The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays (3 page)

The Destiny of Me
rounds out and completes
The Normal Heart
with redemptive moments of an understanding that brings forgiveness—forgiveness, not release, not freedom from pain. Nothing in the plays is more moving or more compelling than Kramer’s unflinching
portrait of his two impossible parents, so unforgivable, so inexcusable, so much the victims and the victimizers, all at once. When Ned expresses too much sympathy for his abusive father, his younger self reprimands him, and the audience: “Don’t you dare feel sorry for him!” And don’t you dare not to. The author of
The Normal Heart
and
The Destiny of Me
was badly abused by psychoanalysts and has many unkind things to say about psychoanalysis, but he is clearly its creature as well as one of its many critics. His search for the truth is that of the talented analysand’s. The poet H.D., in her
Tribute to Freud,
wrote about her psychoanalysis as a matter of life-and-death striving toward transformation:

. . . I have the feeling of holding my breath under water. As if I were searching under water for some priceless treasure, and if I bobbed up to the surface the clue of its whereabouts would be lost forever. So I, though seated upright, am in a sense diving, head-down, underwater—in another element, and as I seem now so near to getting the answer or finding the treasure, I feel that my whole life, my whole being, will be blighted forever if I miss this chance. I must not lose my grip, I must not lose the end of the picture and so miss the meaning of the whole, so far painfully perceived. I must hold on here or the picture will blur over and the sequence will be lost. In a sense, it seems that I am drowning; already half-drowned to the ordinary dimensions of space and time, I know that I must drown, as it were, completely in order to come out on the other side of things (like Alice with her looking-glass or Perseus with his mirror). I must drown and come out on the other side, or rise to the surface after the third time down, not dead to this life but with a new set of values, my treasure dredged from the depth. I must be born again or break utterly.

The protean Alexander/Ned, name and identity tossed about by all manner of tempests, nearly breaks, and both is and is not born again; or rather, is born again, but born again surrounded by ghosts, born again into a horrible dying. In their ardent pursuit of memory and understanding, in their simultaneous optimism and pessimism, the Weeks-family plays are genuinely Freudian tragedy. One drowns to come out on the other side. Annihilation brings new life.

I remember, when I saw
Destiny
at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the winter of 1992, one moment I found jaw-dropping: when Ned, observer/participant in his bygone family drama, admonishes his mother, the great and terrible Rena, parading in a slip and bra:

NED:
Ma, why don’t you put on a dress?

RENA:
If you’re going to become a writer, you must learn to be more precise with words.

NED:
Do not sit half-naked with your adolescent son. Is that precise enough?

It’s a brilliant, complicated moment, funny and very sad. It occurs just when this fierce, unhappy woman is talking about “how impossible it is for a woman to be independent.” She is reaching for nascent consciousness, toward her own liberation. In the context of the political drama, her frustration and sense of injustice feed her young son, his surprising, even happy self-assurance in the present and the fighter he will become. The character of Ned-as-a-boy, Alexander, is his mother’s champion. But in the context of the family drama, her battle for liberation is threatening, disruptive, it’s one more aspect of a personality too large for the role she’s been forced into, a woman who can’t accept boundaries. Her energy, her anger, her lack of boundaries—including perhaps sexual and familial ones—will
coruscate those she loves. The man her son will become, aware after the fact of the damage she’s doing even while bestowing the gift of agency, undercuts her, pathologizes her—not necessarily without cause or merit, but all the same she is undercut.

There are ambiguities, fallacies, in Rena’s externalized sense of her oppression—this is, after all,
after
World War II, it isn’t the nineteenth century, she isn’t Nora, and she’s sort of crazy. So too are there ambiguities and inujustice in Ned’s chastisement. Is she being politically sabotaged to secure the family?
Is
she behaving inappropriately? I don’t know how to answer that, but the moment is a good one because it makes me squirm. My jaw dropped at the chutzpah of the lines, the sudden intimacy. The character/playwright is betraying his mother, not only her ambitions but her privacy, his family’s secrets. He is even, in a sense, transgressing against his larger family, the gay community, implying, or at the very least risking the misreading, that in Ned’s complaint is the etiology of his sexual orientation, a very risky implication these days, but again, not without at least enough conditional, circumspective plausibility to merit its staging, if one has the courage, the nerve to do so.

