Larry Kramer

[Music] Hello and welcome to Badgez, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history. My name is Hugh Lemmy, I'm a writer and author, and I'm Ben Miller, a writer and historian currently at work on a biography of Rudy Grimrich. So last week we were talking about the crown prince of Iraq, Abad Ali-lah, who we're talking about today, Ben. Let's start today with a story, Hugh. I was a student and I was sitting in a cheap seat at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway in the late spring of 2011, watching names write themselves across the back of a simple white unit set. They were the names of people who had died of AIDS-related illness. They flowed from left to right slowly behind characters beginning to understand and name and fight a terrifying new plague that threatened to kill them all. By the end of the night they filled the wall. These characters spoken words that ran me over like a truck. I had never heard such words, nor did I know them the history of that pandemic, and the murderous silence and contempt with which it was handled by the political class, liberal and conservative, whose grip on power has since only intensified. The play was, of course, Larry Kramer's polemic "The Normal Part," being revived in New York for the first time after its 1985 off-Broadway public theater debut. I was just learning about being a writer, and I was there with a friend at the end I couldn't say anything, and so we were walking silently to the subway, but as we fought our way out through the theater door, a wizard-old man handed me a leaflet, and that old man was the subject of today's episode and the author of that play, Larry Kramer. He was the-- Larry Kramer leafletted every evening's performance with an afterward which I've kept in my personal archive. Wow, that's astonishing. Please know the leaflet began that everything in the normal heart happened. I began to search and to read and to think about the history of this epidemic, what it had meant, to radicalize in terms of my identity, in terms of my politics, to think about gay rights, beyond debates of marriage and military, to question liberal bromides about opportunity and access to learn about the movements that Kramer had participated in, and really this play had a big impact on me at that time. And as I began to look into these questions, I, at the beginning, trusted Kramer blindly. He wrote, quote, "Nobody with a brain gets involved in gay politics through his stand-in in the play, Ned Weeks. It's full of the unwashed radicals of anti-any counter-culture," end quote. So I assumed that gay politics before the AIDS movement had been as apolitical as the ones I was familiar with. That gay liberation had been as toothless as the human rights campaign. Quote, "If fucking kills you, doesn't anyone with half a brain stop fucking?" asks the play's doctor character, Emma Brookner. I assumed that a significant problem in the history of the spread of HIV had been gay men's simple refusal to stop fucking. I learned the history of gay men's health crisis, and a version of the history of act up, and I read Kramer's famous essay, "1, 112, and counting," written in the New York native in March of 1983 with an "invocation to, quote, anger, fury, rage, and action," end quote. An essay that insists that, quote, "our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get," end quote. I swallowed whole both Kramer's righteous rage at the murderous inaction of the neoliberal state, and his equivocation between gay men who refused to become politically active, and gay men who, quote, refused to give up careless sex," end quote. Today I think we're surrounded by an extremely online left that looks at the absolutely real horrors of the world and are absolutely real ethical obligations to do something about them, with too often I think the conviction that the most important thing we can do is commit ourselves to rhetorical maximalism and total emotional commitment. The angrier we are, the worse we make ourselves and others feel, and the more that we maximize our rhetoric about what is going on, the more we will have achieved, regardless of what our strategy is, what the politics behind this are, or anything else. I think a lot about two thinkers, the dearly departed Union organizer, Jane McAlevy, and, of course, Sarah Schulman, writer, AIDS activist. I've constructed in my head what I call the immortal science of Marxism, Schulmanism, McAlevyism, and that's the closest thing I have to a political load star. I was at a great talk last fall by Sarah Schulman about the AIDS crisis, where she was also talking about its implications, the implications of act-ups success on organizing in Palestine's solidarity. And the quote I remembered was quote, "Do you know those long open letters we all sign that are too long? Guess what? They're too long." End quote. But her point was that in act-up, the political unity principles were one sentence. It was direct action to end the AIDS crisis. Anyone could organize within act-up to act on doing something as long as it was direct action to end the AIDS crisis. If you didn't want to do it, you didn't have to do it, but you didn't try to stop them. Okay. Different people could do different things. And alongside that, there is this thinking from Jane McAlevy. McAlevy approached organizing from the perspective of trade unions. And she once said, quote, "Unless you're waking up in the morning with an explicit plan to build the universe of people who are not yet part of your organizing, who are not yet in your social media feed, who you don't talk to, you might even think they don't like you, you might even think they're opposed to you. That's the work of organizers in organizing, going out to build unity and solidarity and expand the universe of people in our movement." End quote. She's been a lot of time at the end of her life discussing the climate movement. And she once wrote, quote, "Purity and joy and excitement and the moral high road that comes from a lot of young and youth activism has a particular value in our society. And I say to them, keep going, don't stop." She said, "It has a particular value. The role of young people is meaningful. They raise morality questions in a way that all people can't do. We should be supporting them and helping them and offering them sage advice once in a while and nicely." And then she goes on to offer some of that advice. She said, quote, "Mobilizing an advocacy with the stakes as high as they are, I'm sorry, there's just no time for bullshit politics anymore. Like we actually have to win." And that's why I think the environmental movement in general needs to create the denominators, have the hard conversations, go into difficult terrain every day and get off social media. Those are wise and sage words, all right. And listeners who are familiar with Larry Kramer as, quote, unquote, the founder of act up, as the visionary in the words of his New York Times obituary, quote, "whose raucous and antagonistic campaign for an all-out response to the AIDS crisis helped shift national health policy in the 1980s and 90s," end quote, "might not see the applicability of those words to Kramer or how they're linked to his story, but his legacy as an actual organizer is very complicated. In her magisterial history of act up New York let the record show Thera Schulman gives the following anecdote." In 2018, I wrote a piece for the New York Times about the complex role of branding in political movements. The young white gay male editor corrected my use of act up to Larry Kramer's act up. I told him that if I went on record with the term Larry Kramer's act up, I would have to move to China. It is remarkable she goes on how many people in high places of all ages in multiple spaces think that Larry was the leader of act up. Of course, that phrase alone shows how little others know about our movement because act up had no singular leader," end quote. She wrote that his contribution had been extremely important to, quote, "encouraging a treatment focus," which set act up on one of its most productive trajectories towards tangible change. But soon inside act up, Larry was often absent, regularly in conflict, and not very influential on applied policy or activist matters," end quote. So today I want to address the complex legacy of Larry Kramer. Now, let me be clear, Larry Kramer was a problematic white gay man. He took too much face, he took too much credit, he moved through the world with unexamined privilege, he was somewhere between actively and passively misogynist and racist. Here's another quote about him from Schulman's Let The Record Show, she remembers being in a public conversation with him in Boston in the early 1990s. Quote, "I suggested in front of an audience that the next time Larry was called by the media, he could refer them to a person of color or a woman in act up," and Larry responded, "but Sarah shouldn't we use our best people," end quote. "Oh fucking hell." But as friend of the show K Gabriel wrote in a review of a review of Schulman's book, "politically effective people are not always as we imagine them," end quote. Schulman writes that "very few people