Inspiration and aspiration: behind The Normal Heart's still-powerful call to arms is an equally vibrant message about the dangers of letting pop culture define us

Google "Larry Kramer," and you'll get approximately 75 pages of hits. My name appears on almost every one of them. I have been forever linked with the man since 1992, when I debuted my off-Broadway autobiographical monologue The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me--a metaphorical title for the night in 1985 when I saw his play The Normal Heart, which catapulted me out of the closet and put me on the path toward the gathering world of ACT UP.

While Rex Reed once likened Larry's impact on my coming-of-age consciousness as "the 'kiss' of an unlikely Prince Charming," I've "always cast Larry in another mythic role in my life: father. Indeed, by inspiring me to join forces with my brethren to dismantle homophobia and fight the plague of AIDS, the invaluable if oft-times strident words and actions of Larry Kramer enabled me to find my own words and actions in an effort to make the world a better place and--hope against hope--to save some lives. Perhaps even my own.

And so it was with this anticipation of rejuvenating my activist spirit that I attended the revival of The Normal Heart at New York's Public Theater. The play still ripples with a provocative sense of agitprop, speaking anew to still-raging battles over safer sex and government recognition of same-sex marriages. Its rousing call to arms remains, but what struck me even more powerfully this time was the play's quieter quest for "a new definition of what it means to be gay."

"I belong to a culture," observes Kramer's thinly veiled autobiograpbical character of Ned Weeks, "that includes Proust ... Socrates ... Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci ... Walt Whitman ... Tennessee Williams ... Lorca ... James Baldwin ... Dag Hammarskjold ..." The list goes on and on. "These are not invisible men .... It's all there--all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And," Weeks concludes, "until we do that ... we're doomed."

Sitting on the other side of the footlights in 2004, one can hardly look at our Will & Grace world as "doomed," right? Or can we? Sure, the Fab 5 thrive and the Queer as folk frolic, but it appears that today's definition of "what it means to be gay" sticks pretty close to that of my 82 year-old grandmother: "Salacious sissies with snappy comebacks."

What Kramer reminds us via The Normal Heart is that however simplemindedly entertaining I (and millions of Americans) may find these pop-culture confections, "the only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual." The trendy figures of visibility in 2004 may intoxicate the spirit, but to nurture the soul--and continue to strengthen and widen the depth of one's personal and communal character, without which no battle can be won--we must claim the complexity of our heritage.

Yes, we've known that for some time now. I heard that message loud and clear the first time I saw The Normal Heart nearly 20 years ago! But to hear it spoken aloud again from the formidable figure of Larry Kramer allowed me once more to exit the theater renewed, reempowered, and redetermined to continue the self-defining quest of becoming something more than just a pop-culture cutout. To become something more, even, than the definition of my father's son. To become, in fact, my own man.

Drake is a writer, director, and actor living in New York City.

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