The Tony-winning Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” concluded with a wedding in a hospital room between the protagonist Ned Weeks and his closeted lover, Felix, then dying of AIDS. Many people felt that Kramer had added the exchange of vows for the 2011 production since gay marriage seemed like such an anomaly in 1985, when the play premiered at the Public Theatre.But Kramer, a ferocious gay activist, felt no compunction including a scene of two men getting married in the original — no matter how jarring it might have appeared to the some in the audience at that time.Broadway has long been considered too much of a niche market to be a part of the national discourse. Prior to the AIDS epidemic, which decimated the theater’s artistic community, plays about gays and lesbians were largely relegated to the stuff of farce and comedies, such as Terrence McNally’s “The Ritz,” about a straight blue-collar worker hiding from mobsters in a gay bathhouse.However, the period also produced Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy,” a fervent plea for acceptance of gay love as equal to heterosexual love, which won the Tony for Best Play in 1983. Two years later, his musical comedy “La Cage aux Folles,” with songs by Jerry Herman, further propagated that notion, winning a Best Musical Tony.Much angrier and spikier work followed with Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” and, arriving in epic form, Tony Kushner’s two-part series “Angels in America,” which won consecutive Best Play Tony Awards in 1993 and 1994. (Mike Nichols later adapted Kushner’s plays into Emmy-winning HBO productions, starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep.) McNally moderated the tone with his elegiac “Love! Valour! Compassion!” about a group of gay men flirting and soul-searching in a lakeside summer home. The tragi-comedy won the Best Play Tony in 1995 and McNally, nearly two decades later, would present as matter-of-fact the marriage of two men with a son in his Tony-nominated “Mothers and Sons.”Even more telling, on the 2003 Tony Awards telecast, songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman celebrated their win for “Hairspray” with an on-air lip lock. “I love this man,” said Shaiman at the podium. “We’re not allowed to get married in this world …. But I’d like to declare, in front of all these people, I love you and I’d like to live with you for the rest of my life.”By 2011, the Tonys had become so linked with gays in the public perception that host Neil Patrick Harris, an openly gay and married celebrity with a family, opened the broadcast with the inclusive musical number, “It’s Not Just For Gays Anymore.”Those watching the 2015 Tony Awards might have looked askance at that declaration given the historic triumph of “Fun Home,” which won five honors including Best Musical, a college student’s full-throated celebration of lesbian love (“I’m Changing My Major to Joan”) in the face of mixed messages from her disapproving mother and a closeted gay father.Of course, it’s impossible to measure the impact that this kind of brave and innovative work may have played in the growing public acceptance of the LGBT community. Suffice to say that changing one mind at a time, and Broadway no doubt had a significant role, has led to a majority of the American public agreeing with the historic Supreme Court decision to grant marriage equality, no matter the sexual orientation, as a constitutional right. The exchange of vows between Ned and Felix in “The Normal Heart” may not seem “normal” to all people but it’s certainly is in the eyes of the law.
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