Remembering Larry Kramer, a writer and activist
The few moments I got to spend in Larry Kramer’s world — as a reader, as a playgoer, as a journalist, and at rallies and speeches — were some of the most exhilarating I’ve ever spent, both intellectually and artistically.
He had a thunderous righteous anger that was a wonder to behold. He also had one of the warmest, most welcoming hugs I’ve ever felt.
Kramer died Wednesday, one month shy of his 85th birthday. It’s hard to imagine a world without Larry Kramer plowing through it in his tidy overalls and flowing woolen scarf. He was so present, and present-tense, for so many years. Luckily, we have his writings, which hold up remarkably well despite the of-the-moment fury in which they were written.
In all his works, Kramer went there. He got people speaking about sexual identity, civil rights, AIDS, buried histories. When people wouldn’t talk, he spoke (and often yelled) for them.
The current Netflix series “Hollywood” imagines an enlightened America where gay life could be accepted and celebrated in the 1940s. Kramer helped make that happen in the real world of the 1970s and ’80s. The nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed that Kramer scripted for Ken Russell’s film version of D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love” instantly became one of the most iconic erotic gay images in the history of cinema. His play “The Normal Heart” started a mainstream dialogue about the ravages of the AIDS crisis and remains a classic. (The 2014 film version of “The Normal Heart” was directed by “Hollywood” creator Ryan Murphy, who’s also known for such LGBTQ+ friendly shows as “Glee” and “Pose.”) Kramer was able to issue a fresh topical provocation for just about decade of his life, including Reagan era farce “Just Say No” and his 2005 political screed “The Tragedy of Today’s Gays.”
One of my first direct exchanges with Larry Kramer was in the early ’90s, when, out of the blue, he faxed me a letter he’d sent to a major Connecticut theater, expressing his outrage with a programming choice they’d made, accusing the theater of institutional homophobia and attempting to out its artistic director. You can imagine the amount of behind-the-scenes umbrage and dismay this caused at the theater. I watched the imbroglio with amusement and admiration.
Years later, I saw Larry Kramer show up for a reading at the Yale Bookstore, take issue with the low attendance and loudly berate the manager for scheduling it during a school vacation, not marketing the event better or alerting certain local groups. This wasn’t idle grousing. This was lamenting a bad situation that he was too late to set right. It was in keeping with his decades of in-your-face activism and on-the-spot strategizing, most notably as the co-founder of both the Gay Mens Health Crisis and ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Larry Kramer’s frustrations could fuel revolutions.
Connecticut played a role in his life story. Kramer was born in Bridgeport but grew up largely in Maryland, returning to Connecticut as a Yale undergrad. That’s when he had a major reckoning about his sexual identity. His depression over feeling like he was the only gay student on campus (at a university now universally known as “the gay Ivy”) led to a suicide attempt. He rose to become one of the defining figures of late 20th century gay culture.
Most of his writings were at least somewhat autobiographical. His landmark play “The Normal Heart” is a beautifully articulated breakdown of the key issues in the AIDS crisis, but its confident dramatic structure is rooted in Kramer’s own life experiences seeing his friends die and seeing the government do nothing about it.
For such a topical ’80s drama, “The Normal Heart” has had extraordinary staying power. The community-based Little Theatre of Manchester presented it locally just last year. One of the first regional theater productions of “The Normal Heart” was in 1986 at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, just weeks after the Broadway production had closed.
When Kramer’s brother endowed a chair in Gay Studies at Yale in Larry’s name, the raucous writer happily attended the public lectures there, especially appreciating the ones which used scholarly research to reveal that important figures were likely gay, and excoriating the trendy “queer theory” studies which he thought distracted from worthwhile historical research. His relationship with the university deteriorated, but that phase was pivotal in the eventual growth of Gender Studies at Yale.
Kramer was in Hartford in 2016 to read from his own gay history text, “The American People.” Decades in the making, it proposes that such celebrated figures as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were gay. Their sexual identity, he maintained, was not gossip fodder but influenced the friendships these leaders formed and the decisions they made.
In a phone interview prior to that appearance, Kramer argued that Hartford icon Mark Twain — whose historic home/ museum was the site of the reading — was “not only gay, he was flamboyantly gay. He gloried in it. He lived in practically all-male environments. He wrote about it in ‘Roughing It’.’”
The second volume of “The American People” was published this year.
The books are branded fiction, and Kramer appears in them as the character Fred Lemish, a thinly veiled avatar whom he’d previously used in his controversial 1978 novel “Faggots.” It seems a little silly to put the word “controversial” there. Everything Kramer published could be labeled controversial. “The American People”’s controversy was that it was a novel that upended American history.
You can’t sit stony-faced through anything Kramer wrote. Everything he did was a call to action, an effort to make discontent as public and unavoidable as possible. Let his death be an opportunity to revisit his plays, delve into his histories and celebrate his unavoidable, uncompromising majesty.