Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic It started with a letter. On May 25 1983, the American activist and author Larry Kramer wrote to the historian John Boswell, an authority on early Christianity and homosexuality. Kramer told him that, for some time, he’d been thinking of writing “some kind of play that would not only embody all the Aids mess but also serve as some kind of truly moving pageant of homosexuality through the ages”.Kramer was 47. He wrote the letter less than two years after the first reported deaths from Aids-related causes. In 1981, he had co-founded the first action group to galvanise New York’s gay community and local authorities, an organisation that became known as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Kramer was confrontational and abrasive. He pleaded with his contemporaries to stop having sex. By 1983, he had resigned from the group.This was the “mess” he described in his letter. The play would become The Normal Heart, which premiered in April 1985, no longer an attempt to express homosexuality through the ages but focused instead on his experiences in New York in the early 1980s. The play is largely autobiographical: characters die, warnings are ignored, there is no redemption, no hope.Kramer’s letter is one of the earliest examples of a writer wrestling with how to fictionalise the Aids crisis. But The Normal Heart heralded an era of plays, films, novels and TV shows about HIV/Aids. In the early years, Aids was commonly referred to as a “plague”, but there is no straightforward lineage here back to “plague narratives” such as Albert Camus’ The Plague, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year or Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.In fact Aids never was a plague. Plague is bacterial, spread by breath. HIV is a virus, most commonly spread by unprotected sex. To write about Aids, particularly its effect on queer communities that already faced discrimination, is to consider a very specific pandemic. Are Aids stories a genre in themselves? Who are they for? And what are they trying to say now? The writer Bill Goldstein, now 64, was in the front row for the first ever performance of Kramer’s The Normal Heart. “It was horrifying, shattering, frightening and thrilling,” he told me recently over the phone. “What was presented on stage was also happening offstage in a way that’s very unusual. What was happening to people was very real, and in 1985 very little was still known about Aids, and of course nothing yet could be done.”Goldstein is writing a biography of Kramer, who died in 2020. It was he who shared with me Kramer’s letter to Boswell. Goldstein said that, at the end of the performances, audience members would sit in stunned silence, holding each other. Many were visibly ill. “As a gay man of 25 seeing the play,” he said, “I was not only caught up in the story of what was happening to these people, and what will happen, but the uncertainty of the play was the same as the uncertainty we had. Am I going to get sick, am I going to die?”Kramer wrote The Normal Heart to make the gay male community in New York take notice. It had a profound effect, forcing a dialogue about HIV/Aids into the open. But its audience was localised. Playing at the Public Theater, a downtown off-Broadway venue, it ran for 294 performances. Then it wasn’t seen in New York until 1998, two years after the emergence of the antiretroviral treatments that allowed those infected with HIV to live full lives.The Normal Heart has since become canonical, as has Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a play that debuted in instalments, Part 1 in 1991 and Part 2 in 1992, then fully staged in 1993, running at seven hours and 30 minutes. There are similarities between the two: both take place in New York, with Angels in America set a year after The Normal Heart concludes. Both feature characters infected with HIV and dying from Aids-related causes. Both evoke the nightmare of real-life closeted authority figures who turned their backs on the gay community: mayor Ed Koch in The Normal Heart, Republican lawyer Roy Cohn in Angels in America.But there are striking differences in writing and conception. In the years between the two plays, Aids had become better understood and more widely discussed. Angels in America was operatic in scale, with a time-bending quality of the kind Kramer had eschewed when writing The Normal Heart. Part 1 of the play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The full staging opened on Broadway, winning the Tony Award for best play.The Broadway staging of Angels in America opened the same year the film Philadelphia was released, a legal drama featuring Tom Hanks as a lawyer fighting discrimination for his HIV+ status. Much of the film’s tension rests on the changing attitude of his straight and previously homophobic attorney, played by Denzel Washington. That year, Hanks won the Academy Award for best actor, the first performer to win for playing an HIV+ role.Then, in 1999, Michael Cunningham won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1998 novel The Hours, which became a film in 2002. Loosely inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, it is told over one day, following three plot lines that