![]() ![]() To my surprise, that Friday, then New York Times theater czar Frank Rich wrote a lengthy and rhapsodic review, assuring the play’s success. The Normal Heart was a piece of agitprop about the AIDS crisis, and the failures of will that exacerbated it-plus a love story! It was less successful as drama than as political battle cry, but I felt it was an important work whose message was urgently needed in 1985.Īrnold, who let out a sound of disgust when the two male leads kissed on stage, told me after the play ended that there would be no point in our considering publication if the notices were not good there was no conceivable market for a failed play, important or not. The AIDS epidemic was in its first years, and, trying not to feel powerless in the face of such a horrible scourge, I’d taken my immediate boss Arnold to a play at the Public Theater starring Brad Davis and D. ![]() Those of us in the room-in the club, as it were-were all in agreement that receiving a letter from Larry was akin to being mugged. Gay female authors would come only after I quit the company during my tenure, the publisher Elaine rejected every lesbian book I brought to her, for reasons known only to her. I went in search of some, and soon NAL/Dutton, as it was then known, had amassed a growing list of (primarily literary) fiction and nonfiction with a gay male slant. It was 1985, and I was a young editor at a publishing house whose sales force had recently conveyed to our publisher its desire for gay books, which they said were an underexploited market that could sell well for us. ![]()
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