with his level of privilege did any of the things he did. Larry went to Yale with someone from Bristol Myers, he could get op-eds in the times, he could get famous people on the phone, he could get on television, and he used all of that access for people with AIDS," end quote. I'm less interested in this episode in documenting Kramer's exclusions though they're important, and I'm more interested in making three points. The first was that his hatred and fear of gay male sex culture, one which predated the AIDS epidemic made his political work less effective and even maybe counterproductive. The second was that his work was based off of a strange gay male supremacism, which then led actual living gay men in the world to constantly disappoint him, which sort of fueled the cycle of rage that they weren't living up to what he thought they should be. And the third is that despite having been this problematic white gay man, in a way Larry Kramer is actually an important antecedent to this moralizing political tactic that's currently popular on social media, that sees rhetorical maximalism rather than effectiveness or actual ideological bent as the proof of radicality. Kramer was a bog-standard American liberal. He earned his radical reputation basically through yelling, through affect, and I certainly don't mean to suggest that people should not be, that I think people should not be accurately describing plagues and genocides as they occur in this world. What I mean to say is that there is something more to fighting them than simply finding the most rhetorically maximized way of describing them. That does not do anything on its own. It is important to name what we see, but I feel that so often we have fights between people who essentially agree on what must be done next over whether or not they are using the appropriate adjective to modify the noun that we also all agree on. What I mean by this, for example, is that a term like genocide, which we are using correctly to talk about the current genocide in Palestine, has more power when we haven't, for example, called COVID, which was a horrible crisis of health care and labor that left many people dead a genocide, right? And that's the place where I want to sort of dial in here and think about how Kramer influenced that. Basically throughout this episode, I'm addressing Kramer as one of his narrators addressed his stand-in in the first volume of his last novel, The American People. Quote, "You fuckster. You are so fucksum. I love you very much." So Larry Kramer was born Lawrence David Kramer in Connecticut. In 1935, he was the younger of two sons of George and Rhea Kramer. He's born in the middle of the Great Depression. His mother actually supported the family. She worked in a shoe shop. And in the 1940s, fortunes improved when his father, who had been to Yale law, got a job with the federal government. His older brother Arthur, unfortunately for Larry's psyche, was popular athletic, a good student, and straight, the bastard. Exactly. And this led to difficulty in the family home. Arthur was quoted as saying, "From the day Larry was born until the day my father died, they were antagonists." He wrote an autobiographical play called The Destiny of Me. And in that play, his stand-in character, Ned Weeks, recalls a fight with a father at home who's angry about this breadwinner mother and angry at his younger son. And he culminates by screaming at his son, "I should have shot my load in the toilet." Where do I know the name Ned Weeks from? Ned Weeks is also his stand-in in the normal heart. Okay. Arthur Kramer was a contingent force, let's say, in Kramer's life. He was a partner at a big deal New York City law firm. This was a crucial point of access for Kramer to both legal help and advice, but also to corporate power to donations. He supported his brother a lot. But as late as 1992, Arthur told Vanity Fair, quote, "My view of Larry's character, how he grew up and evolved, is the Freudian classic situation which breeds homosexuality, rejecting father, overprotecting mother, end quote." No comment on that one. You'll be shocked to know that both sons were in psycho analysis for their entire adult life, because his brother is also a major character in the normal heart. His brother is also a character of this place, yeah. So it wasn't until college the Kramer first had gay sex. He seems to have known from much earlier, but he didn't come out to his mother until he was 33 crucially right after his father died. He worked in the film industry starting in the male room at William Morris. He moved on to Columbia Pictures. He was sent to London as a production executive. He was actually an executive on Lawrence of Arabia. At 33, he decided that he wanted to produce an adaptation of the DH Lawrence novel Women in Love. He originally had no ambition to write it himself, but the first screenplay he commissioned was from a writer named David Mercer, and Kramer rejected it for being, quote, "a horrible Marxist tract." And the problem was he'd run out of money, so he just did it himself. Ken Russell, who ended up directing the film, was quite abusive. He apparently would run around with the set poking people with a writing crop for no reason. Wait, Larry Kramer wrote the, what wrote the Ken Russell Women in Love? Larry Kramer wrote the Ken Russell limited love. Another neither. Yes, and the film turned out well, and it was a fireplace. With the fireplace Bear Skin, Rag, Wrestling scene. Yes, yes. The film was very gay indeed for 1969, right? This was very soon after the end of the Hays Code. That's why it could be produced. And it was actually another gay artist Edward Alvy who had finally broken the Hays Code into pieces with who's afraid of Virginia Woolf a year earlier. Got a love, Ken Russell. The devil is one of my favorite films. And Women in Love is also very good, but apparently he would run around the set of women in love hitting people with writing crops, so you know, yeah, okay. Difficult guy. So Kramer got an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of Women in Love, and went back to New York. This suddenly successful creative type. He wrote a successful off-fried way play, which had an unsuccessful Broadway transfer, and he had some money. And so he was basically living out his thirties in this 1970s disco, drug, and dish sex culture that today's gay culture fueled by prep and but magazine loves to recreate. And I with them in a dream. On the weekends, he went to the discos into the bath houses, and on the weekdays he went to his therapist and talked about how miserable he was. And his therapist suggested that he write this all down into a novel, and he titled this novel, Faggets. Faggets appeared in 1978. It came out the same year as Andrew Hollerand's dancer from the dance. It depicts the same gay men having milieu in parapetetic motions between parties in Fire Island and orgies in the baths. It includes the famous Everard Fire in 1977, and this fire serves as a climactic event in both books. But Hollerand's take his trees and lush. There's these romantic evocations of, quote, that long summer season. The process full of blooming and enveloping and the protagonist, a mysterious and emotionally unavailable beauty named Anthony Bologne breaks hearts by the truckload before vanishing into the sea as, quote, the warm dark night descends. End quote. Kramer's text gives us this world through the eyes of Fred Lemish, quote, your average standard New York Faggets obsessive kvetch. End quote. This is a distinctly Jewish voice. It's a stand in for Kramer himself. It's someone searching for meaning and love, not within, but despite and against this glittering world of gay beauty and sex. The book opens as follows. Quote. There are two million 556,596 Faggets in the New York City area. The largest number 993,919 live in Manhattan. 186,991 live in Queens just across the river. 181 236 live in Brooklyn and 1809 live in the Bronx. 