MovieChat Forums > The Normal Heart (2014) Discussion > Great film, but one scene surprised me, ...

Great film, but one scene surprised me, and not in a good way...SPOILER!

posted 11 years ago by Gabe1972
30 replies | jump to latest

During the meeting where Dr. Emma was talking to the young men at Ned's house, she told them that she didn't really know what caused the disease and for sure how it was transmitted. She then added, "Doesn't common sense tell you you should cool it?" What bothered me was the extreme reaction. People started yelling and acting as if their life was over if they stopped having sex. Tommy even said, "That doesn't leave much to look forward to."

Really? So the most important thing in your life is having sex? The most important thing in your relationship with your partner is sex? And even if you don't have a partner, sex is still your reason for living? I could understand a reaction of disappointment and some anger in the fact that she is saying this without knowing for sure how it is being transmitted, but the way that they acted was, to put it bluntly, shocking. In the end, though, is your need and desire for sex so rampant that you are not going to listen to advice that may keep you from contracting this heinous disease because the thought that it may be sexually transmitted may not be 100% fact? (when I say "you", I am referring to the people in the film)

Now this didn't change my opinion of gay people in any way, shape or form, as I know that most people, whether gay or straight, like/love sex, but they don't think of it as their life blood like this group of people did. It did change my opinion of this particular group of people a little, though.

I do understand that their reaction was stronger than would be from straight people because they have been fighting for a right to be who they are and be with who they want to for a long time, and in a way someone was suggesting that they need to stop an aspect of that struggle, but I still think the reaction was too extreme.

Did anyone else find their reaction to the suggestion extreme?

The sad thing is, if many of them had heeded the suggestion, they would still be here. Great sex is not worth dying over.

The plural of mouse is mice. The plural of goose is geese. Why is the plural of moose not meese?

[–] puirt-a-beul 10 years ago

Did anyone else find their reaction to the suggestion extreme?

Ideologically, in principal, yes; in real-life terms? Absolutely not.

If I can add to tsim0227's splendid summing-up: it wasn't just a matter of Larry Kramer's perception; to understand their responses, you have to have an understanding of the context of the time.

I think Kramer was right not to spend expository time on this in the film, but you need to remember that gay self-identity was very much a new-born at the time; when the Plague struck, most gay men had been well into adulthood before they could even apply words like "gay" to themselves. Most still couldn't be "out" in any real sense, and as some of the characters made clear they could be fired from their jobs on the spot and shut out of people's lives for even hinting that they were gay.

I'm not trying to spin a pity-story, but to point out that it was a very real prison of the mind -- one of the things Kramer has been lifelong angry about. It was a ghetto, and produced ghetto behaviour, where people cling to things that define them against their oppressors. The one tangible thing that distinguished their sense of self was gay sex, since it was the essential activity that defined them as gay men -- so anyone trying to take it away from them became indistinguishable from the oppressors.

It's pretty common for straights (or, in some of the radical terminology of the time, "breeders") to scorn the gay promiscuity as selfish and hedonistic, but that's speaking with the luxury of hindsight and the privilege of never having had their own sexual identity called into question. In a very real sense, gays of the time were fighting for their survival, as they saw it; and it's one of the great wickednesses of this modern Plague that it descended almost exclusively on gay men, and that it happened at a time when they were groping towards a broader expression of what it is to be human.

There are many real-life examples. Here in Australia, for instance, we had an extraordinary man named Fred Hollows, an ophthalmologist who had done incredible and selfless work addressing cataracts and glaucoma among indigenous Australians and people of the islands in the Pacific; he was made Australian of the Year in 1990, and the media (in its one-size-fits-all approach) asked him to comment on the AIDS crisis. As a trained epidemiologist, he said that an urgent step should be to stop gay people from having sex. The gay community was outraged, and in its defensive anger started flinging the H-word (homophobe); the broader community was outraged in its turn at seeing a Top Bloke (which he genuinely was) villified, and -- no doubt containing quite a few actual H-words among its numbers -- launched a backlash against gays in general. In the end it all achieved nothing except setting the cause of ACT UP and groups like it back several years. Fred Hollows died in 1993, still feeling considerably aggrieved at being misunderstood and unappreciated by the gay community when he felt his comments had been an attempt to save their lives. I don't think he was wrong, but then I also don't think any of the "sides" were actually wrong (except the H-words; they're always wrong).

It's a much more complex issue than just, "oh, well then, just don't have sex", and that's what the conversation in Ned's apartment was trying to reflect.

You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

[–] 10 years ago

[deleted]