AIDS in the Circle City
First Look
“Actual
reality – Act up! Fight AIDS!”
This is
the key message of an entire play. Rent, written by Jonathan
Larson, is a musical about eight friends who live on Avenue B in New
York City. Of these eight twenty-somethings, four of the characters
have either HIV or AIDS.
Growing up in Indiana, in the heart of the Midwest, attending a Catholic school for 13 years, I never heard much about HIV, or AIDS, for that matter. The few facts that I learned in grade and high school health classes were all about the faceless epidemic that was sweeping Africa, the gay male population, hemophiliacs, and drug addicts. We learned that AIDS could not be transmitted through casual contact, a very important point, as Ryan White, the hemophiliac, lived just an hour north of us. “This is a horrible problem,” we were told. “People are dying,” we heard from our health teacher, who then smoothly segued into a diatribe on the different kinds of viruses. And that was it. Nothing more. Maybe a sentence or two on “safe sex practices and STDs.” But beyond that, I knew little to nothing about the disease; I wasn’t even curious about it or the people who had it.
My junior year of
high school, things started to change. For the first time in my life, I
was headed out to the Big Apple: New
York City. For a Midwestern girl like me, the Big Apple was an
exciting, daunting prospect. And so, I went. That was the first time I
saw Rent. I had no idea what this “rock opera” was about. I
just knew that everyone was very excited to see it. Watching the show
and reading the synopsis, I very quickly learned that this was a show
about AIDS. It blew my mind that four of the eight main characters
would be afflicted with such a disease. There, on the stage before me,
were three men and a woman who all were either HIV positive or had
AIDS. It was this moment that I first became interested in an epidemic
that is more prevalent in my Midwestern home than I ever thought.
Come and see what it's really like in Indianapolis.