2469 live on Staten Island, substantiating that old theory that Faggets don't like to travel or don't like to live on small islands, depending on which old theory you've heard and/or want substantiated. End quote. Is that a stereotype that Faggets sound like small islands? I've been to some islands in the Mediterranean and the Bolerics and they seem to like small islands. I would agree, but apparently, well let's say he continues. There are now more Faggets in the New York City area than Jews. There are now more Faggets in the entire United States than all the Yiddes and Kikes put together. The straight and narrow so beloved of our founding fathers and all fathers thereafter is now obviously an irrevocably bent. What is God trying to tell us? These books, so you think it was about right to let us a great photograph. We'll see some of it later. These books are sometimes misremembered as polar opposites with hollarin characterized as some uncritical celebrant of 70s gay life and Kramer is purely an inhydonic critic. Some observers, even recently and much worse, have referred to Faggets as though Kramer was a prophet. One of his eulogists, truly appallingly, referred to quote, "the novel's prescient view of a section of society out of control." End quote. Oh my God. As though the tragic epidemiological accident of HIV were a morality play with deserving victims. Yeah, fuck you. But in fact, both hollarin and Kramer captured complex different views of this subculture. Hollarin set up scenes of sexual excess between these layered sentences of lush beauty. But Kramer thrust us headfirst into bodily fluids into sexual economy into quote, "tarnished yellowed peed upon bodies," end quote, "dike shrinks," end quote, "one blowjob given and two anal intercourse's one given and one received," end quote. Larry Kramer was just as capable of hollarin as evoking a party at which the men, quote, "merged into a massive cake of solid body, radiating enough heat to defrost arctic wastes, so many bodies bashing and twisting and poppers pass like party favors, and seven men now hold me, and we swing and sway and sweat becoming one," end quote. His very much like Evelyn Wall, like "O Nina, all those parties, all those vile bodies." It is. Kramer's satire of the scenes beauty and tolerance critical love letter to it were both criticized by contemporary gay critics for dismerching the scene's reputation by dragging it down into the hypersexual toilet. I want to start by reading a description by Kramer of his alter-ego narrator, Fred Lemish. This is one sentence. Fred had a hairy chest, wide shoulders, at last a 30-inch waist after years of a slight inner tube of fat image hips, love handles, where new introductions always annoyingly placed their hands, casually in greeting, in reality only prospecting the land beneath the shirt to judge how hard the terrain and hence how desirable before walking away, never to be heard from again if the merchandise was too soft, too excessive, which in Fred's case it had until recently been, plus those sturdy legs, an embarrassing liability as a child, what other kid had fully formed calves like cantalokes at 10. Now at last accepted for the muscular bonus they were, along with that hairy chest also useful as a marketable difference, which the same childhood of being the only King Kong among years of hairless Greek statutes schoolmates had not allowed, plus the requisite mustache now alas Mingling black hair with strokes of gray, and also alas the small but growing bald spot on the crown of his dark head, which no amount of head start vitamins with the mysterious ingredients, or hair trigger program formula 6 available by mail from iMagnon Beverly Hills and applied nightly, with a hot towel, and left steaming on the scalped for 20 minutes, followed by a glass of warm milk and two additional capsules of minerals essential to the root natural growth had alleviated. The Russian period is now something, apparently. It's kind of great, I mean I kind of like this, actually, but what do we notice like what's going on here, it's this very hard-aged description of sexual economy of the body as an object for barter. One critic wrote, quote, "Faggot struck a cord, it exuded the sense that gay men could do better if they understood themselves as fully human, if they could shed their self-loathing in self-deception." I loved it, end quote. You want to guess who that was? No, Andrew Sullivan. Is it both a say, Andrew Sullivan? Yes, whose history of claiming that he never had unprotected sex while also having a secret profile on what is it, robbareincludes.com or something, speaks to surely having shed all of his self-loathing and all of his self-deception. Hi, Andrew. He emailed us once. Maybe he's listening now. It's extreme, even satirical, but there's maybe something to that, although it's sort of exaggerated and boiled down into something. There are certainly ways that lots of gay guys often engage in the world and that way and feel like compelled into something that actually might make him quite miserable at times. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what you're talking about here. The fact that I've been going to the gym every single day while you've been here working on this season surely has nothing to do with my own nervousness about my potential, future, sexual viability. Nothing at all. Or my own growing bald spot or the gray hairs that are popping up in my beard. Yeah, I mean, there is absolutely something to this and I think, you know, the hitdog wall holler, right? One of the reasons why a lot of critics are so mad is because what both this book and dancer from the dance in different ways push back on is the idea that gay life is somehow inherently like spiritual or that there's some beautiful, you know, we're getting really far away from the beautiful love of young men for young men or like schoolboy stuff. We're talking about what it actually looks like when you take a bunch of like middle-to-high-income men with adolescent psyches and put them down in a city and give them a high budget and no bedtime and a lot of drugs. Yeah, I mean, and what that looks like is not always pretty. I was actually the outsider. I was cropping out the lesson psyche thing. I don't think it's even I think it's just a sort of inherent thing of a relationship with sex on those terms can produce those sort of feelings and it's not everyone and for those people who it does apply to is not everything, but that is something that there is a kernel of gay subjectivity that are an experience that there is. So I mentioned that Kramer was not always a good writer. I need to read you an excerpt from one of the novel's first sex scenes. First of many, there's an almost childlike quality to some of this writing and in his last book as we'll see that really comes back and kind of takes everything else over. But to me, it's almost like a gay writer equivalent of R. Crum. Quote, just as suddenly still on his knees, he crawled around in front of Dinky's perfect ass. He took both cheeks in his hand and he buried his face in it like an elegant pillow in a perfect Italian palazzo overlooking the blue Mediterranean, where they could be when they were living happily ever after if they hadn't moved to England. Then he moved his face down and under and inspected like a mechanic beneath a Porsche on the overhead rack. The cock was perfect. The balls were perfect. The conjunction of all parts was perfect. Fred was glaring in the knowledge of true ownership. This perfection of his mind, I love it. And in he stuck his tongue into Dinky's asshole. He just did it. It tasted good. It tasted very good. It was smooth and clean rather like a good quality moist satin. Dinky's asshole was lined with a lovely ribbon. There's an exclamation point at the end of that sentence. That's why I read it that way. And Dinky was obviously enjoying it because he was growing an even larger heart on than Fred had seen him grow during their times together, which had not always been the case, Dinky's heart ons, which was something Fred didn't like to think about or look at as he now was looking at Dinky's own present giganticism. And what? I mean there's some mixed metaphors there of the Porsche parked inside the palazzo with the satin and the ribbon. Sorry mom. But that gets he's like the character's name Dinky and like there's exclamation point. You know like there's something really like teenage about. Yeah, I mean it's it is extremely hard to write about sex. It is extremely hard to read about sex and yet many people did it and have done it and we're doing it at that time in gay male fiction better than that. There's no admin why it's all set up. It is not an admin why it's coming in very soon actually. So Faggots was not as uncomplicated the and hedonic as critics believed, but he ended up talking about the book and positioning it in comparison to writers. He thought had abdicated their political responsibility during the AIDS crisis. Later in his life, he utterly missed the point of a novel by Edmund White called the farewell symphony, which is an elegy to the AIDS dead, which is as in rage in its own way as anything that Kramer ever wrote. He reviewed the book and the advocate and he called it quote a parade of what seems to be every trick he's ever sucked, fucked, rim tied up. He described the book as quote 30 years with a non-stop erection and an asshole busier than his toilet end quote. And he praised the work of Tolstoy Zola Balzak, Chekhov Dostoyevsky, and he said the gay writers need to go back and pick up where they left off to pursue quote greatness end quote. That's also the point of Edmund White. Exactly. And also Larry Kramer wrote fucking Faggots, which is not Tolstoy or Dostoyev. Edmund White is much closer to that tradition. Yeah. But they had a huge right, Edmund White, and that was part of the thing, because he regarded Edmund White as sort of running away from his historical responsibility during the AIDS crisis by moving to Paris. Yes, to write about Jene. To write about Jene. Yeah. How dare he? As we've been alluding to, something happened in 1981 that interrupted the cycle of debate about this novel. And in July of 1981, a rare cancer was seen in 41 homosexuals. And the AIDS HIV epidemic, as we know it, in public had begun. Kramer's lifelong hysteria was well-suited to the early days of the epidemic, it must be said. When many community