It was 3:30 am, when I finished watching the HBO movie The Normal Heart. I was sitting there bawling my eyes out, afraid my flatmates would hear me and come and ask if anything's wrong, and I would only be able to gesture at the screen and continue sobbing.
After watching the movie, I immediately knew I had to read the play by Larry Kramer (which the movie has been adapted from).
The play was exactly how I expected it to be. It was poignant, humorous, insightful, heartbreaking, and a great read. I love Ned Weeks. I love him, admire him, respect him. I love Emma. I love Felix. I love Tommy.
I came across something interesting while reading about this play/movie on the internet :
For the 2011 Broadway premiere of the play, Larry Kramer wrote a flyer called "Please Know", which he often handed out to exiting audience members himself at the end of the performance. This flyer explained that most of the events and characters in the play were based on real events and people. They included : Paul Popham (the basis of Bruce), Dr, Linda Laubenstein (the basis for Emma), Rodger McFarlane (the basis for Tommy), and himself (the basis for Ned Weeks).
It's knowing things like these that add to the story for me.
This story is real, it is relevant, it is important. It was important yesterday, it is important today, and it will be important tomorrow.
I'd like to end with my favourite part of the story. It's something Ned says to Bruce, after being ousted from the Gay Men's Health Crisis.
"I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men. Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do — and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don't they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and maybe you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there—all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth."
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