Larry Kramer

From Philosopedia

Kramer, Larry (25 June 1935- )

With Vitto Russo, author of Celluloid Closet, a work which exposed Hollywood hypocrisy about homosexuality, screenwriter-novelist Kramer in 1987 founded ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).

Kramer in 1969 wrote the screenplay for D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.

In 1985 he wrote The Normal Heart, a play which first starred Richard Dreyfuss as a gay journalist seeking to publicize what was not yet realized to be a major international plague.

Normal Heart was hailed by some as a successful work of political theater. Others complained that Kramer was too brash, that he had gone to such extreme limits that even many in the gay community, not just many in the heterosexual community, considered him an enemy. On the one hand, actress Elizabeth Taylor was saying that “Larry had shaken people up to AIDS awareness, whether they like it or not. He says it as it is.” And on the other hand, Senator Jesse Helms was saying that “I’m not going to comment on Kramer. Remember he and that ACT UP put a giant condom on my house.” Jeff Getty of ACT UP/Golden Gate was saying, “I’m fed up with him - PWAs [people with AIDS] need more hope and positive thinking. Larry Kramer’s an old man who doesn’t know when to shut up.” And actress Barbra Streisand was saying, “His play, The Norman Heart, is a universal story about everyone’s right to love. I’m proud that he has entrusted it to us to bring to the screen.”

Kramer, author in 1987 of Faggots, was a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) but later he disagreed with its leaders and departed. He told writer Andrew Sullivan in 1995,

• Evil has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to research. I can’t find anybody who writes about evil that makes any sense to me. I talk about evil as evil, not as evil in relationship to God, not evil as the opposite of good. Everybody brackets the two. I want to talk about evil. I want to talk about evil, per se. Nobody writes about it that way.

He then allowed that Hanna Arendt had come closest to it.

Kramer added,

• I don’t believe in God, so we have to leave him out of it. But I didn’t think that the world was evil until the last few years. I’ve been unwilling to even think of that notion of evil. But I now think that the fact that this plague has been allowed to go on, that so many people have been allowed to die is just evil.

Telling Sullivan that he lives in Washington, DC, and knows how slow everything is, Kramer continued,

• You know how fast everything can be made to go when you have someone who can make it go that fast and we’re now on the third asshole in a row in the White House who simply doesn’t want to do anything about it.

The award in literature given to him in 1996 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters was as follows:

Since his screenplay for D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in 1969, Larry Kramer has been a prophet of psychic health and catastrophe among us - a prophet unmatched for the accuracy of his omens and the reliability of his anathemas and remedies. His uncannily foresighted novel Faggots appeared in 1978 just as the AIDS virus flooded whole wings of the American bloodstream; now its Swiftean portrait of all but vanished subculture stands as that culture’s visible memorial. His later plays have been clear as firebells, memorable as tracer bullets.

Kramer has made no secret of the fact that he has AIDS and is aware that his life will be cut short before any cure is found. In a discussion of an NBC drama about AIDS, “An Early Frost,” Kramer had said in 1985, “I’m so tired of us not being allowed to touch each other, kiss each other, as straight people are allowed to do, as black people are allowed to do, as anybody else is allowed to do on TV. Every other minority has been exposed and dramatized to the hilt. Why are we kept in such straitjackets?”

At the beginning of 2010, Kramer was written about in an extensive New York article by Jesse Green.

{GL; Poz, April-May 1995}