take place in 1923, 1949 and 1999. The last of these follows Richard, a poet who has developed full-blown Aids before the introduction of the antiretrovirals that are, by the time of the story, accessible. It is too late for him. Richard’s anguish echoes Woolf’s own mental decline in the 1923 plot line. By the 2000s, Aids narratives were becoming more palatable, educating a wider audience. A new genre had come into being. But something else was going on. In 1991, the then-30-year-old director Todd Haynes, who went on to make films including Carol and Far from Heaven, released an experimental film called Poison. A year later, director Gregg Araki, then 32, released The Living End. Both directors were part of the New Queer Cinema movement, and both complicated the notion of an Aids narrative.Poison is allegorical, with three intertwined strands: 1950s-style horror, mock news documentary and doomed romance. Aids is not mentioned once. It’s a far cry from the didacticism of The Normal Heart. Yet the film expresses the isolation and paranoia felt a decade into the crisis. It directly confronts the notion of plague narratives, with a doctor infecting anyone he kisses with disfiguring, deadly lesions. The Living End is a low-budget movie of queer nihilism. Two young HIV+ men meet by chance, and after a shoot out with a homophobic police officer, they hit the road. They are beautiful, horny and wild. Their sex is unsafe, and the car they drive has the bumper sticker “CHOOSE DEATH”.I was 18 when Poison was released. It was the first queer film about Aids I saw, and its sense of disconnection resonated with me. A year later, The Living End terrified and electrified me with its intransigence. It’s about a love of life, a desire to live. I came of age during Section 28, the UK government bill that banned the “promotion” of homosexuality. No adult had ever instigated a conversation with me about Aids. I assumed being gay meant early death. Terrified of getting ill, I had never had sex. I didn’t know how to approach a guy, let alone demand he wear a condom. This was the alienation of the time, tapped into by both Haynes and Araki.Perhaps there is no such thing, then, as an Aids genre. These works are too shape-shifting to comprise a fixed tradition. What we have instead are the stories audiences need at the time they are made. Pandemics cause existential dread. They also cause ennui. Many want life to return to normal as quickly as possible, to forget, move on. It happened with Aids, once antiretrovirals were introduced. And again with Covid-19. For many, it’s already as though nothing ever happened.This has affected the stories that get told. In 2015, Russell T Davies pitched a TV drama about Aids that was turned down by Channel 4, the BBC and ITV. The subject was too tough, they said, it wouldn’t have an audience. After years of trying, Channel 4 finally agreed to commission it if Davies reduced his planned eight episodes to four. He fought for five. The resulting series, It’s a Sin, aired in 2021, during a new pandemic. It became the most streamed show in the channel’s history.‘It’s a Sin’ aired in 2021, during a new pandemic. It became the most streamed show in Channel 4’s history Davies’ was an Aids story as yet untold, that of young friends in London in the first years of the crisis. The British capital was a relative backwater, the virus a distant rumour. With compassion and care, Davies narrates their lives and, among them, deaths. For viewers born long after the introduction of life-saving drugs, it was an education and a wake-up call. There was a surge in HIV testing when the show aired. At first, Aids stories were written to raise awareness, then to “humanise” those who were suffering. Now, stories about Aids can excavate elements of the crisis that have gone overlooked. I have long felt that some of the repercussions of HIV/Aids have not been fully understood. Five years ago, I started writing a novel, Nova Scotia House, to explore the alternative lifestyles and queer philosophies of the 1960s and ’70s that were jeopardised by the Aids crisis. Many queer communities had been living outside the capitalist system, in squats or abandoned warehouses, experimenting with the very fabric of life. Aids cut short those experiments, forcing attention on to survival itself. What emerged in its wake was a more consumerist model, typified in the UK by “the pink pound”. Can we reconnect with experimental philosophies again? I wanted to focus on the early 1990s, the years just before the breakthroughs in treatment, a period under-represented in Aids narratives. It was a time of exhaustion and despair, yet also one of communal strength and resolve. I wanted, too, to explore the experiences of friends and partners who couldn’t openly grieve. Often, families or employers expected them to carry on as normal, even during or after a friend’s death. Finally, I wanted to write a love story reduced to its essentials: love, sex, community, food, death and, ultimately, hope. An invitation for readers to consider how they live and what they could change. This, to me, is an Aids story that could be of use to us now. Charlie Porter’s novel “Nova Scotia House” is published on March 20Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram
