The Normal Heart Larry Kramer Analysis
Ten years after the Radical Gay Liberation and the Gay Rights Movement, the emergence of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in 1981 challenged both the heterosexual and gay world. The gay community had finally liberated themselves from the confines and hatred of a society that still believed homosexuality was a sickness. Thus, when rumors began to emerge about a type of violent cancer that only affected the gay community, both the gay community and stereotypically heterosexual society tried to suppress and ignore the increasing diagnoses and deaths. Enter: Larry Kramer. Larry Kramer was a gay author and playwright who was not an activist in the gay movement until a night in 1980 on Fire Island when he saw a man carrying his frail lover,
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Written as a mostly autobiographical play, the main character—Ned Weeks—who is fashioned after Larry Kramer himself, is a terrifying, “loud-mouthed” activist who is angered by the willful ignorance regarding the 1981 AIDS crisis that was infiltrating the gay community in New York City. With the help of other gay friends from different walks of life, Ned co-founds the Gay Men’s Health Crisis to provide support to the gay community as more diagnoses are reported, as well as fundraise money to support medical treatments and research into the deadly killer that is AIDS. The highly impassioned and political play is an aggressive assault on both the gay and straight communities for ignoring the burgeoning HIV-AIDS crisis. The play not only pulls on the heartstrings of the audience members and cast, but also calls out the moral laziness and ineptness of both guilty parties; it calls for self-evaluation and action from each person, gay or straight. “The Normal Heart” identifies the hypocrisy in society in an Ibsenist manner, urgently and desperately seeking to arouse action among those who are emotionally affected by the play. In a ritual-like manner, “The Normal Heart” aggravates change in both the gay community and non-gay society in regards to the HIV-AIDS
Written as a mostly autobiographical play, the main character—Ned Weeks—who is fashioned after Larry Kramer himself, is a terrifying, “loud-mouthed” activist who is angered by the willful ignorance regarding the 1981 AIDS crisis that was infiltrating the gay community in New York City. With the help of other gay friends from different walks of life, Ned co-founds the Gay Men’s Health Crisis to provide support to the gay community as more diagnoses are reported, as well as fundraise money to support medical treatments and research into the deadly killer that is AIDS. The highly impassioned and political play is an aggressive assault on both the gay and straight communities for ignoring the burgeoning HIV-AIDS crisis. The play not only pulls on the heartstrings of the audience members and cast, but also calls out the moral laziness and ineptness of both guilty parties; it calls for self-evaluation and action from each person, gay or straight. “The Normal Heart” identifies the hypocrisy in society in an Ibsenist manner, urgently and desperately seeking to arouse action among those who are emotionally affected by the play. In a ritual-like manner, “The Normal Heart” aggravates change in both the gay community and non-gay society in regards to the HIV-AIDS