I beyond loved this film. HBO at its best, as usual. I just did not fully understand why the guys turned on Ned? How did he make sex "dirty" again? I get that his exaggerated actions sometimes, maybe most of the time, did more bad than good, but he was still loud when the others were too quiet. How and when did he indirectly call Mickey a murderer? Will definitely watch again someday soon, just wondering if someone can clear this up.
Thanks!
Remember, this was before anybody knew what caused AIDS, how it was spread, etc. Ned thought it might be spread by sexual contact (he turned out to be right), and he wanted gay men to stop the rampant promiscuity that he thought was going to kill them all if it didn't stop.
Ned was saying that sex was killing gay men (ie, that sex was dangerous, if not exactly dirty), and gay men DID NOT want to hear that message. Mickey and the others didn't want to tell gay men to stop having sex whenever and however they wanted to, and that's why he took Ned's message as calling him a murderer. That plus Ned's very abrasive personality is why the other GMHC directors turned on him. Ned was confronting gay men, and the others wanted to reassure and comfort gay men.
Within a few years, most of that resistance to safe sex evaporated, when it became clear that Ned was right and they'd all die if they didn't change what they were doing.
Perfect explanation. Thanks so much.
share[deleted]
Also, most of the leaders of the GMHC didn't believe in being "out" about their sexuality, or in asking their community base to be out either. (Remember the scene in the film where Ned had put "Gay Men's Health Crisis" as the return address on all their mailouts, and everyone else wanted it just to be "GMHC"?) Ned (i.e. Larry Kramer) felt passionately that gay men needed to stand up, identify themselves for who they were and put themselves right in people's faces, or they would continue to be ignored. (And he was proven right.) He had a tendency to overspeak things when he got frustrated, and at one meeting he accused the GMHC, in being silent, of contributing to the deaths -- hence the suggestion that, in their chosen response, they were de facto murderers. (There was a famous artwork in the mid-80s by Keith Haring, a graphic designer who perished in the epidemic, called Silence=Death, that reflected the growing acceptance of the attitudes of activists like Kramer.)
Ned was kicked out of the GMHC (as Kramer was in real life) because he was pushing people to go somewhere they didn't want to go. The board didn't agree with him, and believed his approach was damaging their cause and making people unwilling to respond, so they were more comfortable not having him around. Keramer was the biggest single factor in the GMHC being started in the first place, so he was wounded deeply by being ejected, and it's probably fair to say he's never gotten over it. Since it wasn't until the community started adopting the approach Kramer was advocating all along, he was probably right also in his belief that earlier demands for action from politicians and officials would have saved many more lives.
You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.
that's what i thought as well. i just wish the flick and included
a short scene or two where we actually see Ned getting on everyone's
nerves.
Are you kidding me? He was getting on everyone's nerves the whole movie. That was a huge part of it. Of course, Kramer spins it to make it more about the message rather than the way he was delivering the message, which was the main reason they split. In the end, the GMHC was clearly right that Kramer was hurting the cause with his behavior more than he helped it and it was better for him to go off and do his own thing on his own terms rather than sabotage their efforts. They were just wrong not to do it sooner.
shareIt's a big answer that requires a lot of examination. I know some people have some pretty good answers, but I'd like to contribute my own two cents to the question.
Ned is proud of being gay because it is, to him, what completes who he is as a functioning human being. Bruce, Mickey and the others were "proud" because of the "luxuries" being gay at the time afforded them. The gays on Fire Island even make it a point to tell Ned how much they dislike him because of how his writing basically pickets the gay coda of living in the pre-AIDS 80s. I mean, look at his reaction to the White Party: all the promiscuity and the amounts of drugs being circled around. He's clearly uncomfortable with the thought that this is how people who don't understand the "dilemma" of being gay see him as, which is put to the test later when his brother tells him about the way the gays are being depicted in pop culture at the time. Does he still partake in the gay scene? Of course he does, but when he does, it's either from his "control" or because he's simply a human being with sexual needs and the desire to act on them. That's why I liked the touch on Murphy/Kramer's part not to show whether Ned DID participate in the orgy at the beginning and only show him in bed with Felix.
Later on, when Ned and Dr. Emma plead with the gays to cool down with sexual activity because they're on the path about what all the rampant, unprotected hedonism has caused and will cause, only to be booed and disrespected by the "gay mafia" that feels headlined by Mickey, who basically feels freedom to be who you are is a welcoming mat to f * * k as many guys as possible. Speaking as someone who was born at the heights of the AIDS epidemic and has only seen its devastation though documentaries and books, I can't even begin to imagine how terrifying it must have been to live in a time where you fought for the freedom to be your true self to be told the basic one thing that makes you feel great is just about the guaranteed end of your existence.
