​The Angel in Larry Kramer.


I LEARNED long ago to open my inbox with trepidation. A journalist is a magnet for complaints.

I also learned to take a deep breath and maybe a stiff drink if an email from Larry Kramer lurked there. A journalist who weighed in on gay issues or AIDS was a magnet for his complaints, which were no mere complaints. They were harangues, tirades, jeremiads about what was being overlooked and minimized, about festering injustices and faltering responses, about the need for everyone to summon a fury and determination commensurate to his.

I dreaded Larry Kramer, and sometimes I even detested Larry Kramer, but always — always — I knew that he was on the side of the angels and that we needed him there, in all his unappeasable and obnoxious glory. He was the blazing conscience of a generation of gay people at a crucial hinge of history, when a critical mass of us came far out of the closet, largely because of the AIDS epidemic. He, among others, demanded no less, making clear that our survival depended on it. His outrage gave birth in the 1980s to the protest group Act Up, with its utterly perfect slogan of "Silence=Death." And the end of silence marked the beginning of so much else.

How to honor that? To thank him? I'm not sure there's any adequate way, though there is, finally, a tribute that he long craved, sought and despaired of ever seeing, a movie version of "The Normal Heart," his strident and devastating play of the plague years, during which his thinly fictionalized alter ego, Ned Weeks, tries to sound an early alarm. It stars Mark Ruffalo as Ned, Matt Bomer as his dying lover and Julia Roberts as a physician who shares his sense of urgency, and it will make its debut on HBO on May 25. There are friends of Kramer's who say that his excitement about it may be helping to keep him alive.

He's 78 and in precarious health — there have been sustained complications from a liver transplant more than a decade ago — and I used the past tense to describe his screeds only because they have receded. He seems to have lost the energy for them, and he has pulled back from the spotlight, even turning down requests for interviews about the HBO movie.

But maybe he has also looked at the changed landscape around him — the legalization of same-sex marriage in nearly 20 states, gay characters on every other television show, a new postage stamp commemorating Harvey Milk — and mellowed just the teensiest bit. Over the last few years, his emails changed. "I send you hugs and kisses," he wrote to me about 18 months ago. Hugs and kisses? Kramer used to send brickbats and Molotov cocktails.

Right now there's an impassioned conversation about proper credit for the huge successes of the marriage-equality movement. It stems from the publication of a book by my Times colleague Jo Becker, "Forcing the Spring," which focuses narrowly on a few key figures from the fight to overturn a 2008 California referendum prohibiting same-sex marriage. In giving them such primacy, "Forcing the Spring" has raised hackles, and it suggests a new corollary to an old adage. Perhaps history isn't simply written by the victors. Perhaps it's written by the publicity-conscious participants with the foresight to glue journalists to their sides.

But any serious discussion of credit has to travel back many decades, to scores of pioneers who fought for the baseline recognition of gay and lesbian people that was a prerequisite for "I do." It has to encompass Milk, Urvashi Vaid and, yes, Kramer, whose association chiefly with AIDS activism — with getting doctors, drug companies, politicians and gay men to wake the hell up — shortchanges his broader cause and full effect.

He understood as well as anybody else did that for Americans in the 1980s to care about AIDS, they had to care about homosexuals, and to care about homosexuals, they had to realize how many they knew and loved. He appreciated the need for visibility, from which so much subsequent progress on so many other fronts flowed.

Ryan Murphy, who directed "The Normal Heart" and helped shepherd it onto the screen, said recently that when he looks at blessings in his life — the husband he married in the summer of 2012, the son they had later that year — he sees Kramer's handiwork, Kramer's bequest.

"I don't think we'd have the rights we do today as gay people if it wasn't for Larry," he told me. "For me, Larry is a civil rights leader, and I rank him up there with all of the greats."

Kramer is complicated, though, and "The Normal Heart" acknowledges as much while putting a polite spin on it. Part of what makes him so fascinating is how vividly he demonstrates the braid of flattering and less flattering qualities in many heroes. Is it altruism that draws them to the barricades, or vanity? Where does conviction end and zeal begin, and what's the line between fearlessness and obstinacy? Kramer grew so accustomed to doing battle — it was his default mode, his reflex — that he picked unnecessary fights.

He blew up at Tony Kushner because Kushner's evolving screenplay for the movie "Lincoln" wasn't going to explore the belief that the 16th president was gay. He blew up at the writer Michael Cunningham for some other act of supposed heresy. And he once said, in an interview with New York magazine, that he didn't understand why "every gay person doesn't agree with everything I say."

"I'm serious," he added.

THE actress Ellen Barkin, who won a Tony for the role in "The Normal Heart" that Roberts plays in the movie, recently told me about Kramer's apoplexy when, midway through the production's run, some fabric on her character's wheelchair was changed in a way that he deemed all wrong.

In Barkin's recollection, Kramer said, "Ellen, did you notice that it's flowers now? She wouldn't have flowers."

"I did notice," she replied to him, "but it's fine."

"It's not fine!" Kramer sputtered. "It's not."

And yet, Barkin told me, he could also be the sweetest man she ever met. "It's an amazing paradox," she said.

Both sides of Kramer are reflected in a documentary about him that HBO is producing. Its tentative title is "Larry Kramer: In Love and Anger," and it begins with archival footage of him bellowing the word "plague," along with expletives, as his eyes bulge. He looks like a deranged messiah.

And then, later in the unfinished movie, he looks like a dazed child, silent and full of wonder as he exchanges wedding vows with his longtime partner, David Webster, in the intensive care unit of a hospital last year.

The documentary is scheduled for release sometime in 2015, possibly in conjunction with an epic gay history of sorts, "The American People," that Kramer has been writing for decades. It sprawls to thousands of pages, its heft a hint of the same grandiosity that prompted him to call a second autobiographical play of his "The Destiny of Me."

"He has said again and again, and I think it is truly, truly felt by him, that he loves gay people and considers us all his children," said Peter Staley, who worked with Kramer to set Act Up in motion.

Staley's words reminded me of a remarkable novel, "Two Boys Kissing," by David Levithan, that I'd just read. Levithan intersperses scenes of gay teenagers in the present with commentary from a Greek chorus of their gay forebears, who watch them and wonder if they're aware of the dying and the marching that came before.

"We are your shadow uncles, your angel godfathers," says the chorus. "We taught you how to dance."

The movie of "The Normal Heart" in fact ends with a gay dance, at Yale University, Kramer's alma mater. From its sidelines, Kramer, in the form of Ned Weeks, gazes at the next generation, seemingly knowing that it will live with less shame and in less fear than his did. His pride and relief are palpable.

"It was important for me to shoot that because it had hope," Murphy told me, adding that he encouraged Ruffalo to "give a little smile of 'thank you, Larry, for what you've done.' "

Thank you indeed. Hugs and kisses

New York Times.

Frank Bruni wrote this tribute to the Giant activist, Larry Kramer, on April 26, 2014.

Larry Kramer died today, May 27, 2020

Voices4America Post Script. @FrankBruni wrote this tribute to Larry Kramer, on April 26, 2014. #LarryKramer died today, May 27, 2020 Age 84.- activist, agitator, playwright - a force.

This is the Times obituary.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/us/larry-kramer...

Show Comments ()

SUBSCRIBE TO VOICES4AMERICA #IMWITHHER

Follow Us On

Trending

On Social