WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT LARRY

It’s almost as commonly asked as “If you were a tree what kind of tree would you be?” You know, that one about having a dinner party and your ideal guest list of people, dead or alive (assuming, of course, that the dead invitees would actually be miraculously living again to enjoy cocktails leading up to an exquisitely catered affair).

I don’t know. Not in terms of tree or guests. I suppose it’s safe to say I wouldn’t want to be an alder. Too bland. And I wouldn’t want to dine with Larry Kramer. Too much the other extreme. With respect to Larry Kramer, I will always conjure up mid- to late-’80s Larry. Brash. Over the top. In your face.

To be sure, ’80s Larry would have flat out turn down my evening soiree. Even before learning the entree would be some sort of overcooked tofu-asparagus noodle dish. This is why I don’t spend much time thinking of hypothetical celebrity dinner parties. If any of them showed up, I know they’d take one sniff—“Um,...is that your cooking or is there a car tire burning in the back alley?”—and flee to Whole Foods or the McDonald’s drive-thru.

Larry Kramer made me cringe. He’d probably take that as a compliment. He wanted people to take notice. In his mind, it was his role to shake things up.

I first came across Mr. Kramer’s name when I was a deeply closeted, dateless, sexless special education teacher living in a Dallas suburb. Somehow at some point in 1988, I managed to quell just enough fear and embarrassment to walk into a bookstore and buy Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. I devoured the 620-page book, setting it aside frequently as my emotions got the better of me, the pendulum swinging back and forth from anger to inconsolable sorrow. Larry’s name first popped up on page 25 and a quote from his 1978 novel, Faggots, connected with my Texas-nurtured judginess and my worries that coming out of the closet would mean more than a lifetime of scorn; it would lead to an aching emptiness.

      Why do faggots have to fuck so fucking much? It’s as if we don’t

       have anything else to do...all we do is live in our Ghetto and

       dance and drug and fuck...there’s a whole world out there!...I’m

       tired of being a New York City-Fire Island faggot, I’m tired of

       using my body as a faceless thing to lure another faceless thing,

       I want to love a Person! I want to go out and live in a world with

       that Person, a Person who loves me, we shouldn’t have to be

       faithful!, we should want to be faithful!...No relationship in the

       world could survive the shit we lay on it.

Suffice it to say, he pissed off a lot of New York gays.

I wanted to read more about what this Larry Kramer guy had to say. But there was no way I was going to be able to trek back to another bookstore and buy a book with the word FAGGOTS blazoned across the cover. Not in Dallas. Not as my closeted, dateless, sexless self.

More than two hundred pages later in And the Band Played On, Shilts referenced “a hand grenade [thrown] into the foxhole of denial where most gay men in the United States had been sitting out the epidemic.” That grenade was Kramer’s March 1983 cover story, “1,112 and Counting,” in the now-defunct biweekly gay newspaper, New York Native. Kramer opened with:

          If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you we’re in real trouble.

          If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay

          men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence

          depends on just how angry you can get.

It was a take-no-prisoners essay, lambasting everyone and everything for doing too little, if anything at all: the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, Mayor Ed Koch, The New York Times, the Advocate and closeted gays—yikes, me. (“It’s 1983 already, guys, when are you going to come out? By 1984 you could be dead. Every gay man who is unable to come forward now and fight to save his own life is truly helping to kill the rest of us. There is only one thing that’s going to save some of us, and this is numbers and pressure and our being perceived as united and a threat. As more and more of my friends die, I have less and less sympathy for men who are afraid their mommies will find out or are afraid their bosses will find out...”) Larry Kramer was never one to sugarcoat anything.

These were pre-internet days so it took years before I ever got to read the full 5,000-word article. By then, I’d seen it referenced many times as the call to action. The urgency in Kramer’s writing was palpable as he referenced the rising death toll and the lack of clear understanding of how AIDS was contracted and how it should be treated—an astounding 86% mortality rate over three years. More needed to be done than following proper channels and waiting out conventional vetting periods for medical research. “I don’t want to die. I can only assume you don’t want to die. Can we fight together?”