leaders urged caution, Kramer sounded the alarm loudly. He started an organization called gay men's health crisis in his apartment. Arthur, his brother, drew up the articles of incorporation. The first members were himself, Dr. Lawrence Mass, Edmund White, and three men who have since died, Nathan Fane, Paul Poppum, and Roger McFarlane. They set up a hotline, which was the first AIDS hotline. They got a hundred calls their first day. Kramer's staffed the organization and his leadership with what he would later call, quote, "the guys I danced with," end quote. But he was furious and frustrated by their lack of rage and anger in this moment. This is him quoted in Sarah Schulman's book, Let the Record Showed, quote, "we needed help and you had to scream for it and I asked for it nicely, originally. We tried to be very nice to the New York Times and to Ed Koch, then the mayor. And you learn very fast that you're a faggot and it doesn't make any difference that you went to Yale and were assisted to presidents of a couple film companies and that you had money. You suddenly know what it's like to feel like a faggot or an inward or a kike. I remembered the day it happened and I didn't like it," end quote. By the way, Larry Kramer did not say an word. He said the word, but I want. What do you get from that quote to you? It reminds me of this line by James Baldwin and his interview. He did a village voice towards end of his life where he talks about the reason that so many white middle class gay men get so angry in their politics around calibration is because they feel like they've had the privilege, which they were entitled to, cruelly ripped away in their teenagers by the realization of their gay. And therefore that anger is despite in a different way to people who were never expecting to have access to that in the first place. Yep, that's what I was thinking of too. Now in 1983, Kramer published an article in the New York native, which was an alternative gay newspaper and it was called 1112 Encountings. Let me read an extended quote from the beginning. If this article doesn't scare the shit out of you were in real trouble, if this article doesn't rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get. I'm writing this as Larry Kramer and I am speaking for myself and my views are not to be attributed to gay men's health crisis. I repeat, our continued existence as gay men upon the face of this earth is at stake. Unless we fight for our lives we shall die. In all the history of homosexuality we have never before been so close to death and extinction. Many of us are dying or already dead. Before I tell you what we must do, let me tell you what is happening to us. There are now 1112 cases of serious acquired immune deficiencies in Rome. When we first became worried there were only 41. In only 21 days there were 164 new cases. The total death tally is now 418. 20% of all cases were registered this January alone, etc. etc. The rise in this number is terrifying. Whatever is spreading is now spreading faster as more and more people come down to AIDS. He wrote, "No matter what you've heard there is no single profile for all AIDS victims." And then he turned his anger on the community. "I am sick of the advocate, one of this country's largest gay publications which has yet to quite acknowledge that there's anything going on. The newspaper's recent AIDS issue was so innocuous you'd have thought we were going through nothing worse than a rage of the latest designer flu and their own associate editor Brent Harris died from AIDS. Figure that one out." I'm sick of guys who moan that giving up careless sex until this blunds over is worse than death. How can they value life so little and cocks and asses so much? Come with me guys while I visit a few of our friends in intensive care at NYU. Notice the looks in their eyes guys. They'd give up sex forever if you could promise them life. I am sick of guys who think that all being gay means is sex in the first place. I am sick of guys who can only think with their cocks. We might be tempted to say that this kind of attitude was timely and maybe the caution was warranted at a moment when we didn't know things but I want to contrast this with a pamphlet, a book that came out in March of 1983. It was written by Richard Burkowitz and Michael Callan and they had the assistance of the heroic doctor Joe Sahn Abund. The book is called How to Have Sex in an Epidemic. It collected community knowledge about safer sex. Now at this time there was no scientific consensus on what caused AIDS. It was competition between what was called the new agent theory. The idea that some new pathogen was causing this that ended up being true. What no one knew was that it was a pathogen that you could transmit and then it would take years until you saw anything. Until AIDS developed in the HIV virus. But the HIV virus had not yet been identified. And the other idea was something called multifactorial theory. Maybe it was a lot of different video diseases together. The doctors were involved. Yeah, too many antibiotics for other diseases. It led to some sort of like depletion in a immune system. Now, you had a popus theory that Burkowitz was concerned. Well, no, it wasn't really serious at any point. It was multifactorial or it was new agent. Burkowitz and Callan picked the wrong answer. They land on multifactorial in the book, but all of the advice that they give is completely correct. Like up until the adverb to prep, the advice contained in how to have sex in an epidemic published like a month and a half after Larry Kramer published 1,000 12 and counting was the correct safe sex advice to minimize your risk of HIV transmission when having gay sex. They wrote, quote, remember the issue is disease and not sex, end quote, they advocated condom use. They went through what seems to be the highest risk for any kind of fluid transmission or body fluid transmission in different sexual practices. And therefore, you know, oral sex was less dangerous than anal sex. You could probably get away with oral sex without a condom. If you did not get a lot of sperm in your mouth, anal sex was condom only, you know, condoms because they had a fluid barrier should prevent transmission. Yeah. Like all of that was in there and all of that was correct. And all of that was being spread. At the same time that Kramer is saying, quote, they'd give up sex forever if you could promise them life and tell us saying that people are valuing life so little and Cox and asses so much, right? So Kramer continued to be late to the party on safer sex. In the early 1990s, he went on this wave of mass media appearances starting to undermine the scientific consensus on AIDS and safer sex, basically saying, because we don't have good enough research on all these different things, why are we spending money promoting these safer sex protocols that aren't even necessarily 100% protective? And this is at a time when fighting for funding for safer sex education was one of the crucial issues, right? And to go out as a gay leader and make statements that were like applauded by Republicans who did not want to vote for this funding because, oh, look, even they say it doesn't work, yeah, is really awful. So he's just preaching us all of abstinence abstinence. And then when prep comes in, suddenly the condom culture was great and we missed the condom culture. Like whatever, whatever gay men are doing, it's too much sex. However, sex, much sex gay men are having it's too much. However dangerous it is, it's too dangerous. Like whatever steps they're taking are not enough. And how could you possibly is the moral essentially argument, value, all of this fucking over what you should be doing, which is being like Michelangelo, right? I want to make a comparison here that I know is very sensitive and I want to emphasize that I'm making it carefully, which is to a more recent pandemic, which is COVID, right? And I already said that I think that COVID is a tremendous crisis of health care and labor and represented a tremendous political failure and also that it is not over and also that states have been criminally irresponsible in their handling of it and in their abandonment of many populations of people during it. We then as the generalized us that wants to do something about that, in my view, too often landed on a quite moralizing focus about individual behavior, shaming and blaming individual people, right? There was that whole sort of curtain twitching culture in 2020, 2021 of like people reporting their neighbors for having taken too many walks or whatever. And again, it's this focus on individual behavior rather than this focus on like collective inaction and an extremely moralizing focus. And then in more recent years, what this has gone to is, I mean, we're in a moment now when we have a lot of tools that we can use to collectively manage risk, right? We can ventilate spaces better. We can keep people up to date on vaccines, which it appears are extremely effective at preventing transmission for a while and then that breaks down, but then they're very effective at preventing severe disease. They seem to be very effective at preventing long