The Congress, at this moment, is delivering eulogies in the Capitol Rotunda. Somebody said, “A man of grace.” Vice-President Pence was moved to say, “He was a good man.” Well, no. George Herbert Walker Bush, in his campaign for president, accepted the help of the infamous “Willie Horton ad.” It was the first “dog whistle”—that is, racist—ad in my lifetime, which is clearly not the ad of a “good … [Read more...]
Standing for the anthem
At the Olympic Games in 1968 in Mexico City Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who had won the gold and bronze medals in the 100 meter track event, raised their clenched fists during the US national anthem. Everybody understood them to be giving the Black Power salute. People said these two athletes had protested American racism in the wrong way, in public, in a foreign country, and were disrespectful … [Read more...]
Hillary’s loss of memory
Each day the response from LGBTQ people and their allies gets more furious. First, on Friday, March 11, 2016, two days ago, Hillary Clinton complimented Nancy Reagan on her “low-key” AIDS advocacy in the early eighties, which, she says, started a national conversation. This led to articles everywhere that called Clinton on the facts. The Reagans had not only not advocated for AIDS research or … [Read more...]
The Normal Heart, again
Before I arrived in Boston in 1984, I didn’t know anything about AIDS, or, as it was called, Gay Cancer, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), before AIDS was settled on in 1985. Nobody else did either. We knew that it was fatal. And we knew that they didn’t know how long a person had from infection to dying. The first years in Boston, I was writing about the summer of 1984 in Maine … [Read more...]
The Normal Heart
Tomorrow night, at nine, HBO will carry The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s play about the first years of the AIDS epidemic, from 1981 to 1984. It was originally produced in New York by Joseph Papp. Kramer’s play is about one of those times in the lives of men when there is a great struggle, and the stakes are as high as they ever get, when the conflicts that people faced in their own lives were … [Read more...]