Editor’s Note: Mark Alvarez kindly provides some follow-up commentary to the reading of Larry Kramer’s work The Normal Heart staged by Plan-B Theatre and the Utah AIDS Foundation. In 1985, Kramer’s work clearly laid out the experiences of the earliest days of the AIDS crisis. Stark and brutal in themes, the play also faced down homophobia and demanded gay men to take the baton up for larger issues and causes. Today, Kramer’s work is definitely not anachronistic. It presaged the gay political and cultural issues at the center of today’s equally contentious discourse. And, the characters clearly remind us that tolerance is not a sufficient replacement for acceptance. Perhaps now there is a complexity of layers in the characters that was not particularly apparent at the time The Normal Heart premiered. Again, The Selective Echo graciously appreciates Alvarez’s account of the Aug. 14 performance.

The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer was first staged off-Broadway 25 years ago. A collaboration of the Utah AIDS Foundation, in its 25th year, and Plan-B Theatre Company, in its 20th year, brought a reading of The Normal Heart to the Jeanne Wagner Theatre. The readers wore somber colors.

Before the reading, Stan Penfold spoke for the Utah AIDS Foundation and Jerry Rapier for Plan-B Theatre. The remarks, humorous and serious, fit the occasion, twenty-five years after the final events of the play. The outbreak of HIV/AIDS in New York in the early eighties brought grudging attention from the media and society. Medical research geared up and dollars slowly flowed to the cause.

Today, as Stan Penfold noted, “media is gone, visibility is gone.” And yet the virus continues.

The Normal Heart began in 1981, displayed starkly on stage behind the readers. Through the play, the year changed from 1982 to 1983 to 1984. The march of AIDS grew.

The Normal Heart involved activists, doctors and others affected by the march of the virus. Its center was Ned Weeks, read by Kirt Bateman. The reading began in a doctor’s office with several men waiting to be tested. “28th case; 16 are dead.” One man was diagnosed positive and said, “I’m going to die. That’s the bottom line.”

The Normal Heart ran through reactions to the disease from people who had been diagnosed and those close to them. It followed different lines of advocacy, from steady Bruce Niles, read by Doug Fabrizio, to fiery, often angry Ned, to the concern and wonder of polio-stricken and wheelchair-bound Dr. Emma Bruckner, read by Christy Summerhays.

One character said he was going to be the one who kicked it. By 1983, the incidence of AIDS had grown. This was shown or heard through the constant phone calls being received in an office setting and the statement: “we’re all going to go crazy living this epidemic every minute.”

The Normal Heart took on politicians, The New York Times for relegating early AIDS stories to its innermost pages, The Voice for largely ignoring a crisis directly relevant to its readers, and a number of other institutions and people. “There is not a good word to be said for anyone’s behavior in this whole mess.”

HIV/AIDS remains a challenge in the world, the country and Utah. The reading of The Normal Heart was a reminder of difficult times and a call to current challenges. The work remains important, and it continues to touch the community.

Fittingly, to a standing ovation, the readers left the stage, determined.

‘It’s a war of little battles. The residents fight by lighting their yards, videotaping drug deals, harassing scrappers and chasing off thieves.

Their enemy attacks in shocking ways. Like taking over the homes of bedridden old people. Like recruiting kids as dope-house spotters and runners. Like killing people’s dogs.’ – Detroitblogger John, Metro Times, 2010

In a masterful 2005 book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Thomas Sugrue sets out to explore in detail the causes of urban blight, crime, and inequality in a city that began its decline almost immediately after the end of World War II.

“The physical state of African American neighborhoods and white neighborhoods in Detroit reinforced perceptions of race. The completeness of racial segregation made ghettoization seem an inevitable, natural consequence of profound racial differences. … To the majority of untutored white observers, visible poverty, overcrowding, and deteriorating houses were signs of individual moral deficiencies, not manifestations of structural inequalities. White perceptions of black neighborhoods provided seemingly irrefutable confirmation of African American inferiority and set the terms of debates over the inclusion of African Americans in the city’s housing and labor markets.”

While Sugrue advises that to see Detroit as typical would be misleading, he concludes that the “differences between Detroit and other [cities] are largely a matter of degree, not a matter of kind.” Furthermore, he only touches upon the stories of residents in some of the most embattled and seriously affected neighborhoods. Sugrue’s important work lays out the larger institutional and social structures that forever have been at the heart of this long, stubborn decline.

Enter Andrew James, a Salt Lake City independent documentary filmmaker with solid ties to Michigan, who is directing a feature-length documentary about the residents in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood that lies along the Detroit River, defined by the dramatic juxtaposition of well-kept streets and homes with abandoned property sites that are precarious markers of encroaching urban blight.

It might seem immediately tempting to capture the dystopia side of Detroit in the style of “RoboCop,” “The Omega Man,” or other post-apocalyptic films. However, in “Street Fighting Man,” James embraces the fresh potential impact of the contemporary documentary genre to augment the work of scholars and journalists and use emotion powerfully, purposefully, and persuasively to tell the story of James Jackson, a retired Detroit police officer, – a/k/a Jack Rabbit – and other residents who are fiercely determined to guarantee their neighborhood will not collapse and become another footnote in the story of America’s urban decline.

The film’s title is taken from Detroitblogger Joe’s article in the Metro Times noted above. As James explains, “Jackson’s neighborhood is sort of an island oasis in an urban desert and the residents there are being threatened by an influx of drugs, gang activity, and violence.”