COVID, especially when they're up to date. And yet the number of people who have the most up to date vaccines is really low. And in a lot of places, you actually have to pay money to get this vaccine that we all paid for, like we all paid for the development of that vaccine. That's a scandal. It's a scandal of ownership. It's a scandal of labor. It's something that I think you could organize just about anybody around. And instead of doing that and having that argument, we're still often having an argument about individual behavior and its morality or immorality. And one that just like Scramer was sort of eager to throw away a big component of gay male sociality and to kind of consider it immoral to like pursue this point, people in this case are kind of throwing away sociality in general and considering it somewhat immoral in order to make this point. And both of them feel to me counterproductive, even if both of them are coming out of, I think, the right impulse. There's a conversation about strategy and a conversation about what we're actually fighting and the systems we're actually fighting and keeping that in mind. Now there were other people who pushed back on this promiscuity argument. There's a famous article by Douglas Crimp, who was himself an act up, taking up the title of Calvin Berkowitz. The article is called How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic. And they have these battles about closing gay male sex spaces. And Cramer often found himself on the side of essentially right wing politicians and moral reformers in trying to get these spaces closed. And the argument that people who wanted to keep them open made was that you could actually use them as sites of education. You could mandate condom use. You could distribute condoms. You could have testing. You could once there was testing. You could do all of this stuff there. And Cramer was just very eager to like work with Regina Leone to get these things shut down. And in a lot of cities in America at that time, these public sex venues and these sex on premises venues were shut down. But a lot of research more recently has shown in places like London talking about how the Kemsets epidemic in London in the past few years has developed. When sex on premises venues shut down, the guys who went there don't stop fucking. They just start fucking each other in private. And once they're fucking each other in private, it's much harder to distribute information. It's much harder to have mandate condom use. Like there's all these things you can do once you have, when you have people together in space, that you can't when they're all atomized. And I think losing those spaces was a negative. Yeah. Like those spaces where people are having sex, and at that point, there are big points of transmission of HIV. Or now there are places where people are using drugs and how engaging in Kemsets. The places don't cause the activity. There are places that host the activity. And therefore there are places if you want to reach that population at the most efficient places to reach them. And if you disperse those people, there's just no spot where you can reach them because that together. Exactly. Now this was a time when the federal and city administrations were raisedly refusing all help. Ronald Reagan's surgeon general C Everett Cooper reports that Reagan said the people dying evades were quote getting what they deserved. In whom is quote from Ronald Reagan, the president under whose term every line on every graph started going the wrong direction. The nice way of summarizing it. The mayor of New York City at the time was Ed Koch. Ed Koch was, we are subject to the UK libel law. So Ed Koch was someone who many people have rather convincingly suggested might himself have known his way around, but be fat dick allegedly. He's dead. He can sell you like. Oh yeah, fine. He's a faggot. And he didn't want to admit he was a faggot in public because he had a right wing voting base. And so he didn't want to do too much for HIV patients because he didn't want to look like he was catering to these sort of village radicals. Good thing that urban politics have moved on from then and no one would ever make such a mistake. So Kramer is becoming increasingly frustrated. The debt tool continues to rise. It really is staggering between 1981 and the introduction of protease inhibitors somewhere between a third and a half of gay men died in urban in major cities. Holy shit. So just imagine losing all of your friends in their 30s, in their 20s, in their 40s and losing them horribly to very, very difficult painful deaths. There's an essay in the LRB by Tom Kruke called here was a plague that I think really movingly describes what it was like to be alive at that time. It's a great piece. And also I think I think it's in a gentrification of the minds by Sarah Shulman where she makes the point that it's not just that all your friends would die, but you would die. I entire friendship groups with no one left to remember more and collect and archive their materials, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, just everyone would suddenly be gone. Everyone, you know as dead. All of us and by friends and partners and friends. Kramer, in this environment, delivered a speech at the gay lesbian center in March of 1987, he asked the crowd to stand up and half of the crowd to sit down and the half that were standing up, he said in five years, we don't do something you'll be dead. And so after this act of was founded there, no, I don't say he founded it, we'll get into it. Now Sarah Shulman described this organization and let the record show and why it was effective. And she makes an argument that she thinks is the most important part of her book, and I agree. And here's her argument about why act up was effective as best as I can give it again, but read the book because the book is really good. Direct action, they did stuff. It was not a lot of yammering. They were not a lot of unity principles. There was not too much theory. There was no ideological debate allowed. They talked about what they were going to do. You could talk about whether you thought something would work, which of course means that there is ideological debate, but you were not to discuss, you know, the trotskiest versus Marxist versus non-Marxist theories of revolution, you were to suggest what can we do as direct action to fight the AIDS and crisis. They became their own experts. They learned what they needed to know, and they designed actually workable solutions. This is a step that I think we often forget at the moment. They actually came up with things that could be done that were actionable. We see this effectively actually in a lot of movements now, right? When people suggest tactics like a Green New Deal, when people suggest tactics like an arms embargo on a country that is committing war crimes, like these are actionable, workable things that can actually happen, you know, saying we want AIDS to end was not what they did. They didn't go out in the streets and say, you must do something. They went out of the streets and said, you must do this. Then they prepare. They presented these solutions to the powers that they expecting to be ignored, but they went through the step of presenting them. Then they did something Shulman calls self-purification, and this was basically making sure that everyone in the rank and file knew what the fuck they were talking about, so that any random person who got pulled at one of these events of civil disobedience and had a mic stuck in their face could accurately describe what it was that they were advocating for and why it would work and what the problem was. And then they did this non-violent direct action to get attention, and the idea was basically to force the media to speak on your behalf. Like you can get yourself in the media because no matter what the person says when they're sort of dragging you away and they stick the camera in your face, you do something the media wants to look at because the media likes to look expectable, and then when they're dragging you away, you say the thing that you've been like trained to say that you actually know about. Now please note how different this is from a lot of prevailing activist strategy today, and also how similar it is, right? Like there were things that people have really learned and internalized from this, and Shulman's argument, I think, is that some of the really important steps have too often been left out of this kind of civil disobedience plan. Shulman emphasizes that Kramer was important in the first years of the organization. One of the big principles was what she calls "simultinity of action and not consensus." I talked about this earlier, but the idea is basically everyone can do different stuff. No one has to work on stuff, they don't want to work on. You do that, and I do this, and we don't waste any time arguing about it, as long as it's under this requirement direct action to end the AIDS crisis. Shulman writes, quote, "Larry, like much of his milieu, believed in an inside-outside strategy in which there would be insiders cooperating with government and pharma, and outsiders being threatening via