AIDS AT 20

Crisis has sapped artists of energy
For some, passion has given way to caution

In the mid-1980s, when it became clear what a huge impact AIDS was having on the nation's arts communities, a number of publications illustrated the devastation with rows of photographs of felled artists.

The Chronicle was the first to address that subject in December 1986 with a series of mini-profiles and related stories in Sunday Datebook. Fifteen years later, one is tempted to view the crisis as having leveled off. Antiviral drugs have created a generation of AIDS "long-termers" -- at least among the privileged -- and with it a dramatic reduction in AIDS-related deaths in some communities.

But the epidemic's toll on the arts can't be measured only by the sum of lost artists, their unfinished projects and unmet potential. A climate marked by caution, accommodation and a sometimes gutless superficiality is also part of the disease's legacy. "A way of life had been destroyed," writes author Edmund White in the introduction to "Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS," a recent collection of essays and personal memoirs.

According to White, "the experimentalism, the erotic sophistication, the prejudice against materialism, the elusive humor, the ambition to measure up to international and timeless standards, above all, the belief that art should be serious and difficult -- all this rich, ambiguous mixture of values and ideas evaporated."

Among gay artists, White contends, idiosyncrasy and bohemianism have given way to "stylistic blandness." "Gay fiction has now become a wading pond for minor talents to dabble in; the novels often sound transcribed from the film scripts they long to become: novel as novelization. Gay bookshops are closing down (from 72 two years ago to 50 now). A tackiness, a sort of steroid- injected sex-shop conformism, has replaced the old transgressiveness of gay art."

Daniel Goldstein, a San Francisco artist and co-founder of Visual Aid, a nonprofit group that helps artists with life-threatening illnesses, agrees. "When I go to the galleries in New York everything seems very staid and intellectual. Art isn't sensual anymore. It isn't angry or confrontational. The general trend is very cerebral: It might be a general anti-emotionalism in the arts."

Given the events of the past 20 years, Goldstein says, that urge to distance oneself and focus on other aspects of one's life makes sense. "People have been so embattled through AIDS that they want to make their art into a refuge, not a mirror of what they've been living through.

"The only comparison would be art in wartime or plague time. In wartime, art is not that violent. It's only after a war or plague that artists have the distance and time to finally express their reactions to the horrors, tragedy and grief that they've held locked inside. Look at the abstract expressionist movement after the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II, or the work of Hieronymus Bosch after the Black Plague. With AIDS we're not there yet. AIDS is still very much with us."

Theater, traditionally a forum for social and political themes, saw a small explosion of AIDS-related work in 1985 when Larry Kramer's agitprop "The Normal Heart" opened off-Broadway and William Hoffman's "As Is" played uptown at a Broadway house. In their wake, artists tended to address AIDS metaphorically rather than directly: Stephen Sondheim with "Into the Woods," Craig Lucas with "Prelude to a Kiss" and the late Scott McPherson with "Marvin's Room." It wasn't until Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic "Angels in America" that the enormity of the epidemic was fully embraced. In its wake AIDS has once again been marginalized.

"It's gotten less political," says Austin Pendleton, a veteran actor, director and playwright whose 1995 play "Uncle Bob" was recently revived off- Broadway. "Whereas 'The Normal Heart' and 'As Is' were explicitly political, the plays that deal with AIDS today are much more about the personal relationships that surround it."

"Uncle Bob" is the story of a gay man and his homophobic nephew, both of whom contract AIDS. Pendleton says he was surprised when a New York producer chose to revive it, given the apathy and political passivity in American culture today: "I think people go through periods where they don't really think that an artistic political statement will really change anything. And that's what we're in right now. It's a feeling of, 'What the hell, it's not gonna make any difference.' "

In Hollywood, where social issues are dwarfed by the profit imperative, AIDS has barely made a dent. Jonathan Demme's "Philadelphia" was critically applauded and even made money, thanks to a star performance by Tom Hanks. Other attempts, such as "Boys on the Side" and "The Cure," made less of an impact.

Television, which is able to produce original dramas for far less -- and therefore can take risks that theatrical films can't -- has actually done a far better job of holding a mirror to the AIDS crisis. The NBC movie "An Early Frost" broke the ice in 1985, paving the way for productions such as "The Ryan White Story," "Gia" and "In the Gloaming."

Independent filmmakers were the first, however, beginning with Arthur J. Bressan's "Buddies" (1985). Bill Sherwood's "Parting Glances," a 1986 film that starred Steve Buscemi as a caustic AIDS patient, was a landmark, as were Norman Rene's "Longtime Companion" (1990) and "Love! Valour! Compassion!" (1997).

"I think 'Parting Glances' was probably the most successful at incorporating AIDS into a dramatic story," says Michael Lumpkin, artistic director of the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. "Considering that the community was having to deal with it day to day, that was quite a challenge to present something that was so devastating and not yet understood."

In the late '80s and '90s, Lumpkin says, "I think filmmakers were better able to incorporate it into their films and stories because we'd lived with it for a while." Around that time, he adds, there was a four- to five-year period in which gay-made films dealt most frequently with AIDS.

Today, he says, the subject is "handled in a very nonchalant manner," as though the disease were "just a part of life. Throughout the epidemic I feel that films have generally handled it in the way that the (gay) community was handling it. It's a part of life, and you deal with it when it comes up."

In the festival's 25th annual showcase, which opens June 14, Lumpkin says, a French film called "The Adventures of Felix" typifies the more casual depiction of HIV infection. "It's a sweet road movie about this gay man who hitchhikes across France. He has this wonderful scene where he encounters an elderly woman who's on medication" -- he's on a "cocktail" combo of antiviral therapies -- "and they take their drugs together."

Isn't it possible, though, that AIDS has given many artists a new perception, a way of seeing and appreciating they wouldn't have without the experience of early loss? In "Heaven's Coast," his 1996 memoir about the death of his lover Wally Roberts from AIDS, author Mark Doty writes, "Loss brought with it a species of vision, an inwardness which was the gift of a terrible time -- nearly unbearable, but bracingly real."

That would be true for men like Joe Goode, the San Francisco choreographer who resisted pressure from his board of directors when they asked him not to stage his 1998 dance musical "Deeply There: Stories of a Neighborhood." In the piece, which won a Bessie Award for choreography, Goode played Frank, a man caring for his dying lover; in the last scene, Frank sings an elegy to him.

"It's an example of how certain bold artists continue to make works about AIDS even when there are pressures to stop doing it," says David Gere, a dance critic and assistant professor in the department of world arts and cultures at UCLA. "Joe Goode chose to make this piece that was explicitly about AIDS as late as 1998, even though his board and staff said, 'Please Joe, get over it.' "

That sense of exhaustion -- the compassion fatigue that comes with being confronted over and over with the epidemic -- isn't restricted to the dance arena. In a 1997 literary seminar, former New York Times theater critic Frank Rich spoke of receiving letters from readers after favorably reviewing an AIDS play. Some of the readers weren't necessarily homophobic, he said, and yet many felt compelled to say, "Enough already, I get the point."

Just as some audience members reach a saturation point, most artists -- Goode being a notable exception -- have also discovered a limit to dealing with the subject of AIDS. "Part of it," Goldstein says, "is that you accumulate so much grief inside you that you're afraid to open the floodgates because there's so much inside there."