. Not a patient. Not a survivor. A fact. A statistic. No will. No dream. No choice." Manny can only pray and remember.

The third piece opens much the same way as As Is, with two people meeting to claim their belongings. However, Marion and Arthur were never married to each other, though consecutively, each had been married to Collin, who has died from an AIDS illness. The polite veneer of friendly but awkward graciousness while conducting their business soon lifts to reveal jealousy and hostility over who truly mourns and who really loved Collin. Ironically, Marion, absent from his bed for five years, has tested HIV positive, while Arthur has not. She also is remarried and has Collin's son, who serves as a hopeful promise that all their lives will turn out alright.

The center piece of the trilogy bears the play's title, "Safe Sex." Ghee and Mead are on their second honeymoon, having been a couple for five years before their recent two year separation. The honeymoon is over. Ghee insists upon interrupting lovemaking to check his list of safe sex practices. Mead, who uses calm and cool intellectualization to defend against closeness, rightly proposes that Ghee is misusing safe sex to avoid intimacy. They fight. Mead accuses Ghee of lifelong frigidity; Ghee reminds Mead of his unenticing, non-stimulating personal hygiene. Like Ned and Rich, they are both right and are both wrong. They have made their self-righteous beds and they lie alone. Still, the push for a relationship presses in on these frightened men. Ghee: "Now we enjoy politics and argue sex." Manny, Rich, Ned and Mead could each have said that; each have had that lonely awareness.

Even the stage set underscores the alienation of the characters in Safe Sex. Each part of this play contains a small cast surrounded by a large, nearly empty space. Jake strolls around Manny, who sits on a white sofa, center stage. Mead and Ghee each sit on their respective ends of an overly large see-saw, crawling back and forth upon this stage-on-a-stage to punctuate spatially the elastic nature of their closeness-distance continuum. Marion and Arthur occupy a living room stripped of all but a few boxes, ready to be moved out. Perhaps the space and air press down upon all these characters. They occupy the bottom of an oppressive universe—mere specks—and seldom look up, except at the end of each piece when they transcend disease and their own need to control that universe. The less stylized, more representational sets of the other plays also emphasize this existential anxiety.

Ned's personal library serves a similar function. In a mad rush to meet the deadline, he buys books before they go out of print. Felix: "I think you're going to have to face the fact that you won't be able to read them all before you die." In similar fashion, As Is utilizes a Greek chorus on stage to comment upon the stifled and stifling nature of Rich's life. For example, Rich asks five doctors from the chorus, "Doctor, tell me the truth. What are my chances?" Each in rhythmic, staccato fashion replies in his turn, "I don't know; I just don't know." Simultaneously, a pre-recorded T.V. announcer concludes an AIDS news summary with a cascade of wedon't-know's.

Larry Kramer weds dialogue, set and theme in a rather complex manner. He recommends that the set walls be painted white as a chilling background for black lettering. Upon these walls. AIDS statistics and press releases such as "TWO MILLION AMERICANS ARE INFECTED—ALMOST TEN TIMES THE OFFICIAL ESTIMATES" are displayed. These Brechtian announcements flash numbers all over the stage and audience—numbers about AIDS cases, numbers about AIDS deaths, numbers of news articles printed in major papers, numbers of dollars spent, numbers of various dates and some corresponding and contrasting numbers related to the 1982 Tylenol scare.

Along with the numbers, people's names appear in the fashion of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Names and numbers are all over the place. Kramer floods the dialogue in a similar way. His Ned Weeks (first name an anagram for "end," last name a time measure) speaks in numbers and lists continuously. Most of his numbers ascend. He first raises $124, then $50,000, then $500,000 before Emma complains that a $5,000,000 grant for AIDS pales along side the $20,000,000 spent on the Tylenol hysteria. Moreover, quite predictably, Ned's statistics on AIDS cases and deaths rise while the number of his own friends, dead or dying, spirals.

