Reviving Rage

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Jesse McKinley, “An Acclaimed But Failed Play Receives a Somber Post-Mortem,” New York Times, July 1, 2004. 2. D. S. Lawson, “Rage and Remembrance: The AIDS Plays,” in AIDS: The Literary Response, ed. Emmanuel Nelson (New York: Twayne, 1992), 141. 3. For more on Kramer's rhetorical legacy, see Charles E. Morris III, “Larry Kramer,” in American Voices: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Orators, ed. Bernard K. Duffy and Richard W. Leeman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 270–77. 4. David Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), xiv. 5. Christopher Castiglia, “Past Burning: The (Post-)Traumatic Memories of (Post-)Queer Theory,” in States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies, ed. Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 72. 6. I thank Jeffrey Bennett for sharing his essay, “Resisting the Rhetoric of Health ‘Management’: Diabetes, HIV, and the Trappings of Medical Imaginaries” (unpublished manuscript), and prompting this point. 7. Larry Kramer, The Tragedy of Today's Gays (New York: Penguin, 2005). An excellent engagement of Kramer's use of polemics is Erin Rand, “An Inflammatory Fag and a Queer Form: Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): 297–319. 8. J. Ricky Price, “History: An Open Letter to Larry Kramer,” The New Gay, April 29, 2011, http://thenewgay.net/2011/04/an-open-letter-to-larry-kramer.html. 9. Richard Kim, “Sex Panic,” Salon.com, May 7, 2005, http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/05/07/kramer/index.html. 10. Christopher Castiglia, “Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories,” boundary 2 27, no. 2 (2000): 155. 11. Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 34. 12. Jacob Juntunen, “Mainstream Theatre, Mass Media, and the 1985 Premiere of The Normal Heart: Negotiating Forces Between Emergent and Dominant Ideologies,” in “We Will Be Citizens”: New Essays on Gay and Lesbian Theatre, ed. James Fisher (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 39–41. 13. Cindy Kisenberg's work is uniquely insightful with regard to how their subject matter and narrative arcs engendered different audience responses. AIDS, Social Change, and Theater: Performance as Protest (New York: Garland, 1995), 49–89. 14. John D'Emilio, “A Meaning for All Those Words: Sex, Politics, History and Larry Kramer,” in We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer, ed. Lawrence Mass (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 80. 15. Tony Kushner, “Three Screeds from Key West: For Larry Kramer,” in We Must Love, 192. 16. Michael Paller, “Larry Kramer and Gay Theater,” in We Must Love, 248. 17. Center for Disease Control, “CDC Fact Sheet: HIV and AIDS Among Gay and Bisexual Men,” September 2010, http://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/docs/fastfacts-msm-final508comp.pdf. 18. Qtd. in Patrick Healy, “Life Lessons in ‘Normal Heart,’” New York Times, June 24, 2011. 19. Qtd. in Healy, “Life Lessons.” 20. Further information on this text can be found in Bonnie Dow, “AIDS, Perspective by Incongruity, and Gay Identity in Larry Kramer's ‘1,112 and Counting,’” Communication Studies 45 (1994): 225–40. 21. Larry Kramer, “Please Know,” April 20, 2011, http://www.actup.org/forum/content/letter-larry-kramer-please-know-4142/. 22. Larry Kramer, “Please Know.” 23. Qtd. in Paller, “Larry Kramer and Gay Theater,” 252. 24. McKinley, “An Acclaimed But Failed.” 25. Adam Markovitz, “Anger and Heart,” Entertainment Weekly, May 20, 2011, 19. Additional informationNotes on contributorsIsaac WestIsaac West is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa