‘They Just Don’t Like Us’.
2014 Film Exposes how Health Officials sat on Their Hands During Aids Epidemic
DIRECTED BY RYAN MURPHY/2014
Tommy Boatwright felt the need to develop a new routine with his telephone contacts.
Every now and then, he would remove a card from his Rolodex. He would then add it to a pile of cards wrapped securely by a rubber band that he kept in the top drawer of his desk in the office of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) organization in New York City.
To his Boatwright’s horror, this stack of cards was becoming larger at a rapid pace. They contained the names of friends and associates who died from AIDS. There’s no sense in keeping them in his Rolodex any longer — but he can’t bring himself to throw the cards away.
“I have this tradition. It’s something I do now when a friend dies,” Boatwright says in the 2014 film The Normal Heart. “I save his Rolodex card. What am I supposed to do, throw it away in the trash can? I won’t do that. No, I won’t. It’s too final. Last year, I had five cards. Now I have 50. A collection of cardboard tombstones bound together with a rubber band. I hate these f***ing funerals; I really do.”
The Normal Heart is based on a play of the same title written by writer and activist Larry Kramer. Directed by Ryan Murphy, the movie features Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons and Julia Roberts. The play debuted April 21, 1985, in New York City; the film premiered on HBO on May 25, 2014.
The story is a semiautobiographical account of Kramer’s activism on the HIV/AIDS crisis during the early 1980s. Kramer co-founded the GMHC organization and later the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) group.
In 1981 (the first year of the Reagan administration), health authorities in major cities across the country began reporting on cases of young gay men developing a rare form of skin cancer (Kaposi’s sarcoma) along with other diseases that should have easily been overwhelmed by the body’s natural defenses. It seemed as though their immune systems had completely shut down, and doctors had no idea how to treat it. The most frightening aspect of this mysterious condition is that the death rate among victims was 100%.
Ned Weeks (Ruffalo), a character based on Kramer, is a writer in New York City. While he has no compunction about living as an openly gay man, he chastises other members of the gay community for their promiscuity. He believes they’ve made seeking sexual pleasure their defining characteristic; his confrontational style rubs many people the wrong way.
Weeks believes that this growing health crisis only underscores his admonition. Dr. Emma Brookner (Roberts), who is treating a growing list of men with this condition, encourages Weeks to spread this message throughout the gay community.
Weeks solicits help in raising awareness about this condition from Felix Turner (Bomer), a reporter for the New York Times; the two men soon become lovers. But Turner is reluctant to broach the topic with his editors as the newspaper’s management appears indifferent to the problem.
As they watch more people close to them become ill and die, Weeks and several friends grow infuriated over the lack of attention this condition is receiving by the Reagan administration and the office of New York City Mayor Ed Koch. They form the GMHC to provide whatever information they can to individuals seeking help.
Despite the alarming number of cases being reported, federal and city officials are apathetic to the grim fate that HIV/AIDS victims were confronting. Weeks and his friends are convinced that authorities will let them all died simply because they’re gay. Boatwright (Parsons) summed up the sentiments of his colleagues:
“We’re losing an entire generation. Young men, at the beginning, just gone. Choreographers, playwrights, dancers, actors. All those plays that won’t get written now. All those dances, never to be danced. In closing, I’m just gonna say I’m mad. I’m f***ing mad. I keep screaming inside, ‘Why are they letting us die? Why is no one helping us?’ And here’s the truth, here’s the answer: They just don’t like us.”
The HIV/AIDS epidemic unfolded as follows:
On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report on five gay men in Los Angeles diagnosed with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma. The CDC then stated in July that over the past 30 months, 26 cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma had been reported resulting in eight deaths. Total deaths from AIDS in the United States for 1981 were estimated between 120 and 230.
Total reported deaths from AIDS in 1982 were 853. In 1983, there were 2,807 cases of HIV/AIDS leading to 2,118 deaths. There were 4,251 deaths from AIDS by the end of 1984 and 5,636 from AIDS deaths by the end of 1985 (actor Rock Hudson was among those who died that year).
By the end of 1990, total deaths from AIDS from all previous years in the United States surpassed 100,000. Yet throughout this crisis, health agencies were very slow to respond with money for research or treatment.
Members of the GMHC were confounded that Koch ignored such a significant health catastrophe in his own city. They believed Koch was afraid to address the issue because he was a closeted gay man who publicly denied his sexual orientation.
Deeply influenced by evangelical Christians, President Ronald Reagan did not publicly say the word “AIDS” until 1985 — several years after the epidemic began. He did not give a speech on HIV/AIDS until 1987.
The Normal Heart (the title used by Kramer for his play comes from a line in W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939”) emphasizes the same theme of government negligence presented in another HBO film project on the HIV/AIDS crisis, 1993’s And the Band Played On. Thousands of Americans who had become ill with HIV had access to such limited information on their condition with no hope of recovery; millions of others were terrified at the prospect of being victimized next. And for years, many government authorities expressed no concern about the “gay plague.”
The acting in The Normal Heart is superb. The movie reflects the characters’ determination to pressure government agencies to finally do their jobs by taking this crisis seriously.
This movie’s message remains relevant to us today: When officials base health care-policy decisions on personal biases rather than documented science, people die. The Normal Heart shows how to make the democratic system work for the benefit of all of us.