Kramer adds a sharp contrast to Ned's numbers and lists with the similarly long but less significant lists of other characters. For example, much is made of Ben's million dollar house that he is about to build even when the cost doubles. When Ned first encounters Times writer Felix, whom he will eventually marry, he must listen to Felix's lists. Felix must write about 23 parties, 14 openings, 37 restaurants, 12 discos, 105 spring collections, because "I just write about gay designers, and gay discos, and gay chefs, and gay rock stars, and gay photographers, and gay … " Later when he becomes fully consumed with the disease, Felix's lists take on a far less trivialized nature as he catalogues the names and numbers of treatments he has undergone and paid for. When he settles his will, that final resting place of lists and figures, Felix speaks of numbers hardly at all.

This pattern of descending numbers serves a function that differs from those which ascend. The descending numbers do not serve to flood the audience's consciousness over the size of the plague. Instead, the declining size of the numbers, moving from the big to the small, draws a funnel-like bead on the individual character. Emma starts this pattern when she tells Ned: "That's something over a thousand cases by next year. Half of them will be dead. Your two friends I just diagnosed? One of them will be dead." She moved from the big to the small, from the abstract to the concrete and from the general to the highly personal. Later, Ned expresses his own horror about forty friends now dead of AIDS: "That's too many for one person to know." When the disease eventually hits home and Felix refuses to follow doctor's orders, Ned succumbs: "Felix, I am so sick of statistics, and numbers, and body counts, and howmanys … and everyday, Felix, there are only more numbers, and fights … You want to die, Felix? Die!" Lists and numbers had suffocated Ned.

Kramer did not use numbers the way Thornton Wilder did in Our Town to place a people in their comfortable, right place from the Crofut Farm to the Mind of God. Ned's lists and numbers granted no Epiphany, except in the last paragraph of the play. There, Ned tells of his youth when he had wanted to kill himself "because I thought I was the only gay man in the world … they had a dance. Felix, there were six hundred men and women there." Felix had died only a moment before and Ned's soaring, remembered vision proved a proper send-off for Felix's newly released soul.

Fierstein's Manny also plays the numbers, although his final, solitary reverie casts some doubt about whether or not he achieves Epiphany. "I will kiss having learned nothing." Manny often interrupts his dialogue with Jake in order to recite. These recitations carry the quality of a joke-poem that begins with "Two grown men stand in a bar.…" He starts one of these with two grown men and continues with four, then eight, then twelve grown men. After each grown man speculates about the health of the others, the recitation continues but the number of men standing at the bar decreases incrementally to "One grown man [standing] in a bar looking for someone to look at." Manny finds no safety in numbers; numbers contain danger. Yet squeezed out of the group, he finds little safety, only the press of aloneness in a vast space. Like Ned before him, Manny faces his own need for a group (a lover, family, subculture, culture) and his own lonely distance from that group. Even after his long lists of types of lovers and encounters, he concludes, "And I loved them all. And I missed them when they were gone!"

Fierstein reintroduces, then does away with, numbers in the last piece of his trilogy. Appropriately titled "On Tidy Endings," this segment not only concludes the play, it also contains two endings within itself. The first half engages Marion with her lawyer, June, who represents the business side of grief. June swamps her client with legal papers—copies and copies of legal papers (wills, insurance policies, real estate documents). June cares about Marion and wants the best deal for her. But there's a time and a place for everything. "This is about tidying up loose ends, not holding hands," advises June. That settled, June exits and Arthur, co-beneficiary, enters for the second half. After some small-talk over who gets this or that from the deceased Collin, they begin to "get messy" with some of the emotional, unfinished business. Marion and Arthur tidy up these accounts, too, and ironically they decide to postpone signing those legal papers. Those numbers will have to wait.

Another set of numbers plagues these plays—6,000,000 Jews. The Holocaust took many casualties from Jews and gays alike. Both claim the Holocaust as a major event in their respective and intertwined histories and all three playwrights here lace their dramas with Nazi images. The Normal Heart took its name from The Informed Heart, Bruno Bettleheim's seminal treatise on life in the death camps. Kramer's set contains a paragraph on Jewish political strategy during World War II and his characters draw overt parallels between the Holocaust and AIDS and to the Jewish and gay response to both. Ned delivers near soliloquies on the subject. These speeches turn up the heat; they sap the air out of those who wish to hide from the issues. When they finally get to City Hall, Tommy reflects that the government has put them in a "tomb" (basement), thus arousing the twin images of catacombs and Nazi mass graves. Freud is called just another old Jew who couldn't get laid; David, dying, looks "like someone out of Auschwitz"; and Dr. Emma earns the name Dr. Death.

