AIDS at 30

Now that all of the hoopla surrounding the 30th anniversary of AIDS has died down, there’s an opportunity for more sober reflection. In the AIDS Mastery Workshops that I created in 1985, there was an opening visualization which asked participants to go back in time to before they ever heard the word AIDS, look at what they were doing, what their lives were like, and how AIDS had changed their dreams and plans. Facilitators still begin these weekend workshops with that process. AIDS at 30 still has a day before, a day of diagnosis and the day when it sinks in. There are other similarities, but there are thankfully huge differences. AIDS has gone from, “odds are you’re going to die from this,” to a pretty sure bet that with the latest medication you can live a rich and rewarding life. And now in Germany, a man no longer has any trace of HIV, something that could not have been anticipated when Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart was first introduced at the Public Theater. For those of you who have not seen The Normal Heart, it chronicles the dawning of the epidemic among a group of gay men in New York, including Ned Weeks, the Larry Kramer character, portrayed in a transcendent performance by Joe Mantello, and how the group, the gay community and society responded.

I was working at The Actor’s Institute when friends, colleagues and students started showing strange, seemingly unrelated symptoms, of what, we did not know. But it seemed to happen primarily among gay men, one of whom, Max Navar, was a student and pal. He began to lobby me to pull together a support group for the people around the Institute who were impacted. Dan Fauci, the founder of the Institute, offered us space. The group grew and when I was pressed to create a workshop I borrowed parts of Dan’s Mastery of Acting and used information from my own spiritually-based series of workshops and an array of psychological principles to piece together what I called the AIDS Mastery. Again, Dan offered the Institute to us. “Us” consisted of me and my friends Chuck Baier and Victor Phillips, who became my partners and took on the task of forming the infrastructure to produce more workshops, which we called Northern Lights Alternatives. Many of the men (it was before women were diagnosed in the US), including Chuck and Victor, died before the coming of Protease Inhibitors, which radically altered the face of the epidemic. Others are still among us. The work of the AIDS Mastery expanded to 30 cities in many countries and took on a life of its own. The workshops still occur, though not as frequently, in as many places, or with the kind of urgency of previous years. So we are free to deal with more of a variety of issues surrounding life with HIV/AIDS rather than focusing on the looming shadow of death. 

All of which brings us back to the beginning, and to the need for society to remember the history of AIDS, lest we forget the cost in terms of human life, and the courage of those who lived and died in the wake of the epidemic. We, as a community of those infected and those of us who were/are impacted and involved for a wide variety of reasons, have a rich legacy to pass along, including a unique blending of spirituality and facing up to the powers that be in significant ways to change the course of events for people living with AIDS. We took on governments, the medical establishment, religious institutions and bigotry from all quarters. Lest we forget, The Normal Heart stands as a brilliant reminder that prejudice is still alive and kicking, and activism is still the key to moving hearts and minds wherever and whenever the needs of people with HIV/AIDS are not being met. Its New York run is currently scheduled to end on July 10th, so please take advantage of the opportunity to see it.