Performing arts slowly help change image of AIDS
By Dennis Moore
USA Today
How did we get from an AIDS-emaciated Tom Hanks, clinging to life in his hospital bed as he says goodbye to his family in "Philadelphia," to beautiful Gloria Reuben walking HIV-positive but healthy out of County General Hospital on "ER"?
Dramatic advances in treatment of the disease, to be sure, but also advances in drama itself.
As the anniversary of the discovery of the AIDS virus is recognized around the world, it's worth making note of how the arts have dealt with the epidemic. Performing arts — theater, television and movies — have introduced mainstream audiences to AIDS, carried them through the tragedies and the triumphs and now essentially have left the disease behind.
"In terms of attitudes toward the disease and those who have it, a lot has changed since the media entered the picture," says Christian Mendenhall, associate professor of theater at American University in Washington, D.C. Though the body count mounted in the artistic community even before AIDS was officially acknowledged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1981, artists themselves didn't rally in response until the middle of the decade.
"The arts community was scared," Mendenhall says. "Hollywood was homophobic, and people were not going to pay to see stories about such suffering."
Newspapers, magazines and television treated people with AIDS as if they were starving babies wasting away in Africa, says Robert Atkins, art historian and co-founder of the Visual Aids activist group.
"In the early '80s, activist photographers began to counter with pictures of smiling people in better health," he says. "But the positive pictures didn't make a ripple. It was the same problem artists and journalists have representing any disease. AIDS was too complicated to be read in single images."
Other artists — mostly gay activists — responded to AIDS with individual commentary. The earliest example of AIDS performance is thought to be Jim Howell's 1982 dance piece "Ritual: The Journey of a Soul". Initial AIDS plays, such as Jeff Hagedorn's "One", often were part fund-raisers, part educational campaigns and part memorial services. "One", a monologue about the experiences of a gay man recently diagnosed with AIDS, originally was presented in a Chicago gay bar and soon was re-staged throughout the country.
All this activity occurred under the mainstream radar. AIDS was still mysterious and very far away for most people — until 1985. That year, closeted gay actor Rock Hudson — who with Doris Day was one of the big screen's most attractive proponents of heterosexual sex — was reported to have AIDS. And the story of young hemophiliac Ryan White was told in People magazine.
Paul Rudnick, a writer for both stage and screen, recalled in his 1996 Time magazine article that anxious mobs attended the landmark Public Theater performances of "The Normal Heart", in which medical statistics were painted on the walls of the set and constantly updated. "Theater suddenly performed an unheard-of function: At its opening, "The Normal Heart" was one of the few sources of data on the epidemic anywhere."
But neither drama had the impact of television's first foray into AIDS: "An Early Frost," airing Nov. 11, 1985.
Framing "An Early Frost" in a conventional family melodrama made the subjects of homosexuality and AIDS less threatening, says Rodney Buxton, assistant professor of mass communications at the University of Denver. But the story — however sympathetic — broke new ground. Son Michael (Aidan Quinn), a Chicago lawyer, is a closeted gay man who has AIDS.
" 'An Early Frost' really brought it home," Mendenhall says. "It was the groundbreaker in public media."
Though advertisers shied away, ratings were strong.
Hollywood stars and studio executives, meanwhile, rallied against AIDS by raising money and public consciousness. Red ribbons, created by the Visual Arts Artists' Caucus to counteract what it considered the jingoism embodied in the yellow ribbons worn after the Gulf War, were as ubiquitous at the Academy Awards as Oscar trophies. But no studio was willing to make a movie about the disease.
"There never has been the homophobia in theater that there has been in Hollywood, where macho people run the studios," Mendenhall says. "Political action is not where their interests lie."
But director Jonathan Demme, who won an Oscar for "The Silence of the Lambs," commissioned the story of Andy Beckett, a closeted gay lawyer who contracts AIDS, is fired from his job and sues his former law firm for a civil liberties violation. He wins, but he also dies.
No one challenges the contention that "Philadelphia" never would have been a cultural watershed had Tom Hanks not been cast as Beckett. A married-with-children actor considered the most likable man in Hollywood, Hanks made the film palatable to middle-American audiences.
A work of far more complexity and acclaim, "Angels in America", opened on Broadway in 1993. Many critics contend Tony Kushner's two-part, seven-hour epic — "Millennium Approaches," which won the Tony Award and Pulitzer prize in 1993, and "Perestroika," Tony winner in 1994 — remain the most entertaining and insightful works ever produced about AIDS.
While American artists no longer feel urgency about the disease ("An emergency can't last 20 years," Atkins says), they have not addressed the devastation being wreaked by AIDS in Third World countries.
"We don't have any South African stories or Congolese stories about half a town that's dead," Mendenhall says. "AIDS is an incomplete tale."