And then you have Bruce, who, in all definition of the word, was a complete coward and elevated to the position of "leader" only for the fact that everyone and his father would put out for him in a flash. What he was doing to help simply wasn't good enough because he put just as much time into shielding his sexual identity from the people who afford him his comfortable lifestyle as he did trying to combat the disease. Even if it isn't audibly stated, Ned clearly disliked their thought process because ending the epidemic would only give Bruce the comfort to slip back into his twink-laden shelter and the gays the ok to go back to the way things were (the West Hollywood way, my partner and I joke sometimes given the stuff we see when we end up down that way) without a second thought as to the terror they've just walked through.
And now, let's look at Ned from the GMHC's perspective. He's loud, abrasive and literate as hell about the perspective others have of "modern" gay lifestyle, again as demonstrated by the guy with the "Austr-outhern" accent who says none of them want Ned there and studying how Mayor Koch and those working for him act around him. The GMHC like him in a general sense (and because a couple of them probably want to sleep with him), but dislike his personality and nature, all the more so when the s * * t hits the fan. When the epidemic hits, they believe handling it in a quiet and respectful way is best so it can be fixed and life can go back to normal, which Ned clearly can't take in any way. He's seen how minorities have been eradicated throughout history because of that sort of "silence" and wait and knows they need to act as loud as they can to get results. Instead of seeing it as a necessary action to make headway, not to mention his stress over having to come to terms with Felix's inevitable death (which makes Bruce's decision horrifyingly hypocritical given his lovers' deaths), the board see his actions as those of a jealous, power hungry command freak and propagandist on a level similar of that to the Religious Right who wants to take gay power away and force everyone to be like him.
No one side was completely right or wrong for their actions because all were acting during a crisis no one could ever expect to exist or occur and worried about what the future will hold. But it still doesn't necessarily give Bruce and the rest of them the OK to sack Ned on the eve of his losing everything that genuinely mattered because what they were facing and "letting continue" was putting everyone though the ringer.
That's just my two cents on that aspect of the film that's been on my mind since May. I hope it's been helpful in any way.
Great responses and I don't have much more to add, except the line where Ned remarks that Bruce is being appointed as President because "he's popular, like High School."
One of the things I like about the movie is that while it makes clear Weeks/Kramer was a loudmouth with little to no political savvy, he was right about a lot of things. That's a dilemma in a lot of politics, not just gay politics: the person who cuts through BS often has terrible social skills and therefore is not able to affect policy.
This was in Shilt's book, "And the band played on", I believe in reference to Kramer: He kept a list of the GMHC members in his desk, and after they fired him, every time one of them died, he would pull out the list and check off their name with a pen.
In any case, Shilts made it clear that Kramer was not a very pleasant man, and that he had a tendency to carry grudges for aeons.
It wasn't Larry Kramer who kept the "opponents" list and crossed off the names as they died of AIDS, it was Paul Lorch, an editor of the Bay Area Reporter. Lorch opposed the closing of the bathhouses, probably in large part because they were among the paper's biggest advertisers.
Larry Kramer comes across as ornery and a little caustic in Shilts' book but is hardly portrayed as a villain. Just a passionate curmudgeon. And yeah, not very pleasant. But he wrote some great, eye-opening articles and did a world of good.
Thanks for the correction. I'm kinda glad I was wrong.
share.
The film is autobiographical.
Take a look at Larry Kramer's biography on Wikipedia, and it will probably become much clearer to you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Kramer
Also, if you re-watch the film, you'll notice that the guys didn't "turn" on Ned -- they had always been against his radical, out-there, angry, in-your-face, and off-putting style, from nearly the very first frames of the movie. To Ned, his was the only style that was going to work; but for the rest of them, it was too radical, and they felt it was counter-productive, and it also pushed their buttons (in terms of outing themselves publicly, taking too many risks, etc.), and taking sex away from them when they had fought so hard to win sexual freedom.
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Larry was discerning enough to see as far back as 1976 when he wrote *beep* that the hedonism of the NYC gay community was going to kill them. Many of the "A Group" Manhattan gays, many still in the closet, hated him for this book and they hated him ever after. Paul Popham, one of the "A Group" became the president of GMHC and was among those who ousted Kramer, even though he (Kramer) was one of the founders and most tireless workers. Most of them died in the '80s; Larry proved himself right and he's till living today.
[I figured IMDb would censor the book name, so it's here:
Fox Alpha Golf Golf Oscar Tango Sierra.]
For exerpts go to amazon.com and type in the name, then on the page click on the book name, and on the next page click on the book cover. (IMDb won't let me post the link because it has "that" word.)
I only have one person on ignore, but I've had to ignore him 625 different times.
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To the OP:
I would also highly recommend watching And the Band played On, which goes into much more detail about your question and which will cause you to understand the conflict....
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