(And no, I do
not
believe that seductive mommies make gay sons; but I do believe that the family romance has some part in shaping sexual desire, gay, straight or otherwise. And any allusion to this truth, in the Age of the Genome, makes me happy.)

Rena is saying what is very hard to say politically, and more than she intends personally; Ned is saying what is hard to say personally, and more than he intends politically; and it would be nice if what we need would always coincide with what was good for us, or with what was generous or just, but there are always these discrepancies. The playwright leaves the engine running, resolving nothing, not forcing resolution on what cannot be resolved, on what
is tragic, allowing the tragic to generate new syntheses. Time brings on its changes. Liberation, personal or political, even attained, is not an end, a point of arrival, but a point of departure, a step toward something new.

Time works its changes, and at any given point in his life, Larry Kramer is being abused as a left-wing hysteric or deplored as a right-wing antisex scold. He is impressively unconcerned, at least publicly, with the constant stream of opprobrium sent in his direction, and in fact rather (in)famously invites it; he is one of the few remaining public intellectuals who is willing and eager to brawl. He has paid a high personal price for the brawling. It has cost him much time, and probably great sorrow and fear. The sacrifice of time and emotional life for the sake of inflaming and expanding public debate is a rare thing in a writer in this day and age, a sacrifice too seldom recognized and honored, too often shrugged off as a well-deserved comeuppance.

What seems to matter most to Larry Kramer is the incessant disruption of business as usual, the refusal to be silent or polite. This refusal is praiseworthy. It is only to be expected that any person so completely engaged, so entirely committed to action (and discourse as he discourses is a potent form of action) will make mistakes, will enrage and appall. Given the sheer amount of engagement, of public declaration, it is astounding how often history and reality have affirmed what Kramer has proposed.

His campaign against the oversexualization of gay male life, against indiscriminate, profligate fucking, in favor of long-term commitment (the antimonogamist riposte to which preference, by
the way, is given a fair amount of eloquent stage time in
Normal Heart
) has caused a good deal of unhappiness in our community, as one learns simply by reading the plays. This campaign of Kramer’s is, in my opinion, a brave opening gambit in the pursuit of what must surely be the next step after sexual revolution and liberation, namely the articulation of a new ethics of sexuality. The revolution isn’t over and liberation has not yet arrived, but looking ahead to the next step after the triumph of our efforts cannot be considered premature. It is, rather, essential—for without a forward vision, how are we to progress? The monogamy-versus-promiscuity model is clearly inadequate to our purposes, and if Kramer relies too heavily on such a model, then criticism is appropriate, but not a rejection of his anguished call for personal responsibility.

The homosexual right, pretending that the homosexual revolution has not been a
sexual
revolution, uses “personal responsibility,” or rather an imaginary lack thereof, as a canard with which to discredit the homosexual left. Dividing the community into the “personally responsible” and the “sexually misbehaving,” gay and lesbian conservatives seek to desexualize sexual orientation, to locate the cause of our general disenfranchisement in what they bemoan as the lack of propriety, decency, maturity, sobriety, “family values” manifest in some undesirable percentage of our population—a percentage that happens to coincide, in the writings of the right, precisely with the percentage of our community that is activist and left. These revisionists want to rewrite our liberation as a begging for, and
perhaps
a slow granting of, a place at the table of power. They want to demote our history of effective, collective, militant action to the status of sideshow, a distraction from the real work conducted in private meetings by well-heeled, well-placed conservative individuals—hoping thereby to earn shiny credentials to flash at Republican conventions and other assemblages of virulent homophobes. With “personal
responsibility” as their battle cry, the gay and lesbian right seeks to remove homosexual enfranchisement from its place as a chapter in the book of liberation and paste it squarely in the book of the irresistible rise of entrepreneurial individualism.

