Mark Ruffalo: “I was 17 years old and my best friend came out to me with basically a declaration of love attached to it”

Hopefully a lot of you saw The Normal Heart on HBO last night.

If you, you no doubt would have been blown away (I was anyway) by Mark Ruffalo’s outstanding and passionate performance as activist Ned Weeks.

Ruffalo chatted with Queerty’s Jeremy Kinser and although there has been a lot of interviews in recent weeks, this one has a revelation I did not read anywhere else about Ruffalo’s gay best friend in high school.

When I was in high school my best friend came out to me. I thought he was the only gay person who could possibly be in the whole town. He came out to me and I had to really check myself a little bit. At that time, I’m talking 1984-85, homosexuality was still this fringe thing. It wasn’t out in the open. In certain places you could be gay, but in other places you knew not to be and that was acceptable to the gay community as well as the straight community for the most part. What these guys did and much to Larry Kramer’s genius was to say no, this isn’t cutting it. We have to be gay everywhere. There’s no shame in who we are. We have to let the world no who we are. Otherwise we will always be the other. They will never know us as them. I was 17 years old and my best friend came out to me with basically a declaration of love attached to it. I had to look into myself and ask myself “How do you feel about that and how does that sit with your values of equality?” It took me a moment to get my head around it, but I didn’t stop being his friend. Actually, to a larger degree he felt more uncomfortable about it than I did. Leading up to his telling me he was in so much pain and physical agony. I could see he was disturbed and I kept asking, “What’s the matter?” He said, “I can’t tell you.” This was going on for weeks. I asked if he killed somebody. I couldn’t figure out why he was suffering so much that he couldn’t talk about. Then he told me he was gay. So I started looking around and thought that was messed up. I looked around and understood he didn’t have a choice about it. It was very clear to me as a 17-year-old that that wasn’t something you chose. Why would you choose to live under such angst and persecution. Who would choose that? That’s the way the culture responded at that time.

Ruffalo also talked about what he sees as The Normal Heart’s ultimate message: I think it’s that this really happened in America. This is part of our history and we are better by facing it and embracing it and understanding truthfully what happened. I was talking to a lot of young gay people who don’t even really understand. I spoke to a young reporter who didn’t know that that had happened. Not only is it important because AIDS is still an issue, but this is your history. Gay marriage is happening today because of these guys, this handful of men and women who put their lives and souls and reputations and careers on the line for something bigger than themselves changed the world and have informed all modern activism today. There’s not one activist group, whether it’s right or left, whether they hate gays or love them, that doesn’t use tactics and the strategic mastermind playbook that these people created. That’s significant to us. And by the way, this is still happening all over the place in different forms, with climate change, with gay marriage, toward Muslims…This bigotry, this fear, this lack of compassion is alive and well and it should be routed out and we should do it  the kind of love that these guys had. Ultimately, the message of this movie is that love conquers all and love is the grace that transcends any kind of injustice in the end.