36,656,825 and Counting
In 1983, Larry Kramer wrote an article for the New York Native filled with righteous anger, brilliant insight and, reading it now more than 30 years later, electric prophecy. It began, “If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble.” He proceeds to catalogue the inaction and sheer terror that defined the emerging epidemic.
Kramer recounts the failures of government officials, the medical establishment, researchers, the media, and the gay community itself. With prescient accuracy he connects disenfranchisement with vulnerability to HIV and describes the unrelenting stigma that even today shapes our still inadequate response to the epidemic. He is perceptive as he is relentless. His message: “we must fight to live.”
Kramer’s article was titled “1,112 and Counting.” After three decades, we’re still counting. More than 36 million people have died from AIDS and nearly as many are living with HIV. In India, roughly 150,000 people died from AIDS-related causes last year, ten times the number in the United States. For all our progress, the fight is not over.
Larry Kramer wrote “The Normal Heart” in 1985 during the grimmest and most uncertain days of the epidemic. No other play – no other work of art really – comes as close to capturing those times, and it resonates even today. A long time coming, the film version from HBO brings us back and in doing so reminds us what it takes to act up and fight back.
“The Normal Heart” aptly gets its title from a W.H. Auden poem “September 1, 1939” written as the world teetered on the brink of another epochal tragedy, World War II. What was true in 1939 was true in 1985 and remains true today:
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
The AIDS epidemic has reached across the world in ways that perhaps only Larry Kramer would have imagined in those early days, and there is still no choice.
The author of this blog, James Robertson, is Executive Director of India HIV/AIDS Alliance in New Delhi.
Alliance India brings together committed organisations and communities to support sustained responses to HIV in India. Complementing the Indian national programme, Alliance India works through capacity building, knowledge sharing, technical support and advocacy. Through our network of partners, Alliance India supports the delivery of effective, innovative, community-based HIV programmes to key populations affected by the epidemic.
36,656,825 and Counting
In 1983, Larry Kramer wrote an article for the New York Native filled with righteous anger, brilliant insight and, reading it now more than 30 years later, electric prophecy. It began, “If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble.” He proceeds to catalogue the inaction and sheer terror that defined the emerging epidemic.
Kramer recounts the failures of government officials, the medical establishment, researchers, the media, and the gay community itself. With prescient accuracy he connects disenfranchisement with vulnerability to HIV and describes the unrelenting stigma that even today shapes our still inadequate response to the epidemic. He is perceptive as he is relentless. His message: “we must fight to live.”
Kramer’s article was titled “1,112 and Counting.” After three decades, we’re still counting. More than 36 million people have died from AIDS and nearly as many are living with HIV. In India, roughly 150,000 people died from AIDS-related causes last year, ten times the number in the United States. For all our progress, the fight is not over.
Larry Kramer wrote “The Normal Heart” in 1985 during the grimmest and most uncertain days of the epidemic. No other play – no other work of art really – comes as close to capturing those times, and it resonates even today. A long time coming, the film version from HBO brings us back and in doing so reminds us what it takes to act up and fight back.
“The Normal Heart” aptly gets its title from a W.H. Auden poem “September 1, 1939” written as the world teetered on the brink of another epochal tragedy, World War II. What was true in 1939 was true in 1985 and remains true today:
The AIDS epidemic has reached across the world in ways that perhaps only Larry Kramer would have imagined in those early days, and there is still no choice.
The author of this blog, James Robertson, is Executive Director of India HIV/AIDS Alliance in New Delhi.
Alliance India brings together committed organisations and communities to support sustained responses to HIV in India. Complementing the Indian national programme, Alliance India works through capacity building, knowledge sharing, technical support and advocacy. Through our network of partners, Alliance India supports the delivery of effective, innovative, community-based HIV programmes to key populations affected by the epidemic.