‘AS IS’ SOOTHES SOME OF THE AIDS SUFFERING : Author Wrote About the Emotional Side Effects of Disease Among Gays

Art cannot cure AIDS, but for some, it may serve to soothe or relieve some of the suffering surrounding the lethal disease.

“I still grieve, but I don’t feel the awful isolation, the craziness, the dread that I did before,” said William M. Hoffman, whose play about the emotional side effects of the disease, “As Is,” premieres on Showtime Sunday at 9 p.m. (See adjoining review).

The soft-spoken 20-year veteran of Off Broadway was talking in very personal terms over coffee the other day near his home in Greenwich Village, telling how he came to start writing “As Is” as early as 1982.

“My friends were dying, and I was feeling bad, but my feelings were not being reflected in the media, so I was feeling alone and scared,” Hoffman said. “I wasn’t content to go on feeling this way, and I thought it would help if I expressed my feelings through my work.”

The play, virtually unchanged for the Showtime production, deals as much with relationships and with caring and courage as it does with the disease itself.

The protagonists “are a rather ordinary New York couple who happen to get caught up in this tragedy, and who grow emotionally and spiritually,” said Hoffman. “They cope, rather than fold.

“The norm in the gay community right now is courage and bravery,” he continued. “And this is one of the aspects of the AIDS tragedy that is not being talked about often enough. If Mother Teresa opens a hospice for AIDS victims in Greenwich Village (as planned), it will be given lots of media attention. But the same amount of attention is not given to what’s going on now in the gay community.”

Hoffman is now working on a dramatization of the Oscar-winning documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk,” about the slain San Francisco supervisor and gay activist; on an operatic libretto for the Metropolitan Opera and “a romantic comedy” for Walt Disney’s Touchstone Productions.

“As Is” was not intended as “a propaganda play,” said Hoffman. But he hoped to break down barriers he believes still exist between mainstream society and the gay community, and even within the gay community itself.

“I wanted to break down the barriers between ‘we’ and ‘they’ that exist where this disease is concerned,” he said.

“Six years ago, when I first heard there was a disease spreading among gays, I laughed--because I couldn’t figure out how it could find gays. Then, as the first articles about the disease started to appear, I could see this was something serious. And when my friends started getting sick and dying, it started to become very personal.

“Still, I built a wall between myself and the victims. I told myself I was better than they were, that in some sense they deserved what they got. Of course, this was because I feared getting the disease, and I thought that if I didn’t identify with them, I might not get it.

“As time went by and more and more of my friends got sick, the reality came crushing in on me and I realized I too was vulnerable,” he continued.

“Then something very significant happened. A buddy of mine, a runner and much more healthy than I, got sick and died within a very short time. This was something I could really relate to, and it destroyed any notion I had that I was better or different than the victims.

“I came to realize that what was keeping me sick emotionally was not facing the reality of this disease,” he said. “Facing it has helped me get better.”