Marc Berman, playwright, Variety columnist and AIDS activist. A native of Ohio who was educated at Boston University, Berman began his career as an actor in regional theater and went on to write such critically acclaimed plays as "The Wolf Patrol," "River Downs" and "The Day Andy Warhol Got Shot."
He moved to Los Angeles in 1986 as West Coast bureau chief for TWICE magazine, an acronym for This Week in Consumer Electronics. In 1990, he joined Video Business and then became a staff writer for Daily Variety, doing reviews and covering home video and film and AIDS in the entertainment industry. For the past year, he also wrote a column for the weekly Variety.
In 1989, Berman co-founded the fund-raising Video Industry AIDS Action Committee. He also served on the board of AIDS Project Los Angeles and was active in the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
He died on November 4, 1993, in Sherman Oaks of AIDS complications.
Source: http://articles.latimes.com/1993-11-13/news/mn-56229_1_marc-berman
Further Readings:
Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America by John-Manuel Andriote
Hardcover: 494 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (June 1, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0226020495
ISBN-13: 978-0226020495
Amazon: Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America
There is no question that AIDS has been, and continues to be, one of the most destructive diseases of the century, taking thousands of lives, devastating communities, and exposing prejudice and bigotry. But AIDS has also been a disease of transformation—it has fueled the national gay civil rights movement, altered medical research and federal drug testing, shaken up both federal and local politics, and inspired a vast cultural outpouring. Victory Deferred, the most comprehensive account of the epidemic in more than ten years, is the history of both the destruction and transformation wrought by AIDS.
John-Manuel Andriote chronicles the impact of the disease from the coming-out revelry of the 1970s to the post-AIDS gay community of the 1990s, showing how it has changed both individual lives and national organizations. He tells the truly remarkable story of how a health crisis pushed a disjointed jumble of local activists to become a nationally visible and politically powerful civil rights movement, a full-fledged minority group challenging the authority of some of the nation's most powerful institutions. Based on hundreds of interviews with those at the forefront of the medical, political, and cultural
responses to the disease, Victory Deferred artfully blends personal narratives with institutional histories and organizational politics to show how AIDS forced gay men from their closets and ghettos into the hallways of power to lobby and into the streets to protest.
Andriote, who has been at the center of national advocacy and AIDS politics in Washington, is judicious without being uncritical, and his account of the political maturation of the gay community is one of the most stirring civil rights stories of our time.
Victory Deferred draws on hundreds of original interviews, including first-hand accounts from: Virginia Apuzzo, Reverend Carl Bean, Marcus Conant, M.D., John D'Emilio, Anthony Fauci, M.D, Fenton Johnson, Larry Kramer, Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., Armistead Maupin, Walt Odets, Torie Osborn, Eric Rofes, Urvashi Vaid, Timothy Westmoreland, and Reggie Williams.
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