'Rent' as a social reality check

‘Rent’ is a rock musical set in 1989, written by Jonathan Larson and tells the story of six characters living in Bohemian New York during the AIDS crisis. Each character has a relationship with AIDS - whether they themselves have the disease or if its someone close to them. The musical is a powerful portrayal of AIDS and gives a greater sense of reality as to what it actually meant to be living  with something like that. This reality was often neglected. When AIDS was first introduced in the early 1980s, it was labelled the ‘gay disease’ or the ‘gay plague’ as it was seen to only impact homosexual men; an already stigmatised community. 

 

Larson tries to remove stigmas that surrounded queer people during the AIDS epidemic and worked to do this by showing queers and heterosexuals being part of the same community. To show that queer people were not isolated by everyone in society, they felt pain and love just the same as they stereotyped ‘normal heterosexual people’ did. ‘La Vie Boheme’ ends the first act and emphasises this theme of community as it is a song of friendship and empowerment. One of the lines, “actual reality, act up, fight AIDS!”, creates a force of strength in battling AIDS together. All the characters join in this song, both queer and heterosexual and it is a moment where sexuality does not matter, friendship is friendship.

 

On top of this, Larson features not only queer couples but straight ones too to highlight this sense of community and support during the time. Roger and Mimi are the only heterosexual couple in the show and both contracted AIDS though the use of heroin. The beautiful duet they sing to each other, ‘Without You’, provides deep insight into the pain and fear of losing someone you love to the disease and works to show that drug users were also sufferers of AIDS. This song comes later on in the show to allow the audience to understand the two characters better and remove the label of drug users as ‘wasters’ because you grow to like these characters. Drug users were also a stigmatised community, and suffered just the same and Larson uses Mimi and Roger’s story to bring light to this. AIDS affected so many different of groups of people and was not just a gay disease.  

 

What ‘Rent’ also does very well is break assumptions regarding queer identities. Tom Collins is a gay African-American man, which draws attention to an even greater minority in the queer world. It sheds light onto a racial group that was often ignored during the crisis and the expectation of hyper-masculinity in black communities. Collins however is not the typical ‘camp’ ga y man, nor is he the alpha black male demonstrating how not every gay or African-American man had to exist with such labels. Maureen is another character that breaks assumed queer identities. She demonstrates female promiscuity and is an empowered and confident bisexual woman, working to create a space in which women could feel sexually too and were allowed to show this regardless of sexuality.   

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Works Cited

 

Sontag, S. (2001[1964]) ‘Notes on “Camp”’, in Sontag, Against Interpretation. London: Vintage, pp.275-292.

 

Treichler, Paula A.(1987) 'AIDS, homophobia and biomedical discourse: An epidemic of signification', Cultural Studies, 1: 3, 263 — 305 

 

Winship, Faith Leigh. 2018. "“Actual Reality — ACT UP — Fight AIDS”". Medium. https://medium.com/silence-death-2-0/actual-reality-act-up-fight-aids-9a2ce17200eb.