ABSTRACT
When Ned Weeks, the thinly disguised autobiographical hero of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, learns from a friend that he has been removed from the board of directors of the play's fictional version of the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), he responds defensively by naming names—the members of a group even more important to him than the one he founded:
I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E. M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold…. These are not invisible men…. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there—all through history we've been there. 1
