Tick Tick Boom

 It's Thanksgiving, and my husband and I are visiting with my sister Robin in Greenbelt, Maryland. She has access online to everything out there on Hulu, HBO+, Netflix and I don't know what else. At home, I have a television that's not hooked up to anything except a DVD player. Robin suggested we watch "Tick Tick Boom," a new movie directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda about the life of Jonathan Larson, who wrote "Rent." 

Robin stopped the movie about five minutes in. Andrew Garfield, who portrays Larson, shows us around his cramped apartment in New York City, filled to the brim with records and tapes and bookshelves sagging under the weight of too many books. "That's just like Barry's house," Robin laughed. I didn't laugh. It's true; I have thousands of records, cassette tapes and CDs, and  sagging shelves full of books. 

I've never written a musical, and although I took two years of piano in my forties, and I have a piano at home, I don't play and can't play well at all. I have tried acting, and sang professionally in the Jewish community. It was a lot of work in professions where I wasn't greatly successful. 

That part of my life started in Miami, where I worked as a Spanish-bilingual SSI claims representative for Social Security. I went to career counseling through ORT, a Jewish social service organization. They said I was a pure artistic personality, and why was I working for the government? I had my reasons: steady pay, annual and sick leave, the promise of a pension. I decided to develop hobbies in the arts. I took up black and white photography at Miami-Dade Community College. 

When AIDS hit in 1982, I heard about it before many people because people who were ill applied for disability. At first, they were turned down if they weren't exhibiting symptoms, but then, some of them died before their appeals were completed. The agency started approving cases where a person alleged that they had AIDS. Some wouldn't admit to that because of the stigma.

In "Tick Tick Boom," Larson has gay friends who are ill with AIDS, and he is bereft and angry, like many of us were. I'm almost ten years older than Larson, and at thirty-three decided to give up being gay, marry a woman and have children. Just as Larson thinks he should have accomplished more by thirty, at thirty-three I thought I was too old to be gay, and it was too dangerous to continue to have the kind of random sexual experiences I was used to. The straight life didn't work out for me. I was lacking the knack for it, or maybe deep down I just couldn't sustain a relationship with a woman. 

I came back out of the closet in 1987. When testing became available, I took the test and turned up negative, and we learned what was safe and not safe. I was much more cautious about who I went with (I wanted a first and last name) and what we did. 

I read about how Jesse Helms (who has a cameo in the movie) and others demanded that creators of obscene art have their NEA grants rescinded. The NEA Four included Tim Miller, a performance artist based at Highways, a performance space in Santa Monica. California made up his grant on condition that he teach free classes in performance. I signed up right away. At forty, I was possibly the oldest one in Tim's gay men's class. I got to write stories and perform them with other men. There were people in the group who died from AIDS. I remember two in particular, one a gorgeous man in his early twenties who wrote poetry. We held a memorial for him where we each read one of his poems. The one I read was about having sex with a man who didn't speak to him, and he laments that he might have become the man's lover had the man been open to that. I visited another man in hospice care on Rosh Hashana. There was an older man visiting, my friend's father, a rancher in Wyoming, who hadn't spoken to his gay son in a few years. "You walked in on the big reunion scene," my friend joked from his bed. 

I saw Jonathan Larson's "Rent" when it came to Los Angeles. I spent weeks looking forward to seeing it. The play is about a performance art group. One of the characters has AIDS and dies. They wheel his gurney off stage, and everyone goes on with their life. I was furious, because you can't just go on with your life. Thirty years later, I still think about the men from the performance group who died from AIDS, as well as my other friends and acquaintances. It wasn't something that happened, then it was over. It colored the rest of our time in that group, just as my hurt and anger have remained with me all these years. 

"Tick Tick Boom" is a brave work of art. Jonathan Larson is not necessarily a sympathetic character. His music is good, but I wouldn't say it's great. The performers, the singers he uses for his showcase knocked me out. I guess I related to Larson the slob and the obsessive personality, and his gay friend who says "I was a mediocre actor in a town full of mediocre actors." That may not be an exact quote, but I can certainly relate after taking acting, singing and dancing lessons for years, studying music theory, piano, guitar and Hebrew at community college in my forties, and never being quite as good as I would have liked to be. 

I applaud Lin-Manuel Miranda for making "Tick Tick Boom" and all the excellent performers in it. I appreciate the look back at the good and the horror of 1990, when Larson was concerned about turning thirty and I was already forty and still struggling with what I would do when (if) I grew up.  I don't think this will be a hugely popular film, but it's important and for some of us an inspiration to keep going. It got me to stay up late to write this.