Hi there everyone and happy Pride!
I'm Claybourne Elder and these are Iconic LGBTQ Moments in the Theatre
You Should Know.
This year for pride
I've teamed up with Eric Ulloa, Roberto Araujo and the team at Playbill and three other
LGBTQ Broadway stars to empower and uplift you each week of Pride 2022.
Each week
We're coming to you
with a little mini lesson about our glorious queer theatrical history.
So let's learn a little something.
As queer subject matter started to finally have a commercially
viable and award winning life on Broadway stages,
something horrifying was lingering backstage that would upend
all of this. Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.
It was the first headline about what would eventually be known as HIV AIDS.
Doctors were perplexed as their young and healthy gay patients were suddenly
dying of symptoms that had only been seen in much older patients.
Soon, rumors and gossip raged throughout the US, fueling hysteria
about this unknown virus.
Religious institutions used it as leverage and as physical proof of God's punishment
for being homosexual.
Republican President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan
turned their backs on a growing epidemic, feeling a homosexual problem
didn't affect their political lives.
Reagan wouldn't even say the word AIDS
until four years after the virus was detected
and just about 16,000 people had died from it.
Ignorance, stigma and privilege found most heterosexuals
ignoring a deadly epidemic, stealing the lives of young gay men and trans women.
And our community found itself very much alone and defenseless
on a terrifying battlefield.
AIDS was cutting a horrifying swath across the country,
and in the Broadway and New York theatrical community,
it was the tidal wave that washed away an entire generation.
Cast members would arrive to their theaters finding out that
their colleagues who had called out for sickness would be dead
just a few days later. The leading man of the Tony Award winning musical
Grand Hotel became too sick to perform on the Tony Awards and subsequently died
in the recording studio while laying down the show's cast album.
As many have stated, AIDS didn't just come for the generals,
it took the privates as well.
It wasn't just losing those that had given our community so much
but losing the community that hadn't yet given what was inside them.
The stories, the performances, the theatrical innovations
we never got to see.
Broadway had no choice but to fight back.
In 1981 activist, writer and playwright Larry Kramer had an almost clairvoyant
sense of what was to come
and co-founded an organization to help his dying community,
the Gay Men's Health Crisis, though this would go on to be the world's largest
private organization assisting people with AIDS in 1981 no one was interested
in helping this organization let alone even reporting on it or the virus.
So what do artists do when they need to use their loudest voice they make art.
In April of 1985, the first production of Larry Kramer's
almost autobiographical play, The Normal Heart, opened off-Broadway
at the Public Theater the play documented Larry's alter ego Ned Weeks,
and the first four years of the AIDS epidemic.
It was raw, it was intense.
It was of the moment so much so that the set designer would cross out
the number of those dead from AIDS painted on the set and update it daily.
In the famous words of Death of a Salesman, attention must be paid.
And it finally was beginning to.
Of the first 75 times that The New York Times printed the word AIDS,
50 of them were in relation to The Normal Heart.
Larry's voice was loud and clear and unrelenting.
The play was revived finally on Broadway in 2011,
where it took home the Tony for Best Play Revival
and outside the theater doors on any given night of the run was Larry Kramer,
with pamphlets telling audiences what our government still wasn't
doing in regards HIV AIDS. His tenacity
and dedication as fierce as it ever was.
By the late 1980s, what would ultimately become today's
philanthropic heart of Broadway began as two organizations each
focused on providing immediate support for those devastated by the AIDS epidemic.
One Equity Finance AIDS was founded by the Council of Actors’
Equity Association and focused on helping those in the theatrical community
as there were far too many voices sidelined and lost.
The other Broadway Cares looked beyond theater to awarding
lifesaving grants to AIDS service organizations across the country.
By 1992, the two merged becoming Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS
a joint force that for the last 30 years has championed
and expanded the missions of both original organizations.
Today millions of people in all 50 states Puerto Rico and Washington D.C.
get meals and medication, healthcare and hope.
Thanks to generous Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS
supporters and those iconic red buckets.
How much so over $300 million.
Now, I told you last week that La Cage aux Folles had a unique tie in with BCFA.
Want to know why?
After losing cast members to the scourge of AIDS,
the cast stepped up to create the first Easter Bonnet competition,
a collection of bonnets in the basement of the Palace Theater.
The best bonnet was determined by dropping dollars in a bucket next to each bonnet.
The event raised an incredible $21,000 and by the next year
became a staged production
and is now one of the longest running benefits for Broadway Cares.
We now live in a world where HIV is no longer a death sentence
when diagnosed and properly treated.
Drugs like Prep have made the world a lot safer for so many as the virus
still has no cure.
But access to that health care is still for the privileged and not a
right for all, which we continue to fight. For the theatrical generation we lost.
We continue on in their memory and hope to create even brighter days
ahead in a future where AIDS is actually history.
As Tony Kushner wrote in his landmark Angels in America.
The dead will be commemorated and we'll struggle on with the living
And we are not going away.
We won't die
secret deaths anymore.
The world only spins forward.
We will be citizens. The time has come.
And next
week for the final episode, we shake this all up a little bit.
What do you mean?
Ooh can't wait?
So here's where I leave you this week and tell you to keep going,
keep googling, keep researching, and type in these topics.
I gave you an appetizer, and there's a whole feast out there.
We'll be back next week with our final host and a new topic
to remind you of the powerful history of our gorgeous diverse community.
Happy Pride family!