But Larry Kramer’s invocation of personal responsibility is not consonant with theirs. Kramer’s demand that we save ourselves, that we take responsibility for ourselves, is historically, communally based. His is a demand always accompanied by a powerful depiction of its context—historical, and ongoing, homophobia, life-threatening oppression, which he has time and again (and in both of these plays) likened to the holocaust. Kramer has declared the homophobia behind the wide world’s response to the AIDS epidemic a great crime against humanity, and in doing so he has renamed the ostensibly biological as actually political. This act of renaming, this exposing of ideology, is antithetical to the practices and program of the political right.

Kramer is telling us
we must save ourselves.
He is forcefully reminding us that being the object of hatred for millennia will make any subject hate her- or himself. He is demanding that, as we liberate ourselves, we also tranform what we are liberating, that we rid ourselves of self-hatred and begin the riddance by naming it. But he has never through all this hectoring lost sight of the fact that we are more hated than self-hating, that we are in a fight with an enemy whose implacable detestation of us is the true nemesis against which our battles are waged. The two plays collected here are magnificent examples of this understanding, which by virtue of its historicity, its complexity, its realism, is unmistakably progressive.

We’ll go down if we don’t stand up for ourselves.

Surely you see that.

If Larry Kramer makes you angry, he also has a rich claim on your forgiveness. Read these plays.

The Washington Weekses, like the New England Tyrones, and their nearly coeval Brooklyn equivalents the Lomans, are “fog people”; you can tell by the way they talk. Their eloquence is all in the hesitations, in the tumult. They are most patently American in this, that they betray in every word and gesture how densely the fog surrounds them, how nearly impossible it is to move forward. Doubts, confusions, night sweats, real darkness: a fog has hovered about and haunted every moment of American history, potential doom obscuring potential illumination. The fog pours in to engulf any great work, any new beginning, any attempt to overturn and start anew, any voyage past what is known. Progress is unimaginably difficult, dangerous, always at risk, always made by people with only partial vision. American actors, historical, familial, political, theatrical, move blindly ahead toward a future that never is, and never can be, clear. The great error has been to mistake the darkness for damnation, to surrender to immobility or worse, to try to retrace our steps backward to a safety that has ceased to exist or never existed. It is nearly impossible to move forward. And yet move forward is precisely what the courageous among the fog people do.

Here is an American epic, a wandering without a homecoming. We haven’t aged sufficiently as a community, or as a nation, even to imagine what the homecoming will be like. The doom that haunts every American epic is here made manifest in a plague, which has now grown to globally holocaustal dimensions: fifty million infected, sixteen million dead, ten percent increases in new infections every year. And still there is no cure, still there is mendacity and calumny and malign neglect and hatred for the Other—gay, female, black, brown, yellow, non-American, poor. And still there are the epic virtues, still there is astonishing courage, generosity,
nobility and heroism, still the grand battles to change the world and the order of things, still the refusal to accept inujustice, blind destiny, even fate. This doom and these virtues are given full-blooded stage life in
The Normal Heart
and
The Destiny of Me.
Together the plays constitute an American epic, improbably and perhaps accidentally of the theater. Their vision is individual and deeply communal. It is tragic and unceasingly generative. Its characters are possessed of a stammering eloquence, and what they speak is uncomfortable, outrageous, abrasive, brave: the truth. These plays give the lie to a theater of diminished expectations and humbled ambitions. Here is theater that has managed to matter, the work of a deep-diving heart as hot as the sun.

—Tony Kushner
New York City
June 2000

For Norman J. Levy,

who succeeded where all others failed.

The windiest militant trash