A eulogy for RENT

One morning last spring I woke up to some very sad news: RENT, the Broadway rock musical about life in the East Village in the midst of the AIDS crisis, would be ending its twelve-year run in September.

The show had its swansong last night, as the curtains closed for last time on the 1996 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winner for best musical.

Yes, I consider myself one of the “RENT-heads”—one of the many of my generation who fell in love with the story and the music way back in 1996 and have bought enough tickets through the years to probably have some sort of tangible impact on the reason why the run has become the seventh-longest in Broadway history.

And I get plenty of grief for it—even here in my office at the Pride Agenda, those who are a bit (or a lot) older than me call the show trite or a relic—something that became a historical artifact right before our very eyes. Many of them dealt personally with HIV/AIDS in a way that made the show somewhat trivial or not relevant to their own experiences.

But for me—for the awkward 16-year old from Longmont, Colorado—RENT brought up issues that I hadn’t dealt with in a serious way before. HIV/AIDS certainly wasn’t a part of my everyday life. I knew of AIDS in abstract terms—what I saw on the news and statistics that I’d hear about that impacted places far from where I was. I was also educated in one of those unfortunate, backwards-thinking school districts that taught “abstinence only” as the best way to avoid teenage pregnancy or the spread of STDs. Along with this mindset came the implication that those who did contract HIV somehow brought it on themselves: miscreants who only cared about sex or drugs.

RENT changed a lot of that for me—or at least it started to. Not only did I see young people dealing with their mortality, I also saw how communities and friends can become families and that making the choice to live—even when it’s not easy—was a powerful way for people (especially gay people) with HIV/AIDS to say “I will not be invisible.”

Most significantly for me, RENT was really the first time that I saw gay people, in a pop culture vehicle that I could connect with, as integrated and “normal” members of a community, falling in love and dealing with the loss of a loved one. When I first saw RENT in 1997 I was only beginning to realize that I didn’t get excited about girls or that looking at guys in gym class was more fun than anything that might happen on Prom night. I certainly wasn’t ready to admit to myself that I was gay, but RENT was the first time I can remember not hating myself for the possibility that I might be.

I saw RENT again at the Nederlander a few months ago with my best friend from college. Singing the songs of RENT was one of our very first bonding moments when we met as freshmen in the dorms at USC. She’s not gay or living with AIDS, but RENT meant something bigger to her, too. For those of us who came of age in the mid-late 1990s—after the worst of AIDS, in the midst of the burgeoning gay rights movement, during the revitalization of many of America’s cities, the advent of the Internet, and in a general era of prosperity—many of us felt a need to cling to an idea that people and communities still mattered and that we, unlike many before us, were going to think differently about traditional, artificial divides based on gender, race, sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. And in an increasingly cut-throat society, where we were taught to always think about what’s next and how to advance faster, RENT reminded us to pause and think about the real impact we could have on today—what we could do now.

RENT signified these things for many of us, and that’s why we’ve clung to it for so long, even if its literal story line has become outdated. So it’s with no small amount of nostalgia that I bid farewell to a work of art that no doubt played a part in developing who I have become.

The Presidential candidates on HIV/AIDS

The presidential primaries are quickly approaching, and if you’re like me you still haven’t settled upon one specific candidate yet. The polls are tightening and right now there is no clear leader in either Party’s races. This is a good thing: it forces candidates to be very clear on important issues—and that particularly holds true for LGBT issues.

Our community has played a role in this presidential election that is unparalleled in our political history. LGBT issues have been front-and-center for both parties—in debates, speeches, town halls, etc. We have demanded that Democrats and Republicans articulate their positions on issues that are extremely important to our safety, happiness and health. And in many cases (most often in the case of Democratic candidates) we have been able to move candidates when we’ve felt that they haven’t been where they need to be on issues like “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and legal recognition of our families.

One issue in particular, however, tends to get overshadowed by the headlines caused by sexier, more controversial issues such as gay marriage, LGBT people serving openly in the military and the need for a federal hate crimes bill. That issue is HIV/AIDS.

Numerous reports have recently stated that HIV infections are on the rise for young gay men and gay men of color. This is a problem that is not going away. New treatments have made it so that HIV/AIDS is no longer a death sentence, but it is still a very serious and lifelong disease. The next leader of this country needs to have a comprehensive plan for dealing with AIDS—not just globally, but also here in the United States.

Gay Men’s Health Crisis has just put out a report that very closely details where exactly each candidate for president stands on all issues pertaining to HIV/AIDS—from the strategies used to educate about prevention to subsidizing medicine for those who are already infected but cannot otherwise afford treatment. The report is reader-friendly and hopefully will help if you have not yet made up your mind on which candidate to support on Feb. 5, 2008 (for all New Yorkers).

The report was the subject of a recent front-page article in Gay City News. In it, Duncan Osborne discusses how bad Republicans are on HIV/AIDS related policies. Republicans—closely following the Bush Administration line—tend to support ideology-based solutions instead of the obviously more effective strategy of using science-based solutions (like teaching abstinence-only curriculum versus safe-sex practices in sex education classes).

We might also add that Republicans tend to want to talk about HIV/AIDS as being something "over there" (i.e., Africa where transmission is predominately due to heterosexual sex) instead of here at home where they deem transmission pathways as being too hot to talk about on the "Pollyanna" trail of a Presidential campaign.

As far as New York’s two presidential candidates are concerned, Hillary scores towards the top of the chart, ranking among the best candidates on HIV/AIDS issues. And Rudy dwells near the bottom with his fellow Republicans. He didn’t respond to the questionnaire provided by AIDSvote.org for evaluation on this report and his record on HIV/AIDS policy while mayor of New York City was never much to be proud of.

Download a PDF of the report here.