American Queer Life: Larry Kramer, Now Yelling at God

As we celebrate PrideFest, let us doff our rainbow chapeaux to honor the death of one of our heroes, a writer and activist who changed America: Larry Kramer, the angriest gay man ever. Kramer’s passing isn’t the end of an era, my era, but it’s another nagging proof I’m old, and that, if not for his words, anger, and activism, I wouldn’t have grown old. Neither would millions of others infected by HIV/AIDS. In 1982, Kramer was one of the six founders of GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), created to address the growing plague in the gay community. In 1987, he was a founding member of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), created to demand that something be done to stem the surge of AIDS-related deaths in the thousands. (FYI: The tally now pushes 40 million.) Yelling was Kramer’s double-edged trademark, sometimes unifying, sometimes alienating. Unfamiliar with this enraged avenger? Watch a two-minute YouTube clip from a 2012 documentary: Larry Kramer from “How to Survive a Plague” Uncensored. Stewing in tight close-up in front of a bickering audience, he suddenly screams, “PLAGUE! We’re in the middle of a f*cking plague, and you behave like this? … If we don’t get our act together, we’re as good as dead.” He’s chilling in his volume, power, passion, and truth. Screenwriter, playwright, and novelist, Kramer wrote about the gay man’s life. Though Hollywood, Broadway, and bookstores often didn’t welcome this perspective, undaunted, his unique voice persisted. Kramer was nominated for an Academy Award in 1969 for his screenplay of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (he was also producer). Its controversial, nude wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in front of a roaring fireplace—one of the first to show male frontal nudity—renders them, if not explicitly sexually satisfied, homoerotically sweat-slicked and breathless. Kramer’s combination of Greco-Roman athleticism and smutty voyeurism visually liberates the homosexual tension in the novel from the bi-curious (at the least), English author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In 1978, Kramer wrote a novel with an unapologetically loud and provocative title, Faggots. Realize that 42 years ago, this f-word carried a damning judgment, and in some ways, his use of the word diminished its power to harm. No less a damning judgment was Kramer’s evisceration of the gay milieu. His scathing screed depicted a depressing, three-ring circus of sex, drugs, and dancing where love between two men had little chance of survival in a constantly glib and ugly orgy.

Related article: Activists Demand Action for Queer Refugees in Kenya  Critics judged the author a traitor and the novel a betrayal of his community’s hard-won sexual freedoms. Kramer wanted to wake up people, yelling from the printed page. I was working at a bookstore in New York across from Macy’s in Herald Square and observed how the book’s in-your-face title in huge print seemed to scream at uncomfortable passersby. That did not prevent the novel’s best-seller status. Kramer got everyone’s attention again with his play The Normal Heart, first produced at the Public Theater in 1985, then in 2011 for its Broadway premiere, and again in 2014 on HBO with an all-star cast. Winner of Tonys, Emmys, and Golden Globes, the story follows the nascent AIDS debacle through the eyes of a group of men attempting to organize a clinic to thwart the looming plague. While Kramer roared, I cowered. My silence ended in 2015 when my first article for this publication raged over an anti-gay law passed in Indiana that would protect individuals and companies from discrimination lawsuits based on their religious beliefs. The bigots’ bill was signed by then-governor Mike Pence. Today, we see him as the spineless toady cringing behind his monstrous master masquerading as a president. Kramer thought President Reagan should be charged with murder because of his deliberate neglect of citizens dying of AIDS. (I feel the same way about our current president; he should be charged with murder over his deliberate neglect of citizens dying of COVID-19.) In 2013, Kramer married longtime partner David Webster, who announced his husband had died in Manhattan of pneumonia on May 27. Poz since 1988, Kramer was simultaneously diagnosed with liver damage. HIV patients were rarely given organ transplants, another battlefront Kramer fought successfully, receiving a new liver in 2001. Oddly, in February, I finished reading Faggots for the second time. Still a slog of a read, its humor, veracity, inventiveness, and hopeful conclusion make up for its artistic mess. And I just bought his last novel: The American People—Volumes 1 and 2. I currently have time to read its 1,700 pages, a historical phantasmagoria of a conspiracy by powerful enemies to eradicate gay men. Volume 1 was published in 2015, Volume 2 in January. I’m happy the author lived to realize the completion of his magnum opus. Anger needs a productive outlet, or it festers into cruelty. As a powerful tool, Kramer’s anger moved mountains: a hateful and apathetic American society, bureaucracy and medical monopoly. Thanks to him and others with a variety of tactics, Pride is now celebrated more freely all over the world, and our diverse community and many allies got our act together. I’m living proof, an inheritor of his indomitable drive to expose hypocrisy and demand justice. Wherever you are, Mr. Kramer, my inspiring mentor, thank you. I hope you’re at peace. But I doubt it. You’re probably yelling at God. Good! He’s got some explaining to do.