And, like many entrepreneurial independent documentary filmmakers, James has turned to Kickstarter, an online crowdfunding platform, to raise $6,500 by Sept. 4 so he can make a second trip to the Detroit neighborhood and get enough footage for a 15-minute preview of the film. It eventually will run 90 minutes in its final form when it is completed by late 2011 or early 2012.

Those wishing to donate can pledge any amount. Depending upon the amount pledged, benefactors can gain a wide variety of benefits ranging from autographed DVD copies of the finished documentary to film credit acknowledgments as associate producer and to co-producer or executive producer credits along with other amenities. The film is produced by Katie Tibaldi and Michael Van Orden.

Rather than focus on the customary images of Detroit’s urban blight that viewers and readers of news would see or journalists would forage for striking newsworthy events, James seeks to pare the facts and zero in on the details of the daily grassroots struggles and the ‘little battles’, that often are fought at night. As he explains, “Our goal is for none of the subjects in the film to break the fourth wall. We are less interested in exploring why Detroit is suffering and more interested in showing the daily struggles of every day residents.”

In James’ documentary, the focus is on the conversations at meetings of neighborhood homeowners and business owners as well as the activities of residents who do not shy away from confronting and videotaping criminals on the streets in the area, banding together to mow overgrown lots, and planting new gardens in previously blighted areas. “In many ways, they put community action in Utah to shame,” he explains.

James is part of a growing number of independent creative artists who contribute significantly to Salt Lake City’s solid reputation for making films where emotions and themes form and flow into a provocative energizing discourse and ask viewers to suspend judgment, prejudice and political partisanship as they participate in the conversation and find voice for their own grassroots motivations. More recently, James co-directed “Cleanflix,” a documentary about the sanitized film movement in Utah, with Joshua Ligairi. The film has enjoyed a healthy presence on the juried festival circuit including the Toronto International Film Festival, Michael Moore’s invite-only Traverse City Film Festival and Thom Powers’ Stranger Than Fiction film series at the IFC Center in NYC. In 2008, “Una Vida Mejor,” a small fiction film he wrote and directed about the lives of southern California migrant workers, won the Cinequest special jury prize for artistic vision.

Editor’s Note: Mark Alvarez, a regular correspondent lays out in concise, terse, brilliant form Stephen Sandstrom’s latest foray into making legislation that is ridiculously untenable and intellectually embarrassing. By the way, readers looking to make some intelligible sense of the mindset of Sandstrom and countless other elected officials on this particular issue, please consider Peter Schrag’s book ‘Not Fit for Our Society Immigration and Nativism in America.’ You will see how the attitudes of Sandstrom and his ilk throughout American history have actively sought to use race-based arguments for restricting Irish, German, Slavic, Italian, Jewish, and Chinese immigrants.

“This is not ‘Arizona Light,’” Representative Stephen Sandstrom said after he “revealed” his “Illegal Immigration Enforcement Act.”

Meaning: “This is ‘Arizona Light.’”

Arizona Light largely mirrors Arizona’s SB1070, enjoined in a federal court. The proposal reveals more than just simple copying: it reveals a curious unfamiliarity with Utah law.

Section 76-9-1008 of Arizona Light virtually copies Section 63-99a-104 of SB81, which was passed by the 2008 Utah legislature and went into effect on July 1, 2009.

Three possibilities:

1. Sandstrom is ignorant of Utah law.

2. Sandstrom believes in flattery through imitation.

3. Sandstrom did not write his own bill.

Some comparisons to Arizona’s SB1070:

1. Police officers must check immigration status after a lawful stop, detention or arrest when reasonable suspicion exists as to the immigration status of the person stopped, detained or arrested.

2. Racial profiling prohibited.

3. Willful failure of alien to carry documents indicating lawful status.

4. Creation of a right to sue agencies that limit enforcement of federal immigration laws.

5. Frustration and desperation over federal inaction on immigration.

Arizona Light is less wordy than Arizona’s SB1070. It has shed provisions that proscribe day labor and the users of such labor.

Arizona Light does not contain a statement on legislative intent. Arizona’s SB1070 had the intent to “make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona.” In other words, the law aimed to put the screws to the undocumented population until it surrendered and left the state.

Arizona Light has revised Arizona SB1070 in an attempt at constitutionality. Its constitutionality could be argued, but the proposal is still misguided. Immigration reform by law and by logic must ultimately be carried out at the national level. Arizona Light would be costly, divisive and disruptive for Utah, which already has substantial economic pressures to deal with in delivering a balanced budget for a state that continues to be among the fastest growing in terms of population.

Sandstrom’s ignorance is dangerously irresponsible and would levy a negative economic impact upon the state requiring years to undo. Bad politics make bad policy which, in turn, makes bad law. A forthcoming article in the Cardozo Law Review documents the first empirical study of its kind in looking at the economic impact of laws regarding local immigration regulation that have been passed by cities and counties since 2005. The authors demonstrate these laws had a 1 to 2 percent negative effect on employment. For the average county, this translates to a range of about 337 to 675 lost jobs, affecting authorized and unauthorized workers. While employment in some industries, such as restaurants, dropped, others gained, including grocery and liquor stores, in a specific jurisdiction. Most importantly, it underscores why immigration reform must be based not on assumptions but empirical evidence.

We face challenges in education, health and economics. Let’s work on those.