The Normal Heart - Thoughts and Reflections

The husband and I watched "The Normal Heart" on HBO and found the movie to be not only well done but emotionally gripping.  The two of us were in very different places in our lives during the time period covered in the film.  He was in a relationship with his first partner while I was married to a woman and living in the suburbs, first in Houston and then in Virginia Beach.   The husband knew individuals who were lost to AIDS whereas, I was isolated and largely detached from the horrors that were happening.  The reaction by many in the straight community - that gays were diseased and to be avoided - likely deepened my subconscious resolve that I could never, ever face the reality of who I was.  The result of the reaction of the straight world was that thousands died with little or no support and research to battle HIV/AIDS was delayed. 

One of the most disturbing aspects of the film was in the closing credits when it acknowledged that Ronald Reagan did not first utter the term AIDS in public until 1985 when he pledged to make research a priority.  The next sentence then states that his 1986 budget instead cut funding by 11%.  To far too many, HIV/AIDS did not matter because it was perceived to be happening only to gays, a group reviled by the "Godly Christian" crowd and deemed "other."  That heterosexuals in Africa were contracting it and dying too did not seem to matter, probably because of white American racism that relegated African blacks to realm of "other" as well.  Its the mindset we still see from the conservatives and angry white conservative Christians: if you don't look just like me and don't hold my beliefs, then you simply do not matter.  Indeed, you're not even human.  Behind much of this is the ever present poison of religious belief.

Much has changed since the early 1980's, but one thing has not: many continue to die and far too many Americans simply do not care.  In the Hampton Roads area, HIV/AIDS is a crisis within the black community, yet many black churches and black pastors continue to refuse to face the crisis much less cease their rampant homophobia which continues to cause black men to be "on the down low" and/or fail to seek testing and treatment.  Elton John has an op-ed at CNN that looks at the ongoing problem and the still deadly disinterest that too many hold toward HIV/AIDS.   Here are highlights:

"The Normal Heart," written by my friend, the brilliant playwright Larry Kramer, and based on his story during the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic, tells a tale that many of us lived through, and many others did not survive. It's as relevant today as an HBO movie as when it premiered on the stage in New York City in 1985.

Back then, The New York Times refused to print the word "gay," and New York Mayor Ed Koch was agonizingly slow to respond to the unfolding epidemic. Fear was everywhere. Around the country, family members shunned infected relatives, doctors were afraid to touch AIDS patients, let alone treat them, and hospital wards filled up with young men covered in lesions, dying excruciating deaths. I've almost lost track of the number of funerals I went to in those years. My friends were dying all around me -- I'm lucky that I somehow survived.

ACT UP, the coalition that Larry founded to address the crisis, coined the phrase "silence equals death" as its rallying cry, and it was no exaggeration. By the end of 1983, AIDS had claimed 2,100 lives, but the government would hardly acknowledge that anything was awry. I can't help but wonder, if those in power had cared more, if they had done more, perhaps we could have ended this epidemic before it began to circle the globe. But they didn't care, they didn't act, and 36 million people have died of AIDS since.

Worldwide, another than 1.6 million people will die of AIDS this year

Today, African-Americans represent 12% of the national population, but they account for 44% of Americans living with HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gay and bisexual men comprise only 2% of the American population, but they represented 30% of the nation's HIV infections in 2010.

The crisis is particularly acute in the American South, where homophobia is rampant.

I hope HBO's production of "The Normal Heart" will compel a new generation to act up. There is so much work still to be done, but there's also so much potential. The characters in "The Normal Heart," living as they did in the 1980s, didn't understand what they or their friends were dying of, and they didn't have treatments to manage the disease. They hardly knew how to protect themselves.

Today, we know how to protect everyone, and we have the ability to treat every single person living with HIV. . . . Today, as ever, silence equals death.

[W]e must speak out against injustice, act with compassion, and fight for equality.  If enough of us raise our voices, we can finally begin to end this epidemic.

Just imagine if the millions and millions of dollars spent by "family values groups," the Mormon Church, the Catholic Church and the Knights of Columbus to keep gays inferior under the law had been spent instead on HIV/AIDS prevention, education and treatment how many more might be saved from HIV?AIDS.  The "godly Christians" continue to be the strongest argument available as to why one would not want to be deemed a Christian. 

 

Readers - especially straight readers - need to watch The Normal Heart.  It should be required viewing for Republicans in particular.