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about AIDS--I saw it and and was moved to tears--it is now having a revival
in NYC--this is a letter from Kramer, in his 80s, who has been HIV+
positive and living with AIDS for over 20 years, that he has been handing out after each
show!)
Posted on Advocate.com April 20, 2011
Larry Kramer: Please Know
By Brandon Voss
The Broadway cast of The Normal Heart
A letter from Larry Kramer
PLEASE KNOW
Thank you for coming to see our play.
Please know that everything in The Normal Heart happened.
These were and are real people who lived and spoke and died, and are
presented here as best I could. Several more have died since, including
Bruce, whose name was Paul Popham, and Tommy, whose name was Rodger
McFarlane and who became my best friend, and Emma, whose name was Dr.
Linda Laubenstein. She died after a return bout of polio and another
trip to an iron lung. Rodger, after building three gay/AIDS agencies
from the ground up, committed suicide in despair. On his deathbed at
Memorial, Paul called me (we’d not spoken since our last fight in this
play) and told me to never stop fighting.
Four members of the
original cast died as well, including my dear sweet friend Brad Davis,
the original Ned, whom I knew from practically the moment he got off the
bus from Florida, a shy kid intent on becoming a fine actor, which he
did.
Please know that AIDS is a worldwide plague.
Please
know that no country in the world, including this one, especially this
one, has ever called it a plague, or dealt with it as a plague.
Please know that there is no cure.
Please
know that after all this time the amount of money being spent to find a
cure is still miniscule, still almost invisible, still impossible to
locate in any national health budget, and still totally uncoordinated.
Please
know that here in America case numbers continue to rise in every
category. In much of the rest of the world — Russia, India, Southeast
Asia, Africa — the numbers of the infected and the dying are so
grotesquely high they are rarely acknowledged.
Please know that all efforts at prevention and educations continue their unending record of abject failure.
Please
know that there is no one in charge of this plague. This is a war for
which there is no general and for which there has never been a general.
How can you win a war with no one in charge?
Please know that
beginning with Ronald Reagan (who would not say the word “AIDS” publicly
for seven years), every single president has said nothing and done
nothing, or in the case of the current president, says the right things
and then doesn’t do them.
Please know that most medications for
HIV/AIDS are inhumanly expensive and that government funding for the
poor to obtain them is dwindling and often unavailable.
Please
know that pharmaceutical companies are among the most evil and greedy
nightmares ever loosed on humankind. What “research” they embark upon is
calculated only toward finding newer drugs to keep us, just barely,
from dying, but not to make us better or, god forbid, cured.
Please
know that an awful lot of people have needlessly died and will continue
to needlessly die because of any and all of the above.
Please
know that the world has suffered at the very least some 75 million
infections and 35 million deaths. When the action of the play that you
have just seen begins, there were 41.
I have never seen such wrongs as this plague, in all its guises, represents, and continues to say about us all.
Larry Kramer
They have done very little or none at all.
I am trying to remember if this was a movie at one time?
Maybe Farley Granger?will have to looked this up.
Good post there.Mr.Kramer is a hero.