SOURCE: "Coming Up for Air: Three AIDS Plays," in Journal of American Culture, Vol. 15, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 63-7.

In the essay below, Gross compares The Normal Heart to two other AIDS plays: William Hoffman's As Is and Harvey Fierstein's Safe Sex. All three works are "history plays, " Gross asserts, that "remind audiences that history is political, art is political and even sex is political. "

Jews, homosexuals, infidels and other devils took more than their fair share of the blame for the Black Death which plagued medieval Europe. No historical drama exists to depict that piece of the gay collective past. Until recently, writers of gay historical drama chose a plague of a different color—the non-biological warfare of persecution, oppression and brutality which crouches at the center of the "three key symbolic events in … gay history: Oscar Wilde's trial, the Nazi purge, and Stonewall" [J. M. Clum, "'A...