street organizers." He did not seem to be aware that the act-uppers who could be insiders looked and acted for the most part like the white, Ivy League-educated man who ran government and pharma, end quote. And she quotes Kramer as calling himself, quote, "the only gay writer on the front line that still alive who was on the front line from the very beginning," end quote. Edmund White is still alive, right? And she went on to say this, and this is the most quietly devastating quote about anyone have ever read or among them. Quote, "I think Larry never really understood the range of people who were in act-up where we were coming from and what we were doing. He was able to recognize when women had something to offer that act-up needed, but he never integrated the AIDS politics of women and people of color into his worldview despite repeated exposure. Perhaps in some way this false image that he was the leader was palatable to the media and the men with power who saw the world in fundamental racial and gender lenses that made only white men important. And the world thinks of Larry as the leader of an organization that he didn't know and never claimed to lead because of the desire for a mirror of the power that was itself detrimental to both act-up and the communities we were fighting for," end quote. Yeah, I was very profound thing to say. Very. Now, Kramer became increasingly frustrated with act-up. He gave a speech in 1991 where he said quote, "Act-up has been taken over by a lunatic fringe. I deserve a little fucking respect for what I've done in this world and I don't know what to do next. I don't know what kind of organization to start. I don't know how to give advice. I don't know how to lead anyone should they want to follow. I don't know what to write anymore. I don't know how to write anymore articles because I've said what I've said to you tonight in one form or other for ten fucking years, whereas good is dead." Now, this isn't speech too act-up. In 1991, which is in the middle of being act-up in 1991, like they're doing a lot on as highly inspirational. It's totally uninspirational and I think it's exactly the kind of things that so often you see coming out of movements and people who are so burned out in movements that what they feel they can do is to raise the rhetorical stakes ever higher and to describe both themselves and everyone around them as having endlessly failed and failed and failed instead of seeing how winds build winds and power builds power. Today we won this, which means tomorrow we can win that, which is bigger. It can actually be really damaging when it grows. What Kramer's disappointment, constant disappointment was based on was this idea of what he called greatness, right, which is a fundamentally conservative vision of achievement and morality and inclusion in these institutions that were the institutions that were killing people. This was a theory of greatness that led him to first help create and then to denounce and withdraw support for a center for gay and lesbian studies at Yale, but he did this. He decried the influence of queer theorists and deconstructionists and he insisted that gay history meant tracking a historical stable identity, "pretty much the same since the beginning of human history" and "and that doing it otherwise in a constructionist way was "stupidity and elite presumption of the highest and most preposterous order." So basically gay phases and high places was the limit of his political vision. All right. This is a kind in a way of gay nationalism and along with it came a respectability politics. For all the power and beauty of the normal heart and some of the 80s and 90s essays, they're very blunt objects and they attacked a lot of undeserving things along with deserving things and as he got older his accuracy continued decreasing. He wrote a speech in 2004 called "the tragedy of today's gays." This is a piece that he wrote at the time when drug protocols had made HIV livable, which is a tremendous victory in comparison to 20 years before when HIV was a death sentence and barely being understood as the pathogen that caused AIDS. Crucially that livability was not the same for everyone, right? Access to these medications is the deciding factor as to who lives or who dies. We now know that these medicines also stop you from passing it on. So the fact that there is any single person in the world who does not have access to these medications, which once again we paid for the development of is a fucking crime, right? That's the thing to be angry about, not the fact that people are having sex. Also in 2004, the locus of the HIV pandemic had moved on from urban gay men to other communities. There's a massive HIV epidemic among black gay men in the United States, especially rural, especially in the south. HIV transmission rates there and even death rates there are astonishingly and criminally high. Of course, many people know there was a huge crisis, is a huge crisis of HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. And yet, Kramer was still focused on the tragedy of today's gays. And he wrote, quote, "I love being gay. I think we're better than other people. I really do." And he talks about these sort of transcultural, trans-historic character that's better. Of course, he doesn't talk about the murder of trans women of color. He doesn't talk about police violence against queer people. What he says is that America pre-Ragan was, quote, "the richest and most liberal nation in the history of civilization," and was turned by Reagan and the conservative movement into, quote, "a classist racist homophobic imperial army," end quote. Pre-Ragan, it wasn't a classist racist homophobic imperialist. No, apparently Jim Crow didn't happen. Apparently there was no Vietnam. There was no redlining until the 70s. There was no slavery. There was no indigenous genocide. It was none of this conviction that New Deal liberalism was America's telos, which is a very mid-century New York Jewish intellectual point of view. And it blinded him to America's actual history. Also, on the point you're making about a sort of gay nationalism, there is this sort of nationalist impulse, which is, my nation was the greatest nation in the world forever. And now we've ruined it. And he's sort of saying the same thing. We were Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and Deli is like that. And now we're going back. Yeah, make gay men are like today. Larry Kramer, make gay guys great again. Yeah, exactly. Now he was responding also in this lecture to a crystal meth epidemic, the first kind of wave of crystal meth epidemic use among gay men. And researchers have talked about the closure of queer spaces. They've talked about rapidly gentrifying cities. They've talked like cane race about various different drugs alongside HIV drugs as part of a technology of becoming sort of pharmacists of the self as ways of slowing down time. This famous Tony Valenzuela article about meth and time and HIV. And like, what do you do when you thought you had no time and then you have all this time? And it's a, you know, there's various complex reasons for this. And what Kramer summoned was the moralism of a Bill Cosby, right? Quote, you want to kill yourself, go kill yourself. I'm sorry. It takes hard work to behave like an adult. It takes discipline. When are you going to realize that for the rest of your lives, for the rest of life on earth, you are never going to be able to have sex with another person without a condom never end quote. But she's wrong about what she was wrong about. But 10 years later, in a New York Times interview, once prep had emerged in 2012, he referred to prep as quote cowardly. And he said people taking prep were taking quote a drug that is poison that has lessened their energy to go out and fight for anything end quote. And this is after multiple peer reviewed studies had established the safety and efficacy of prep protocols. And he cried these drugs. He decried the people who use them. He referred to HIV treatment as quote daily chemotherapy. He continued insisting with no scientific evidence that the treatments were about to stop working. And so therefore, the modifications and behavior that people had made with treatment protocols like prep or like treatment as prevention were about to fail. And we were about to be back in 1982. And he wrote quote, you cannot continue to allow yourselves in each other to act and live like this end quote. And by this he meant partying in sex. And he said quote, gay men had quote, brought the plague of AIDS on ourselves end quote. This like the end like just Jerry fall well. It's Ronald Reagan, right? Yeah. Getting what they deserved. But right. It's the same worldview. It's also this thing of he diverting so much of his life to effective health care for gay men. Yeah. And then it an effective health care for gay men arrives. And it's actually wrong because the effective health care for gay men enables gay men to have sex. You have the bad sex that you don't say that you know on. And he had a horrible health scare in the early 90s that let him to step back from frontline organizing for a time. He went to the hospital with