HBO tells the story of the landmark court case that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and sent California's hateful and homophobic Proposition 8 to the trash heap of history in an uneven but powerful documentary, The Case Against 8. It's a bit too dry and not as gripping as it deserves to be, but I was nonetheless moved by the courage of the plaintiffs and sat in wonder at how much things have changed since my day in court.
Kris Perry, one of the plaintiffs in the Case Against 8, and one of her sons
Two days later I watched another HBO presentation, Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, about the early days of the AIDS epidemic. This one is not dry. Neither were my eyes. It's powerful stuff and the lead character, Ned Weeks (Larry Kramer in fact) is convincingly played by Mark Ruffalo, an actor whose work I have long enjoyed.
The most sobering moment of The Normal Heart comes at the end when a slide tells us that 35 million people worldwide have died from this plague. 35 MILLION PEOPLE! The mind cannot grasp the enormity of that. In America we lost a generation of young men but eventually turned AIDS into a manageable chronic health problem -- at least for those lucky enough to have good health insurance. The rest of the world, especially the African continent, has not been so lucky.
In the US, AIDS has been somewhat tamed and homophobes have been chastised. It's politically correct to support gay marriage and, in the greater New York area at least, being gay ceased to be an issue for many of us quite some time ago.
But hatred and stupidity are alive and thriving in other parts of the country, and the world. Watching The Case Against 8 and The Normal Heart is an important reminder of that fact.
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