44 Middlebrow after the orgy, The (new) Normal hearT by Dion Kagan queer “After all our history, after all these deaths, we still don’t … have a gay culture … We have our sexuality and we have made a culture out of our sexuality, and that culture has killed us. I want to say this again: We have made sex the cornerstone of gay liberation and gay culture, and it has killed us.” —Larry Kramer, The Advocate, 27 th May 1997. The Normal Heart has been buried in an avalanche of Emmy award nominations: Mark Rufalo for his mannered and actually quite restrained lead performance as the relent- less Ned Weeks; Julia Roberts for her supporting actress portrayal of furiously reasonable moral compass Dr Emma Brookner; outstanding directing from Ryan Murphy of Glee fame (congratulations for bringing things down a couple of notches, Ryan); and of course, among the others, the ‘outstanding writing for a miniseries, movie or a dramatic special’ nomination for Larry Kramer who adapted his roman à clef AIDS crisis agitprop play (1985) into the HBO drama upon which it is very closely based. The awards are but a few days of, and the made-for-cable ilm is poised to clean up. The Normal Heart left me feeling devastated, insulted, and bitterly unresolved, so it’s deinitely doing some things right. The Liberation to Crisis narrative contains endless potential for all kinds of feelings. One of its principle fascinations is the brutal transformation of bodies from beautiful, proud embodiments of leshy eroticism to frail, lesioned objects of sufering and sentiment, alongside rage and resistance. These images incite complex viewing pleasures and ethics, about which countless books on the politics of representation have been written. How a ilm handles the transformation, and to what ends it serves are some of the questions at issue. Among critics, the verdict has been almost unanimous: afecting, accolade-worthy performances from a sturdy and convincing cast; a powerful, heartbreaking melodrama of rage, resistance, compassion, and care; a vital contribution to the ever-expanding ilm archive of the early years of AIDS crisis in its urban American (mostly gay male) epicen- tres. “The Normal Heart might be the most important movie HBO has ever made” reads the title of an article on news website vox.com. Says Slate TV critic Willa Paskin: “If some of this material—scenes of lesions and deathbeds, of men being denied the right to say goodbye to their lovers—is becoming a part of the tragedy canon, so be it: It belongs.” This efusiveness may partly represent a relief at seeing a familiar gay political drama after the confusing politics of a white, male, homophobe AIDS hero in Dallas Buyers Club. There is a sense that this screen remake will become an essential dramatic document of the era. Alongside Philadelphia and Angels in America and Buyers Club, The Normal Heart seems destined to enter the pantheon of popular American AIDS movies whose version of this history will become the version that millions of people across the globe call upon for their memories of this time. But Kramer is a fraught igure. On the one hand, he’s been a hero of AIDS activism for over thirty tireless years. He was a co-founding member of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (from which he was later expelled – the circumstances around which are dramatised in both stage and screen versions of The Normal Heart) and after that he founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Yes, the man started ACT UP – the most prominent activist organisation to emerge from the crisis; that frank, furious, and relentless movement whose in-yer-face theatrical modes of demon- stration became a watershed in modern activism. That ACT UP’s signature political stylings echoed the personal and politics modus operandi of people like Kramer—unable and unwilling to temper either the message or the medium to make it palatable to the mainstream—is also the stuf of endless activist chronicles. The man, almost in his eighties now, is due his place in the canon of AIDS histories. On the other hand, Kramer has long been a pugnacious ambassador for a version of gay life and gay politics that privileges monogamous love above all other forms of erotic expression. Even before he wrote The Normal Heart—even before AIDS—he was writing furious polemics against the drugs and promiscuity of 1970s-era Liberation culture. His feelings about gay men and promiscuity are well known and well matured. Most recently, earlier this year, he came out with characteristically scathing comments against US federal health recommendations