Free The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays by Larry Kramer

right.
    NED: And I made a speech appealing for volunteers and we got over a hundred people to sign up, including a few women. And I’ve got us on Donahue. I’m going to be on national TV with a doctor and a patient.
    BEN: Don’t tell your mother.
    NED: Why not?
    BEN: She’s afraid someone is going to shoot you.
    ( BEN
rolls the model house stage center and pulls off the cover.
)
    NED: What about you? Aren’t you afraid your corporate clients will say, “Was that your faggot brother I saw on TV?” Excuse me—is this a bad time? You seem preoccupied.
    BEN: Do I? I’m sorry. A morning with the architect is enough to shake me up a little bit. It’s going to cost more than I thought.
    NED: More?
    BEN: Twice as much.
    NED: Two million?
    BEN: I can handle it.
    NED: You can? That’s very nice. You know, Ben, one of these days I’ll make you agree that over twenty million men and women are not all here on this earth because of something requiring the services of a psychiatrist.
    BEN: Oh, it’s up to twenty million now, is it? Every time we have this discussion, you up the ante.
    NED: We haven’t had this discussion in years, Ben. And we grow, just like everybody else.
    BEN: Look, I try to understand. I read stuff. (
Picking up a copy of
Newsweek,
with “Gay America” on the cover.
) I open magazines and I see pictures of you guys in leather and chains and whipsand black masks, with captions saying this is a social worker, this is a computer analyst, this is a schoolteacher—-and I say to myself, “This isn’t Ned.”
    NED: No, it isn’t. It isn’t most of us. You know the media always dramatizes the most extreme. Do you think we all wear dresses, too?
    BEN: Don’t you?
    NED: Me, personally? No, I do not.
    BEN: But then you tell me how you go to the bathhouses and fuck blindly, and to me that’s not so different from this. You guys don’t seem to understand why there are rules, and regulations, guidelines, responsibilities. You guys have a dreadful image problem.
    NED: I know that! That’s what has to be changed. That’s why it’s so important to have people like you supporting us. You’re a respected person. You already have your dignity.
    BEN: We better decide where we’re going to eat lunch and get out of here. I have an important meeting.
    NED: Do you? How important? I’ve asked for your support.
    BEN: In every area I consider important you have my support.
    NED: In some place deep inside of you you still think I’m sick. Isn’t that right? Okay. Define it for me. What do you mean by “sick”? Sick unhealthy? Sick perverted? Sick I’ll get over it? Sick to be locked up?
    BEN: I think you’ve adjusted to life quite well.
    NED: All things considered? ( BEN
nods.
) In the only area I consider important I don’t have your support at all. The single-minded determination of all you people to forever see us as sick helps keep us sick.
    BEN: I saw how unhappy you were!
    NED: So were you! You wound up going to shrinks, too. We grew up side by side. We both felt pretty much the same about Mom and Pop. I refuse to accept for one more second that I was damaged by our childhood while you were not.
    BEN: But we all don’t react the same way to the same thing.
    NED: That’s right. So I became a writer and you became a lawyer. I’ll agree to the fact that I have any number of awful character traits. But not to the fact that whatever they did to us as kids automatically made me sick and gay while you stayed straight and healthy.
    BEN: Well, that’s the difference of opinion we have over theory.
    NED: But your theory turns me into a man from Mars. My theory doesn’t do that to you.
    BEN: Are you suggesting it was wrong of me to send you into therapy so young? I didn’t think you’d stay in it forever.
    NED: I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong until you sent me into it. Ben, you know you mean more to me than anyone else in the world; you always have. Although I think I’ve finally found someone I