Kramer's men are not only victims; they are victimizers: "So we're just walking time bombs—waiting for whatever it is that sets us off." Again, these men feel the life squeezed out of them, caught in a vice of passivity on one hand and sexual/political action on the other. Both appear futile. The Holocaust smothers the play with the undertones of brutality and oppression. At the same time, as John Clum claimed of Bent, a gay-issues play set more directly within the Nazi regime, "the real issue of the play is self-oppression manifested in behavior that would be considered typical for an urban gay man in 1979." As Is, too, punctuates AIDS with allusion to Naziism. Saul refers to Rich's agent as Dr. Mengale, and Hospice Worker admires a Lodz Ghetto survivor who accepted death passively but nobly. And then PWA 4 tells the complete joke: "Have you heard about the disease attacking Jewish American Princesses? It's called MAIDS. You die if you don't get it." Jewish humor, sick humor, the Holocaust and 1980s gay experience collide in that one joke. Here the audience may die if they don't "get" it. Saul had set this joke up much earlier when he said to Rich, "Why didn't you warn me we were going to play Christians and Jews today? I would have worn my yellow star." Much later Saul quips that if he commits suicide he will "go to hell with all us Jews." Rich replies, "I bet they have a separate AIDS section in the cemetery."

It was no joke in The Normal Heart when Bruce described Albert's "cemetery." An orderly "stuffs Albert in a heavy-duty Glad bag … and he puts him in the back alley with the garbage … and we finally found a black undertaker who cremated him for a thousand dollars, no questions asked." Kramer wrote this scene with such craft that one might even smell the death-smoke and choke on its suffocating odor. This atmosphere of growing persecutory paranoia stemming from both homophobia and societal indifference threatens to explode into oppressive action. Mickey: "Do you think the CIA really has unleased germ warfare to kill off all us queers … ?" Ned: "Did you ever consider it could get so bad they'll quarantine us in camps?" Ghee's sexual paranoia in Safe Sex, reality based as it is, pales beside Kramer's view of a society gone mad.

Fierstein alludes less directly to the Holocaust, but its spectre squats just beneath the surface. Manny's sober, chant-like prayers place him in a death house. He states he is not a "survivor." Perhaps his soul has gone. In the final play of the trilogy, Arthur calls himself a "prisoner of love" and adds, "Who says I survived?" He and his lover had played the Wandering Jew, together shopping the world over for the newest cure promised—in Reno, Philly, France, New Orleans, Mexico. "We traveled everywhere they offered hope for sale and came home with souvenirs." Collin died and part of Arthur failed to survive the new Holocaust.

With their lists, and their deaths, and their Dachaus, and their dead air, do these plays depress? No. If these plays do not end happily, they at least end hopefully. Fierstein's "Author's Note" advises, "Never lose your sense of humor." As Is begins and ends with a laugh, albeit a nervous laugh. These plays are chock full of in-jokes, out-jokes, ethnic jokes, "faggot jokes," affectionate teasing and down-right funniness. Much of the humor represents the gallows variety described in previous decades by two Jewish men who wrote non-fiction. Freud said such sick humor "perches on the edge of personal destruction." Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist and a survivor of Auschwitz, called these jokes "one of the 'soul's weapons' in the struggle for self-preservation." Both writers were speaking of a psychic liberation from the proverbial abyss. Each of the three dramas laments the loss of a better time before the AIDS abyss. Whether an audience laughs at this humor out of depravity, therapy or liberation seems beside the point. The point is AIDS has forced a re-examination of liberated spirit as well as liberated behavior. Ghee laments, "We can never touch as before. We can never be as before. 'Now' will always define us. Different times. Too late. … Safe sex." "The more open and liberated the movement,… the more sexuality is freed to wreak havoc." If Ned articulates a desire for gay men to identify with more than their sexuality, then sexuality today may have to find a way to identify with more than AIDS. Balancing the demands of desire and dread, these three plays pose all the old questions of love and will, freedom and responsibility. Mead: "This is dangerous. You're supposed to be [scared]. These are different times with different rules, but some things never change."