Larry Kramer sounds off

[tazber]

Posted: 1/14/11 at 7:31pm

A Plague Allowed To Happen

[Q]

Posted: 1/14/11 at 8:14pm

Oh, Larry.

The comments afterwards are . . . well, what they are. I didn't make it through too many of them.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 1/14/11 at 9:37pm

God bless him, he's our own Prophet Jeremiah. Every word he says is true.

But he does tend to repeat himself a bit.

I do hope he's got some new material in that thousand-page novel he's written. I'm going to have to read it, and I hope I'm not mouthing the words as I do.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/14/11 at 10:37pm

Written or writing?

I dunno. I look at the comments and I see the things that have stuck in the cultural imagination and I remember being pissed about them at the time. St. Martin's did the infamous ad for "And the Band Played On" with the lurid headline: "The Man Who Brought AIDS to America" over the picture of Gaetan Dugas.

When interviewed later, Shilts said he knew it was inaccurate and he knew St. Martin's was going to go with it, and he knew it wasn't the point he was making in "unmasking" Patient Zero, but there really was nothing he could do about it. And the book sold and Shilts made money. Then, to borrow a Datalounge phrase, he died.

And STILL, some homophobe in the comments section on the Kramer rant says a gay flight attendant is the one who brought this plague to the US and blah blah blah.

Frankly, I think it's only fairly recently that Kramer even gave lip service to people of color. He never seemed to give a merde about them before.

Updated On: 1/14/11 at 10:37 PM

[thetinymagic2]

Posted: 1/14/11 at 10:57pm

I love Larry Kramer. I believe he is one of the greatest human beings of the 20th century. Reading this CNN article also reminds me of this other "story", one of which is so heinous, I almost can't believe I had never heard about it or was taught about it in school in the 70s. Only as an adult did I discover the full implications of it. "The Tuskegee Experiment".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_experiment

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/14/11 at 11:25pm

"I believe he is one of the greatest human beings of the 20th century."

You're erring on the side of generosity.

[SNAFU]

Posted: 1/14/11 at 11:34pm

Whether you agree with Kramer or despise him you have to admit he was a loud, albeit obnoxious, voice that cried out loud and clear during a particularly terrifying time in modern Gay History. In some respect I find it amazing that he has managed to retain his vitriol all these years. Kudos to him for that!

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/15/11 at 12:25am

You know what? I would much rather celebrate Michael Callen, who co-authoried (with Richard Berkowitz and Joseph Sonnabend) the first safer-sex guidelines How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach before the virus had even been identified.

Callen's mostly forgotten, but his far less flashy, much quieter activism, I daresay, saved a lot of gay men's lives. And you know why he's mostly forgotten? He never built up a myth about himself the way Kramer did with The Normal Heart. And then, as they say on the DL, he died.

[uncageg]

Posted: 1/15/11 at 9:08am

Read a few of the comments. One kind of blames the straight community for forgetting about AIDS. Some of the blame has to go to the gay community. After the cocktails came out, a lot of people went back to having unprotected sex. A lot of guys prefer it and won't even use a condom. You can't blame the straight community for forgetting when members of the gay, and straight for that matter, community aren't doing their part. Just to clarify, I am not speaking about the entire gay community but there are enough people out there not having safe sex to continue spreading the virus (Both straight and gay). I also wonder how it could have been "contained" from the very beginning. I do agree with his statement about people not wanting to know the truth about it in the beginning. Just my random thoughts.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/15/11 at 1:05pm

I certainly hate to have to do the work that Kramer is always too busy yelling to include, but I believe (and don't agree with) the point he's making that people who are told again and again that their lives are less than, that they can't get married, that they can't be in the military, have internalized these messages that their lives aren't WORTH protecting.

These things DO feed into sexual behaviors. but I think it's because sex is really complicated in a culture that simply can't deal with it.

[Mister Matt]

Posted: 1/18/11 at 4:39pm

Namo - The "bug chaser" phenomenon perfectly illustrates your point. Gay men were starting to believe infection was inevitable and actively sought it out to simply get it out of the way.

Though I fear I may sound antagonistic, I also have to wonder how much of the responsibility also lies within the gay community itself. While decrying the accusations of AIDS being a "gay disease", for over a decade, it was nearly impossible to find any current gay literature, films or plays written by gays that did not include HIV-infected characters or characters dying of AIDS. In raising awareness, we ultimately branded ourselves by not identifying the unbiased aggression of the disease. It was like we were horrified to have HIV and AIDS equated to the gay community, but unwilling to represent the gay community without HIV or AIDS.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/18/11 at 4:45pm

The bug chaser "phenomenon" is as much a phenomenon as the DL, which is to say not much of one except for people needing to sensationalize a topic.

[Mister Matt]

Posted: 1/18/11 at 5:01pm

I don't know how much of it was sensationalized, but I remember seeing websites for it. I couldn't wrap my head around it. Maybe the psychology of it wasn't a phenomenon, but the specificity of it really unnerved me.