Larry Kramer has a thing or two to say about the gays today

I reviewed Larry Kramer’s ‘The Normal Heart’ for a local Los Angeles gay paper when it played there in the mid-1980s. I went to see it with my partner Jim, who subsequently died from AIDS in 1991. I almost bought tickets this morning to go see it in Broadway previews, but Frank, whose partner Michael died five years ago (not long before we met) just isn’t up to it. I can understand, it brings back painful memories for those of us old enough to have lived through the wave of loss and its lingering effects. I remember asking Richard Dreyfuss (he was playing the lead) during the Q&A how we were going to change attitudes when sex-on-demand was being treated as a civil right by gay men at the time. There were protests in Los Angeles when they tried to close the bathhouses. They stayed open, and we’ll never know how many men might be alive today had it been treated as the critical public health crisis it was. Kramer was recently interviewed in Salon and had, as usual, some things to say about the state of gay in 2011. From Salon.com: The problem with gay men today To say Larry Kramer is polarizing is like saying Rush Limbaugh is a little bit conservative. The Pulitzer-nominated playwright, screenwriter, author and activist has been one of the most controversial figures in American gay life over the past 30 years. He first incensed gay men in 1978 with “Faggots,” his eerily prescient novel that critiqued the gay community’s culture of promiscuity. And as a co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the founder of ACT UP, the influential AIDS activist group, he became one of the most strident and passionate voices in the early years of the AIDS crisis. While making countless enemies, most notably New York Mayor Ed Koch, he was one of the people most responsible for drawing attention to the disease. Over the last decade and a half, as AIDS has transitioned from a death sentence to largely treatable and gay culture has transitioned from the margins to somewhere closer to the mainstream, Kramer has remained (almost) as angry as ever. In 2005, he published “The Tragedy of Today’s Gays,” a transcript of a speech in which he attacked the younger generation of gay men for their apathy over gay causes and accused them of condemning their “predecessors to nonexistence.” Continue reading.]]>