horrible abdominal pain. And he had known that he had hepatitis, but thought it was managed and then had like lots of bile pumped out of him and had very little liver left. He was basically an advanced cirrhosis. And then when they checked him into the hospital, they did an HIV test, which he'd actually never taken because since the beginning of the epidemic, he had never had unprotected sex. And it turns out he was HIV positive. That's how he found out, which also meant that he was for a while thought to be ineligible for a transplant, which meant that he was facing extremely uncertain situations. He did end up being approved eventually for a transplant, had a transplant, and continued as we know to live until 2020. But that was what was happening in the background of all of this. Now his worldview limited his anger, right? It made the anger moral and not political. It's not that he wasn't a political writer that he didn't make political change, but his anger's targets were either too broad or not broad enough. He attacked gay people he thought should have done better, but he never interrogated his own standards and their implication in the systems that were producing the evils that he decried. And the weird thing is that when he died during the COVID pandemic, he died in the very beginning of the COVID pandemic. Many of the representatives of the shadowy networks of evil that he had described so passionately absorbed his work and legacy. When he died, there were pions to the brilliance of his anger from Hillary Clinton, from Pete Buttigieg, from Vilde Blasio, who I think a few days after he made his statement about Kramer and the importance of angry protest sent out the NYPD to tear gas Black Lives Matter Marches in New York City. Kramer's anger was an anger that gay men could be better and were refusing to be. And it's the anger that kind of overwhelms and destroys his final book. It's a two-volume novel that he viewed as his masterpiece called the American People. Thousands of pages long, and it takes readers throughout all of US history from gay orgies led by George Washington to monkeys, swapping versions of AIDS before the dawn of human civilization, to secret Nazi camps in North Dakota. The whole novel is completely covered in blood and shit and piss. The book has people named Dame Hermia Blood Ranch, Dr. Sister Grace Hooker, Dr. Bosco Dripper and Dr. Israel Jerusalem, and at the center is Fred Limich, whose Kramer's new literary stand in, and he slaps down historians and institutions and underneath all of it as a sort of metaphor for American history's evil heart is AIDS, which is called the underlying condition. Sections of the novel are actually narrated by AIDS itself. And I have to tell you, this novel is basically unreadable. All of his limits were found in this book. His anger is justified, its targets are wrong, he insists, that gay men had always existed in the same ways and had always both been sort of uniquely advantaged and persecuted at the same time. If we compare this to a gay writer like Gary Indiana, who totally refuses this sort of winsome lyricism that a lot of gay stories that get into the canon have, you know, a book like Three Month Fever by Gary Indiana is deadly precise about the ways in which gay men were complicit in unrelentingly shallow social lives, and in which a kind of status achieved through having the right look and having competed to consume as much as possible, sex drugs bodies, was more important than comradeship or solidarity. But what Larry Kramer does is attack the sex itself rather than its commodification, and what he refuses to see is that there's no reason why the identity category gay should make anyone any better or worse. Different, but not better or worse. I want to conclude on this final note. Despite the limits of his moral rage, despite the limits of his activism, Kramer made more political change than most writers ever have or will. And I think probably the most important thing we can learn from Larry Kramer is that the most important thing we can do with artists is to address ourselves to the parts of change making that are unglamorous and that don't actually call upon our unique creative essence and that fuchs of prosotic debate about writing and art are basically irrelevant to the work that needs to be done, which mostly involves showing up, doing things, stuffing envelopes, knocking under his marching, fighting, handing out flyers on the steps of the theatre. Exactly. Neththistory of Larry Kramer. Hi, you're all listening to Badgays. We're an audience supported show we'd have as network, we'd have sponsors or advertising. It's really you guys who keep the show on the road. So if you're interested in supporting us, why not head over to Patreon where you can listen to extra Badgays, a monthly podcast about all things queer? It's really fun to do. You get deer from us every month, you get deer from us in a less scripted format. We're starting to do fun new things like an advice column segment. Again, all of that is only for subscribers. You can also subscribe on Apple podcasts right there in the app. We also have new merch for season eight. We have t-shirts. We have socks that say evil twink energy on them. We have caps in pink and camo and black. Go check it out all at our website at badgayspod.com. All of that helps us keep the show going and do more of this, which we love to do. And now on with the show. Thanks for that, Ben. A fascinating story about a very interesting man. So I have a few questions. First of all, we've talked quite a lot in the show today and also in previous episodes about the concept that we're standing on the shores of giants. It's very easy to be critical about LGBT people in the past, especially those who we sort of see ourselves within the same potential political current as, as problematic. But in fact, we can only reach those conclusions because of the work and thinking that those people did. And you mentioned as well in this show how act ups of political strategy was very much based around turn up. We have one aim. Let's try everything. If you don't want to do it, you don't do it. You do what you want to do, as long as it goes towards the same. Was perhaps Kramer's anger just one part of that strategy, you know, like, but yes, we can say in retrospect that perhaps the anger was ineffective and might have ostracized people. But in reality, it was one thing that might have worked, now trying everything it could have worked. I certainly don't want to give people the impression that Kramer's anger about the AIDS epidemic in and of itself is what it is that I'm criticizing him for. I think his anger was correct. I think the quantity of his anger was correct. As I said around the founding of game in health crisis, the very beginning of this epidemic was a moment when a certain amount of hysteria was warranted was correct, right? This was a moment when, and I think for reasons that we can historically understand, a lot of gay movement leaders were very reluctant to suddenly demand that people shut down or avoid a very hard one kind of sexual freedom, right? The sexual freedom of the clone culture of New York, right? The drugstick, disco, and dish, clone culture of New York, was an unbelievably hard one victory in many ways for some people. There's a reason why it is so often canonized today, right? There's a reason why so many gay cultural events today, parties, record labels, whatever are like going back to this time, are seeing this time as potentially interesting and productive. I mean, it's a moment when the gay subjectivity, as we understand it now, is really just being formed and people are having this tremendous amount of freedom to explore and having a whole lot of fun doing it. And that's a good thing, right? Like, I too would have been extremely low to want to accept that something about this was going to change whether we wanted it to or not, then that we were going to have to devote our attention to other things, maybe at a moment when for a certain kind of gay person in New York, it felt like you would eke out enough of a life that you could spend most of your life not doing activism and instead having your life, which I think sometimes we valorize activism to the point where we forget that ideally we would live in a world where people didn't have to take to the streets to constantly fight for their own rights and to constantly fight against impending death and doom and destruction. We certainly don't live there now, nor did we live there in the late 70s, but you certainly understand why people were low to accept and do his credit. Larry Kramer got it immediately. He was one of the first people to see what was coming and immediately understand the severity it was going to take. That being said, why was that because he was pessimistic about gay men's babies because he was pessimistic about gay men's behaviors. And so he it led him to be very useful in that early moment. But then as we saw, there were a few things wrong. One was that he was not throughout his life promoting the best medical public health consensus, home reduction consensus around messaging around safer sex and techniques around