In the 1980s, Larry Kramer was the best Cassandra a movement – and a nation – could have asked for. Caustic, relentless and loud, Kramer gave us all a kick in the butt and ACT UP, both badly needed, and both successful beyond anyone’s imagining.
More than a quarter century later, he’s finding it hard to accept victory. His sour screed at the Huffington Post is unnecessary, overheated and wrong. In typical Kramer fashion, he overargues his case, but what once was passion now just comes across as melodrama:
During World War II, when Jews were being gassed to death by the trainload, the great Jewish scholar of political theory Hannah Arendt told her people they should form an army to fight back, and that they only had themselves to blame if they didn’t. We had that army for a while. It was called ACT UP. What happened to it?
Well, two things. First, after its victory, it moved on. Yes, there still is HIV, and yes, far too many people suffer and die as a result. But today that is more a function of poverty, ignorance and other social conditions than of homophobia and the pathological need to make gay people invisible. While one part of the ACT UP forces became more radical, the rest saw they really had made a difference, and tried to actually enjoy the fruits of their labor. The AIDS fight did more than just save the lives of millions, and bring a generation out of the closet, it was the earthquake that uprooted in heterosexuals the refusal to acknowledge gay people even existed.
And because of that, a second thing happened to the army: It enlisted an uncountable number of heterosexuals. Kramer may have difficulty accepting that fact, since he seems to have blinded himself to the idea that heterosexuals can be not only our allies but also our champions. But that is the most profound change that has happened since the 1980s.
The problem of a minority in a democracy is that it cannot, by definition, succeed on its own. It must have allies, either in the political realm or at the very least, in the courts. And today, we have no shortage of such allies: Ted Olson and David Boies; Meghan and Cindy McCain; Andrew Cuomo and Christine Gregoire; George Clooney and Brad Pitt; Isaiah Thomas, Antonio Cromartie and Scott Fujita; Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt. . . . It is utterly impossible to draft a complete list of heterosexuals who not only support us, but have taken public roles in fostering our equality.
But don’t tell that to Kramer:
To those still alive, just know that there’s no one out there fighting for you now. [snip] Why can’t we, once and for all, bond together to fight for our mutual needs? Where are the leaders who can lead us on this journey to our equality?
Kramer’s pessimism seems to come from his view that only gay people should or can fight for their rights:
What does that say about how much the gay population wants to fight for these rights that I speak of? I think we help to kill each other by not fighting together to get these rights, by fighting each other instead, and not fighting against all the hate that’s always out there coming non-stop from our enemies.
Yes, we still have enemies who fire non-stop hate in our direction. Bully (you might say) for them. But it’s hard work these days being that grim a pessimist. With the important exception of schoolchildren, the vast majority of us can ignore the haters (or even love them, depending on your philosophy), and keep convincing the far larger group of waverers. And in a beautiful exponential progression, each person who changes in our favor changes others. That progression does not work in the opposite direction.
If I were in a position to give any advice to Kramer, it would be to open his gaze a little, and include heterosexual supporters in his worldview. The glass isn’t half empty, it’s three-quarters full.
10 Comments for “Cheer Up, Larry”
posted by Cheer Up, Larry | QClick Radar on
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posted by Jorge on
Yes, I agree.
Integration and acceptance are a two-way street. Mainstream acceptance moves us into the mainstream, and makes us as divided as the mainstream. This command-control business Mr. Kramer is trying will not work–too many of us are in competing commands.
I often cite the African American community as an example of why too much unity and why being “sour” upon success are both very bad things. Yes, politicians don’t dare insult blacks anymore. But do blacks truly have the political power to continue earning victories? I don’t think they do. The conventional wisdom is that Republicans can’t win their vote, and Democrats can take it for granted, so why work for it? My question: are things getting better for the black community because of any activism they’ve done recently? I see decisions being made to take a stand on such things as police brutality, off-color remarks by radio personalities, and other things they condemn as racism, and I see backlash and people sticking their heads in the sand.
