Four books, four touchstones, by director Shane Bosher.
The Normal Heart, by Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer is one of my heroes. He died a few years back, but his life was underpinned by extraordinary courage. A no-bulls*** chronicler of gay experience, he wrote about the really tricky stuff and was often vilified for it. He once said, "I put the truth in writing. That's what I do: I have told the f***ing truth to everyone I have ever met."
I found out who I was through his writing and was inspired by his activism. As a teenager, his play The Normal Heart was on permanent loan from Hamilton Public Library. It was me, I always had it out. The play charts his own lived experience establishing and being thrown out of Gay Men's Health Crisis, an advocacy and support organisation set up at the beginning of the HIV/Aids crisis. The play deftly walks the tightrope between the personal and the political, as its hero fights to get his community to wake up. It is incendiary, necessary writing. About 10 years ago, I got to see a revival of the play in New York. Ever the activist, he would hang outside the theatre at the end, thrusting fliers into audience members hands detailing government inaction on HIV/Aids. I emerged from the theatre an absolute blubbery mess. He looked at me and said "Good," thrust a flier in my hand and walked away. Everything about the encounter – its brevity, its non-compromising punch - felt perfect.
There is a lot of Larry's fight which has inspired the journey of the play I'm currently working on, Everything After. Its central character, Nick, is a lot like Larry. Fiercely intelligent, alive with contradiction, fuelled by passion, backed by history. The rainbow community owes a lot to people like Larry, who gave themselves permission to be Cassandra, shouting atop the mountain.