Larry Kramer’s Tony-winning play, The Normal Heart, based on historical events during the outbreak of AIDS, portrays the New York gay community’s indictment under the social prejudice and governmental indifference to the crisis. By presenting the gay community’s struggles to raise public attention to the disease and the gay activists’ fight for their own rights, the play discloses how and why AIDS and gay people have continuously been stigmatized and criminalized by medical reports, mass media, and governmental institutions. As Susan Sontag points out, AIDS is not just a disease but replete with punitive metaphors, which are socially and culturally constructed in order to condemn the disease as the result of perversity and moral degradation. The metaphors associated with AIDS stigmatize those who are affected and thus often inhibit them from seeking proper medical treatment. Only when the metaphors are rejected, the patients will be able to resist the disease. Following Sontag’s argument, this study will examine the playwright’s attempt to demystify such socio-cultural metaphor of AIDS, and also discuss how the playwright challenges the dominant AIDS discourse. Finally, the study will demonstrate that the play functions to help eliminate the prejudice against persons with AIDS and empower the gendered Others against the stigmatization of AIDS and its metaphors.
