![]() ![]() I went to the library to do research and learned about Alan Turing, the Englishman who cracked the Nazis' Enigma code and helped win World War II. I began with a diatribe by Ned, Kramer's theatrical stand-in, about gay history that listed more than a dozen people I'd never heard of. This would be a mind-blowing scene - even if it required me to craft a clumsy transition and pretend it was all one gay everyman's story. Nothing was quite long enough, so I cheated and took a haphazard approach, deciding to suture two profound pieces by two different characters into one longish, eruptive moment of total hell-raising catharsis. These were my people.Ī 10-minute monologue was required for the drama competition, and not knowing any better, I flipped through the pages to find a chunk of text that might work. These people in this play were nothing like me, but I needed to understand them. The violent truth-telling in the play's scenes - between men at the beginning of a global epidemic - attracted me. The story of Ned Weeks, a Jewish, gay activist and writer in New York City, reverberated with me. To me, this was what it meant to be gay: to know other intelligent, successful men who wanted to change the world. So I sought support in the raw emotion of Kramer's autobiographical play. ![]() People wanted to know if I had proof, but I'd never had sex with another guy - only fantasies. "Oh, well." He let it hang in the air and then looked down, embarrassed. ![]()
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