that certain people at risk of exposure to HIV take Truvada, the antiretroviral drug that HIV negative people can be take as a preventative measure against seroconversion. His public position on treatment-as-prevention is just the latest in a long and legendary and speciically political type of slut-shaming of gay men who don’t pursue monogamy, in this instance con- tributing to the growing personiication of men who elect to take these drugs for preventative purposes as ‘Truvada whores’. Kramer’s words: “Anybody who voluntarily takes an antiviral every day has got to have rocks in their heads… There’s something to me cowardly about taking Truvada instead of using a condom. You’re taking a drug that is poison to you, and it has lessened your energy to ight, to get involved, to do anything.” Putting to one side the logic that a pharmaceuticals-prom- iscuity nexus works to (further) fatigue or demobilise gay men as an active political constituency, there is an irony in the assumption that Kramer’s preferred arrangement of intimacy—love and coupledom—would do otherwise. This irony is that decades of radical, queer, and feminist political thought has questioned the centrality of equality rhetoric and the demand to be included in the failed institutions of the majority (like marriage), arguing that it is these very institutions that de-politicize. This old issue of the sluts vs the suits might seem a little far away from what appears to be another fairly standard admission into the cinematic catalogue of AIDS Crisis revisitations, but in fact, I would say that it’s at the political and emotional heart of this adaptation’s take on AIDS history. There is, in other words, a very robust argument to be made that HBO’s adaptation of The Normal Heart works to vindicate the rancorous anti-promiscuity polemics of its writer Larry Kramer. Ê The promiscuity problem and Kramer’s ambivalence about it is foregrounded revealingly in the opening sequence of the ilm. Not yet an activist, the character of Ned Weeks (the ictional stand-in for Kramer) gets of a boat at Fire Island in 1982, on the cusp of gay Armageddon. As in so many recollections of this place at this time, it’s a writhing cornu- copia of Let’s Get Physical short shorts, muscular physiques, never-ending parties, and sex. To my eyes, HBO’s version looks more like the manicured, circuit-party styles of the gay ’90s than Fire Island in the early ’80s, especially when Ned and co attend what appears to be a ‘White Party’. It’s a bit weird given the White Parties began a few years later as HIV/AIDS fundraisers, but whatever: the main point is that this horny homosexual bacchanal equals shorthand for gay paradise on the eve of the apocalypse. Some background: before this Fire Island prelude, Kramer had already published the novel Faggots (1978), an anti-promiscuity screed dressed up as ictional narrative. Like The Normal Heart, Faggots’ protagonist, Fred Lemish, is based on its author. Lemish, who wants to ind love but feels thwarted by 1970s ‘fast lane’ New York gay culture, spends the novel wandering through one-nighters, orgies, and glory holes in notorious bathhouses, encountering poppers, quaaludes, PCP, LSD, pot, booze, valium, coke, and heroin en route. Because Kramer’s critique of urban gay sexual and drug culture had already made him a contro- versial igure, when Rufalo’s Ned arrives on the beach at Fire Island, naturally, some languid faggots tell him to fuck of. Not only is he bad PR for Gay Liberation, he’s a serious killjoy. “You made us look terrible in your novel,” his pal tells him, explaining why he’s suddenly so unpopular. “Look around you, sex is liberating!” “All I said,” Ned responds, “was having so much sex makes inding love impossible.” Cue handsome young man (Jonathan Grof, the movie’s irst AIDS casualty) falling to the ground. This brief early exchange is one of The Normal Heart’s laccid gestures to the centrality of pleasure and desire to gay men at the time, even in the increasingly fraught, dev- astating and politically hostile world that AIDS would soon bring about. But as a gesture it remains just that – gestural. Had the adaptation been serious about considering the implications of a liberation sexual ethos in the early years of AIDS, it might have also at the very least gestured to the ways in which intimate informal sexual networks formed the basis for the infrastructure that literally invented—and then disseminated—the life-saving message of safer sex with condoms. The Normal Heart doesn’t say much about the emotional and political importance of sexual freedom