Four years later, in March 1987, Larry Kramer helped organize ACT UP after rallying an audience at NYC’s Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, sharply criticizing a major grassroots AIDS influencer of the time, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization in which Kramer had been one of the founders. “Do we want to start a new organization devoted to political action?”

ACT UP did what it aimed to do, making headlines for its motto, Silence = Death and its soundbite chants, including:

“Act Up! Fight Back! Fight AIDS!”

“Black, White, Gay, Straight. AIDS Does Not Discriminate!”

“What Do We Want? Money For AIDS? When Do We Want It? Now!”

“Hey, Hey, FDA [Food and Drug Administration]. How Many People Have You Killed Today?”

“George Bush, You Can’t Hide. We Charge You With Genocide.”

Abrasive and offensive. They chained themselves in government buildings, scaled them to fly banners and interrupted church masses with die-ins. Too often I thought Larry Kramer and his brood went too far. They got on the news but I feared they were hurting the cause, giving haters more reason to hate and causing friction with people who were already on our side. (Yes, Kramer called Dr. Anthony Fauci a murderer.)

But then, to quote the only line I could ever relate to in the Paul McCartney-Michael Jackson duet, “The Girl Is Mine”: I’m a lover, not a fighter. Or, to quote Rodney King, “Can we all get along?”

Of course, back then, that was but a dream. People like Senator Jesse Helms attributed AIDS to “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct” while other self-righteous churchgoers welcomed the disease as God’s wrath.

I had been consumed by AIDS since I was fifteen or sixteen in 1980 when I sat at home one night in the family den as my parents watched “20/20” and a segment aired about a sickness that otherwise healthy gay men were dying from. At that early stage it was called GRID or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. Struggling with my sexual orientation—back then, it was frequently called “sexual preference,” as if one could simply opt for another choice on the menu—I picked up the latest issue of Texas Monthly on the coffee table to cover my reddening face as the horror immediately registered: I could die from this. For the next fifteen years, I read every article I could get my hands on. In the process of working through my sexuality, I came to understand being gay as being inextricably interwoven with the AIDS crisis.

A few months after reading And the Band Played On, I opted for a quieter form of advocacy, signing up to be a volunteer at the AIDS Resource Center in Dallas before moving and becoming a buddy for PWAs (Persons With AIDS) at AIDS Project Los Angeles. I slapped a pink triangle on the bumper of my car, marked my American money with a “Gay Dollar” stamp and participated for several evenings marching in protest of California Governor Pete Wilson vetoing AB 101, legislation which would have prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I stopped on the third night as protesters swarmed the car of a driver demanding to get through and he responded by putting his foot on the gas pedal and nearly running over several people.

Yep, not a fighter. The driver’s action scared me, but so did the rising anger of people I walked with. The scene teetered toward violence via mob mentality. I was too shaken to go out the next night.

In time, I came to realize Larry could be Larry and I could be me. What mattered was that we were both doing what we felt was right. We both sought to make a difference. We’d both seen too much hate and felt too much loss from one disease.

Over time, I became thankful for Larry Kramer’s passion and his action. People listened to Larry, even if at first it was only because he was yelling. He helped rally people who would never have felt comfortable or valued in more conventional advocacy streams.

I’d read in recent years that his health was in decline and I wanted him to rally once more, for his own sake. It is astounding how much has changed in the past forty years, not just in terms of HIV but with regard to LGBTQ rights. Perhaps like World War II veterans, I fret that younger LGBTQ people will fail to grasp the devastation that came from AIDS and the varied, sophisticated forms of advocacy and empowerment that arose from it. There is more to be done, but we are freer and healthier today, mentally and physically, because of thoughtful, gutsy agitation from gay and lesbian leaders who navigated through scarier times.

I wept when I read the first tweet about his death. I can’t picture him resting in peace. I’ll always see him as the fighter. Maybe I should offer Larry Kramer that hypothetical dinner invitation, after all. He could show up as ’80s Larry, contankerous even to the sweet Olivia Newton-John. I’d welcome anything to distract from the main course.