What is a graphic depiction?

Was the depiction of politics in "The Normal Heart" realistic?

• I just watched The Normal Heart and was slightly shocked by the depiction of people in power not caring just because the people affected were gay men. Especially the scene where Bruce is talking to the advisor to the president, and the advisor flat-out asks him if heterosexual men have been shown ever to get the disease, and promptly dismisses him when he doesn't answer. That scene seemed way over-the-top to me; I can't imagine someone consciously thinking "oh, lots of young people are dying horrifically, but I'm not at risk, so wha'evs!" But it seems like lots of reviews online are saying the depiction of politics in the film is very accurate.

• Answer:

  The Normal Heart is a  brilliant, heartbreaking play, but it is NOT history. It is a polemic. Here's the equation: Republicans are conservatives, for the most part. Many conservatives are evangelical Christians, or other Christian creeds that are sexually conservative, like Mormons. In turn, these religious conservatives have very strong opinions in regard to what is usually lumped together as "social Issues," which includes abortion and gay rights, among many others. Hence, there is a substantial number of Republicans who refuse to accept homosexuality as a normal human variation that is inborn, rather than a conscious and therefore wicked and sinful choice, and they tend to be unsympathetic to the problems that gay people might face, including AIDS, which is NOT, of course, an exclusively gay disease. But there is another very important factor in this equation I am cobbling up here: ALL Western religions, except for very recent liberalizations of small percentages of various religions, unreservedly condemn homosexuality as unnatural and sinful. (Many if not most Eastern religions do so also, but they are not large enough in America to merit consideration in the argument.) So when gay and lesbian people become aware of their inborn, natural sexual desires, they are also immediately confronted with any number of painful realizations, and one of those is that the religion in which they were raised, in which they may well have learned to love God and in which they believe deeply, rejects them without reservation. Good people who do not recall even making a choice, let alone doing anything wrong or bad, find themselves labeled as deliberate sinners by people who may well have played important parts in raising them, teaching them, and nurturing them. It is almost impossible for me, as a straight man, to imagine how painful this realization, and the consequences that often follow, must be. I am an atheist who rejected the religion in which I was raised, but I can go into any Reform or Liberal Jewish temple in the world and find welcome. I am a apikoros, an apostate - but I am not regarded as a sinner while good, honest gay people, likely more devout than I ever was, are condemned as sinners. Since I am an atheist, my personal opinion about how wrong this is really does not matter. It is not my place to tell religious people what things their creeds should or should not contain, nor is it my place to tell someone how to be a good Jew, a good Christian, a good Muslim, etc. I forfeited that right when I left not only my faith but all faiths. But I am certainly entitled to feel sad and sympathetic, and I most certainly do. As a conservative, it is one of my dearest wishes that no matter what their religious views of homosexuality may be, I would like my fellows who are evangelical Christians and Mormons to practice more compassion toward gay people. But I also believe that the gay rights movement has become part and parcel of the progressive left. The progressives are implacable enemies of religion in general and Christianity in particular, and little pleases them more than endless condemnation of Christians, and being a thorn in the side of Christians. Gay people are now, by and large, in the vanguard of this anti-Christian sentiment. It is the habit of leftists to conflate politics and religion, and to despise both without nuance, distinction, and, in many cases, disregard for historical truth. One other aspect of historical truth, which Larry Kramer, the author of The Normal Heart, has written about every bit as eloquently and passionately as that play, is that many straight people, no matter their religious beliefs or political persuasions, perceived that the spread of AIDS was hastened and exacerbated by what was then not atypical casual sexual behavior on the part of homosexuals. Fair or not - and anyone who denies the kernel of truth at the heart of the issue needs to reread history (I suggest beginning with Randy Shilts's magnum opus And The Band Played On, and Larry Kramer's stunning cri de couer Reports from the Holocaust), many straight people felt that homosexuals were far more responsible for the spread of AIDS in the early days of the epidemic than any lack of attention to the public health issue, funding for medical research, or presidential attitudes. Many straight people felt that gay people were putting not only themselves at risk by not curbing their sexual habits, but they were also presenting an unknowable public health risk to the population at large of what was then a little-understood disease that was incurable and had a frighteningly high fatality rate. These attitudes gave political cover to politicians who did not want to be the first to stick their necks out to support a fight that seemed to be mostly confined to the gay community. Did the politicians, including President Reagan, lead such attitudes and actively resist funding AIDS research, or were they more reflecting the attitudes they perceived among their constituents? Thanks to changes in social attitudes over the last thirty or forty years, the public is no longer neatly divided between straight and gay, with a pretty small number of straight people supportive of gay rights; no politician who disdains gay people has much of a chance to achieve national leadership. Things were very different in the era in which The Normal Heart takes place. I am not making apologies for anyone who, with hindsight, should have acted more quickly and more decisively, but I am not interested in joining a leftist chorus that looks at a revival of a play from 1985, set in 1981 to 1984, and wants to use it to revive what was likely an exaggerated condemnation of President Reagan for its own agenda. READ THE PLAY. WATCH THE PLAY. It condemns any number of politicians, like then New York Mayor Ed Koch, even more savagely than it skewers Reagan. But there are no political points to be scored by the left in reviving condemnation of a Democratic politician who is dead. It's much more fun to attack Reagan, the hero of many conservatives. The play is roman a clef autobiographical, and is just as much about how Larry Kramer (and his onstage alter ego Ned Weeks) may have been in the vanguard of making people aware of the AIDS crisis, but who also alienated virtually everyone he came in contact with. Larry Kramer, make no mistake, is a genius and a genuine hero. He cofounded Gay Men's Health Crisis - and was thrown off its board and asked to stay away, an event the play recounts. Much of the context of the play involves Ned Weeks's fight against irresponsible homosexual behavior, fearing, correctly, it would hasten the spread of AIDS. But Kramer/Weeks was so passionate, so much the bull in the china shop, that he gave so much ammunition to those in the gay community who felt that gay sexuality was such a hard-won victory and such a joyous and unfettered expression of personal freedom so long denied gays that they were unwilling to tamper with it in any way - an attitude, no matter how understandable, that cost literally thousands and thousands of lives. The Normal Heart is about human weakness, human vanity, human failures, and the simple, eloquent realization that all these things are part of the makeup and experience of straight and gay people alike; that these all-too-human frailties are part of a normal heart, which beats in gay people as much as it does in straight people. To make of The Normal Heart a political disquisiiton, instead of the great, thundering, heartbreaking and utterly humane drama that it is, reduces its still-unshakable impact to something petty and ugly. Larry Kramer can rage as eloquently as you have ever heard about the failures of many politicians in responding to the AIDS crisis, including President Reagan, and I have heard him do so. But the pain of what we all lost - our innocence, our distance, our youth, and all those beautiful young lives - is what matters about The Normal Heart, not petty recapitulations of who should get the most blame.