safer sex that will minimize harm in ways that people will do. Instead, he was promoting a kind of maximalist agenda, right? At a time when Mike Callan and Richard Berkowitz created this safer sex guide with again, the wrong background idea about what caused AIDS, but that had the correct information about how to protect yourself from fluid-born STIs, which they figured it might be one and they were right, you know, like, you know, who knows? There's a moment when it becomes less useful to just be purely pessimistic, purely angry, and purely sort of culturally angry. And certainly, I think we see that in some of his reactions to what happened to act up itself, right? I mean, it's one thing in 1981 or two or three when some people thought this was just going to be a little passing thing and didn't understand the scale of it to be kind of railing against community leaders and saying, how could you be ignoring this? How could you not be taking every step possible? But to be screaming at the members of act up, who were in 1991, right in the middle of those sort of peak years of that organization being extremely engaged and extremely effective, they didn't yet know how effective they were going to be, but it was obvious that the people in act up were doing something. We're doing a lot. We're doing more than most people have ever done to still be like screaming at them as though they were doing nothing is a little bit, seems a bit unhelpful to me. There's one more thing just to add to that point. It's sort of the other ingredient of act up's success that Sarah Schulman describes and let the record show. One of the questions she describes having tried to figure out is why these people? Like, what was the thing that made the people who threw themselves into act up, actually throw themselves into act up? Why did they do it and not other people? And she spent, she writes a lot of time trying to figure out what that factor might be. And the answer was that there are just some people who could not accept what was going on. Like, she could not find a better answer than just some people cannot accept things. And so they set out to change them. And Larry Kramer is maybe the greatest carrier of that gene or the greatest possessor of that trait you could imagine. And that's something that did make him very helpful to many movements. But I still think all the things he can't accept are not to send things as the things that you can't accept. Exactly. And they're, I mean, this is not the episode I would have written if Larry Kramer were a forgotten figure. But Larry Kramer is one of the most eulogized and praised figures in gay activists and ever. And he's someone who at this point has been praised and accepted fully across his spectrum from radical to liberal. And that's why I think it's interesting to look a little bit more critically at his legacy. And it weighs that his legacy, I think, echoes some various dysfunctions that we might see in certain contexts and discussions today. Thanks. Another question I think is about him as a writer. And we talked a bit about some of his better and some of his worst sentences. His, what's wrong with Dr. Hermia Bled-Rinch, Hugh? Actually, I don't got that. I was the name is perhaps one of his strongo points. Ask Dripper. Yeah. And then move Bernstein. Like I said, as a sort of even war aspects to some of his satire, I think, in terms of his grotescaries. And you mentioned before the AIDS epidemic sort of came to the surface that he was writing faggots, for example. And then some of his other things you mentioned, for example, is a normal heart. Did he write anything after this sort of high point of the AIDS epidemic as it was affecting gay men that was outside of this discourse, this world? Not really. So there was faggots in 1979. Then there's a off-broadway play that's been kind of forgotten. Then there's the normal heart and its successor, the destiny of me. And these are like late 80s, early 90s. Then he has his horrible health crisis in the early 90s. And then from then until the end of his life, he's hard at work on this two-volume, giant novel, The American People, which was one of these book projects that I think a lot of people didn't think was ever going to be finished. And then it was. And I think if Larry Kramer hadn't written it, it would not have been published. He made up his room by someone else. Yeah. Yeah. Like I think it's probably good that it was published on balance. When the first volume came out, I actually liked it. I sort of fooled myself into liking it very much. And now with hindsight, I see that I was just too excited about it. And it's actually really, I mean, it's just not, it's not really, it's not readable. It's not a readable book. It, you know, maybe with good editing, it could have been something in one volume. But at this point, he just refused editing. And in a way, again, it's good that it got out there, right? Like more people should have their cranky, late-light, cuckoo books, it published. But that's something about them. It does say something about them. And it also, it's good that it's circulating. Maybe it'll be interesting to someone. But, you know, whatever, it's just not very good. And there's nothing and there's nothing that he wrote that was outside of it. I mean, the easy comparison to make is with someone like Edmund White, who's a much better writer and who writes much more throughout his life. But then again, remember, Edmund White is like more of a writer than Larry Cramer ever was, right? Like Larry Cramer wrote women in love because he had to, because he ran out of money. He wrote the normal heart and destiny of me, I think, because he had to. And it certainly feels like the American people is something he wrote because he had to. I mean, I think writing for him wasn't necessarily as much of an artistic pursuit as the expression of something that needed to be expressed. Yeah, there are people who write and there are writers. So on that note, Ben, and actually I'm very interested to hear what your, your completion is here. Usually, it's pretty obvious. Larry Cramer. Good gay, bad gay, good not gay, bad not gay. I return once again to Larry Cramer's own sentence from his last novel, The American People. Quote, you fuckster, you are so fucksum, I love you very much. A problematic fave. A fave problematic, let's say. Cramer. So people want to know more about Larry Cramer, what some sources you use to research this episode. Well, first of all, people can take a look at faggots and the normal heart and destiny of me if they would like. I think those are the pieces of Cramer's own writing that are the most possible to read. Yeah, I saw a, I saw a normal heart, a national theater a couple of years ago and a revival and it was really interesting. Yeah, period piece. I mean, it's a pure polemic play, but quite something. It's been possible to not be affected by it. There's also a filmed version of the normal heart that was made with Mark Ruffalo as the Larry Cramer stand and in Julia Roberts as the doctor. Barbara Streisand was trying to adapt it for a long time with her playing the doctor, which would have been quite something. Maybe she would have sung a song. One can only imagine. Then if people want to know more about the history of Act Up New York, there is, of course, Sarah Schulman's magisterial book, Let The Record Show, A Political History of Act Up New York, came out a couple of years ago from Forrestress and Giroux. It is such a good book, do not be intimidated by the fact that it is 12,857 pages long. 1200. 1200 pages long, there you go. One of the things that's great about the book is it's actually extremely well organized in a way long books aren't always. So it's in a lot of short chunks. It's totally possible to kind of go in and find stories and learn about pieces of it and to read it slowly over time and the information at the beginning where she synthesizes what she thinks the political lessons of Act Up were are really great. Also, if she comes to your town to talk about the book, go, she's a really great talker. We were happy to host her here with Full List Museum and Berlin writer's workshop earlier. This year, maybe it was technically last year, but I forget which. Then there is a vanity fair article called Kramer versus Kramer that talks a bit about Kramer's life in the 1990s. The general form of the episode, some of the words and the structuring is a free adaptation by me of my own literary obituary to Kramer who is quoting herself is well, you know, which is on lid hub, which is linked in the show notes. There's also that interview with Jane McAlevy, which I'm going to link in the show notes because I think it's very good. If you're interested in thinking about these questions, I also took a look at his New York Times obituary and another piece of writing by Kramer, 112th and counting, which I'll also link in the show notes. So that's where people can find more. Fantastic. Well, that's all from us this week. My name is Hugh Lemmy. You can find me online q.substock.com. And I'm Ben Miller and you can find me at BenRiteThings and just about every platform I'm quoting. And until next week, see you, bye!