I think people at least respected the fights for gay marriage laws and to overturn Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, fights that from where I stand gays have fought multifaceted and fractured. I’m not sure what Mr. Kramer wants us to do that would be better, but whatever it is I’d be highly suspicious of it.
posted by Houndentenor on
I can’t help but laugh. If you’d ever read Faggots or seen a production of The Normal Heart you’d know that Kramer’s public persona is the opposite of “lightening up”. He goes off on one of these rants periodically, everyone reacts, and he goes back into hiding (wherever that is these days). It’s what he does. No one takes them that seriously at this point. It’s not at all unlike Ann Coulter’s rants. It’s just a tactic to stir something up. In this case perhaps we’ll talk about AIDS which frankly none of us is all that eager to do, before going back to what we were doing. I find these sorts of provocations entertaining, not so much the actual statement but the rather predictable reactions they get from certain quarters.
posted by LarRY KRAMER on
OF COURSE i know that straights have helped us. i have even written a number of times that much of our progress has been achieved BECAUSE of straights. believe it or not, i am not a pessimist. i just call them as i see them, which is different from how you see them, i guess. but like i’ve also written ad nauseum, no matter what you say, x number of people are going to agree with you and x number are not. so you might just as well say what you want to. sorry you guys don’t. larry kramer
posted by Larry Kramer on
AND i prefer not to forget that we had (and still have) a plague that murdered almost everyone i knew.
posted by Audrey the Liberal on
Dear Mr. Kramer,
Try making new friends.
Love,
Audrey the Liberal
posted by Jorge on
I’ll take that as a blank check to keep doing what we’re already doing.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
I’ll take that as a blank check to keep doing what we’re already doing.
We have been generally successful doing what we’ve been doing — coming out to our family, friends, co-workers and neighbors, living our lives as we choose to live them, and keeping the pressure on for change, in Congress and state legislatures, and in court. Doing that in response to the anti-marriage amendments debacles of 2000-2006, we’ve marginalized the forces of darkness politically and culturally to the point where anti-equality, not equality, will be the losing side of the “wedge”.
So I think that what we are doing now is the right thing to be doing now.
But I would also make an observation.
I’m not as old as Larry (he’s about 75 and I’m 65) but I’m old enough to remember how hard and how different the struggle was in the 1970’s and 1980’s. For those of us who fought the battles of that day — when we were routinely jailed, when we were subject to imprisonment if we served (as many of us nonetheless did) in the military, when our livelihoods threatened by exposure and it was an open question whether we should be allowed to teach, when our friends dying right and left and the culture aligned against us — it is very hard to lay down suspicion and distrust of the culture.
You younger people read Larry and dismiss him as a dinosaur. I read him and I hear the voice of experience from a different, dark and difficult time warning against too much trust in the present and in our “straight allies”, particularly politicians.
And so, I would issue a caution.
Larry is not alone in realizing that politicians are not our champions. Most politicians who vote for equality– include almost all Democratic politicians in this category — vote for equality only because we have changed the ground in our favor. Like anti-semitism, anti-gay bias has deep roots in our culture, always lurking just under the surface, waiting for spark and tinker. If we don’t keep the moving forward, if we don’t keep the pressure on, we may well see a turnabout.
Thinking along those lines, I believe we have reached the point, politically, where a vote for a politician who takes anti-equality positions — and that includes President-Presumptive Romney — is a vote against equality, a vote that will at a minimum delay equality and lay the groundwork for serious future setbacks — for example, the appointment of “original intent” judges and justices who will overturn Lawrence and rule against us in cases challenging the constitutionality of anti-equality legal discrimination. It is no longer possible to say “it doesn’t make any difference”. If you vote for anti-equality politicians, you are responsible for the consequences.
Think about it, conservatives. It is all too easy to ignore inconvenient truths.
posted by TomJeffersonIII on
(rushes t0 Goggle Larry)….
posted by Matt on
I am not sure that Mr. Kramer’s pessimism is completely unwarranted. Gay men still become HIV positive at staggeringly disproportionate rates every year–the CDC estimates that about 30,000 men are newly infected annually as a result of consensual homosexual sex– and while this is no longer a death sentence, it is still one of the most serious things that can happen to a person in life, and there is too much pretending that it’s not a big deal.
Perhaps the main reason why Kramer’s pessimism is so intransigent is because he does not seem to recognize the incoherence of his own approach to sex and sexual morality. I would not have believed it, but the author of “Faggots” and “The Normal Heart” apparently doesn’t think monogamy is important. In an interview with the South Florida Gay News in 2010, he talked about how his partner “gave him permission to explore” and how he looks for “hot young bodies.” You’d think a writer–someone who was one of the most important voices to rise up against the communal-sewer sex culture of the 1970s, in fact!–would be sensitive to the dehumanizing effect of referring to people as “bodies,” especially when an entire culture develops that views its members in this way. But I guess not. Kramer has also posted some comments, I see, so maybe he can weigh in on this, himself.
As long as some non-negligible proportion of gay men consent to viewing themselves and others as “hot young bodies”–a perhaps unintentionally pithy summary of the telos of the 1970s urban gay culture–pessimism is indeed warranted. Optimism is, too, however, because if we can identify the problem as something that lies within us, within our own hearts, we need not wait on others to change or see the light–we are empowered to be the light, ourselves.